Voters have once again handed President Donald Trump a loss in one of the defining fights of his second administration: the national congressional redistricting race.
Virginia
Recap: Stanford MBB vanquishes Virginia on The Farm
On Saturday, Stanford men’s basketball defeated Virginia at home by a final score of 88-65. Stanford center Maxime Raynaud led the way for the Cardinal with 24 points & 10 rebounds while guards Oziyah Sellers (15 points) and Jaylen Blakes (10 points) finished in double figures. Virginia guard Isaac McKneely was the top performer for the Cavaliers with 22 points. Stanford improves to 11-5 overall and 3-2 in the ACC while Virginia falls to 8-8 overall and 1-4 in the ACC.
VIDEO: Stanford MBB Postgame Press Conference: Virginia
VIDEO: Virginia MBB Postgame Press Conference: Stanford
BOX SCORE: Virginia at Stanford-Saturday, January 11th
“Yeah, I felt like that was probably our best game wire to wire,” Stanford head coach Kyle Smith said after the game. “Obviously, we had a little trouble guarding them early in the game. We usually run people off the three and their five for six to start, but we just played with such purpose on the offensive end, really good with the ball, played unselfishly, didn’t take many bad shots and we were good on the rebound, really good on the glass.
“And then that last ten minutes, kinda tighten up the D and it was good for kind of extent pushed the lead out when Jaylen and Max were on the bench, which was really positive growth for our confidence of our team and our bench was really, Donavin started and did well, but then Chisom came in and did well, Aidan did really well, Benny did really well, so it was nice just to have our bench kind of step up and play really well.”
With 15:28 to go in the first half, it was tied 8-8 as Donavin Young and Oziyah Sellers each had three points for the Cardinal while Ryan Agarwal had two points. Young was making the first start of his career, bringing good energy. After getting down 8-2, Virginia was on a 6-0 run over the last minute.
“He just gives us a dynamic forward that we don’t have necessarily as far as just a, like I said, I told Stanford people he reminds me of Josh Huestis,” Smith said of Young. “You know, that can defend, he can switch one through five, he’s got grit on the court, and is just a plus athlete. So, it’s kind of what we needed and he’s been hurt and hasn’t been able to compete as much and doesn’t know necessarily everything we’re doing out there to be honest, but it just seems like that’s kind of what the doctor ordered for this team.”
Virginia would lead 19-16 with 12:00 to go in the half. Ishan Sharma and Isaac McKneely each had six points for the Cavaliers while Donavin Young had five points for the Cardinal. Virginia had made seven of their last eight field goal attempts while Stanford had made four of their last five.
Stanford would soon take the lead 23-22 with 7:53 to go in the half. Sellers was up to eight points for the Cardinal on 3-5 shooting from the field. Stanford was doing a nice job on the glass with a +3 rebounding advantage.
“So, we have this thing called ‘The Card Zone’,” Raynaud said of their rebounding. “It’s a little section our coach does during the game review. And yeah, he mentioned that he wanted us to be plus five on the offensive boards…He just wanted us to be up a lot on the offensive rebounds and also boxing out because we knew outside of their five men not a lot of people were gonna crash and they were just gonna go back on defense.
“So yeah, it’s a very physical game, they have a ton of pride, they’re a really good team, so I’ll just say boxing out and crashing the boards is something that helps us. So yeah, I think it’s an emphasis every time. Today we did a really good job at it and hopefully we can keep that up for next week.”
Stanford would continue to extend the lead as they were up 27-22 with 6:32 to go in the half after Chisom Okpara had a nice pass to Maxime Raynaud for a vicious two-handed jam. Raynaud was hanging on the rim afterwards like he was Spider-Man.
Stanford would lead 35-30 with 1:21 to go in the half after a huge 3-pointer by Agarwal. He was up to seven points and three rebounds on 3-6 shooting from the field.
Stanford would lead 40-30 at halftime after Jaylen Blakes had a steal and 3-pointer to beat the buzzer. That gave the Cardinal a lot of momentum as they headed into the locker room. Raynaud was up to 10 points and five rebounds for the Cardinal while McKneely had nine points for the Cavaliers.
“It’s surreal,” Raynaud said of Blakes’ buzzer beater. “It’s really surreal. I think you all saw it, was just like, running straight to the tunnel. That’s the kind of thing that is just like give you so much energy. We always talk about finishing the last four minutes of the first half and starting the first three minutes of the second half really strong and I think that was the best thing that could happen, right? Like, he got a steal, kind of got out on a fast break, got that three, and yeah, just like galvanized us a lot and yeah, that was tough as hell.”
“I think the way we ended the first half kind of spilled over into the second half,” Virginia head coach Ron Sanchez said. “We had the ball, last possession, ended up having a potential for a layup. It was a turnover and they hit a three-point shot to end the half to go up I think seven instead of being up four or five. Whatever, I can’t remember exactly. I think that spilled over into the second half.”
Stanford got off to a good start in the second half, leading 52-41 with 15:29 to go. Donavin Young was up to eight points after a nasty throw down, doing a nice job in his first career start. Raynaud was leading the way with 14 points and seven rebounds. The Cardinal continued to have the momentum.
Stanford continued to gain separation from Virginia as they led 62-45 with 11:37 to go. Sellers was up to 13 points on 5-9 shooting from the field and 3-4 shooting from 3-point range. He was in a nice groove for the Cardinal. Stanford was a perfect 10-10 at the foul line up to this point while Virginia hadn’t made a field goal in the last 3:34.
With 7:49 to go, Stanford led 72-55. Raynaud was nearing a double- double with 16 points and nine rebounds. Both teams were trading baskets, which for Stanford was totally fine.
Virginia would then go on a 7-0 run to make it 72-62 with 6:11 to go. Stanford called for time, hoping to regroup. The timeout worked for Stanford as they did indeed regroup, leading 78-63 with 3:37 to go. Right when Virginia looked like they might make the game interesting, Raynaud took over as he was now up to 22 points and 10 rebounds. He had a nice hook shot and reverse layup inside.
From there, Stanford would win by a final score of 88-65 as a throw down by Jaylen Thompson at the very end was the exclamation mark. Stanford proved to be the better team and did a nice job of finishing the game out the right way.
“It was over two people,” Raynaud said of Thompson’s dunk. “It was over two people, like do we realize that?”
One thing that was cool was Cole Kastner getting a chance to get a couple of minutes against his alma mater where he excelled as a lacrosse player. Kastner had a great career at Virginia and won a national title. Before that he played high school basketball at Menlo School, so he had a nice little section of fans cheering him on when he entered the game.
“His attitude is phenomenal,” Smith said of Kastner. “Obviously he was a captain on a national championship program at Virginia as lacrosse and I don’t care what sport you’re playing, that’s significant and I think there’s 50 guys on that team and he’d separate himself as that kind of leader and that’s so healthy for this program. What we need is like he just knows how to behave what winning behaviors. I can’t think of one instant where I’ve ever had to correct him on anything. Other than technique or something, but as far as attitude and he’s just a winner. It was neat to get him in there and I don’t know how you feel, he might have been, that’s his alma mater. I don’t know if he wanted to get a bucket or not, but it was I’m sure it was nice. He likes winning. He’s been an awesome asset.”
“What you need to know about Cole is that he’s the boy,” Raynaud added. “He is, I think the kind of guy anyone would want on his team. We need to understand that this guy is like a three-time All-American, national champion in lacrosse, probably Hall of Famer at Virginia, which is a crazy program for lacrosse. He comes in every day, does his job on scout team, comes in with insane energy, is the best team player you can ever think of, never complains. Like, that level of humility is off the charts. So I think as a person off the court this guy is like the funniest person ever.
“So, it’s so awesome to have him with us and on top of that his high school basketball coaches and the team were there, too. So I’m super super happy for him that he got to go into the game and I’m super happy for the people in Maples to realize that he’s a big part of our organization and it’s not just about the five guys that are on the court, it’s about everybody on the bench…I was really really happy for him and it seemed like he had a blast.”
For Stanford, this is a nice win. While they were favored to win, they won even more convincingly than expected. Raynaud was fantastic as usual and then just in general, they played really sound, winning basketball. This was probably the best Stanford has looked all season long if you just look at how well they played for the full 40 minutes. A lot of different guys stepped up, including Aidan Cammann, whose nine points and three rebounds off the bench were really crucial to ensuring a comfortable victory.
“Yeah, in a key section, he was really good on the pick and roll,” Smith said of Cammann. “We run a lot of stuff for him, through him, because he’s got a really good brain, too. Those two both have really good feel and he was tough. We ran a little out of bounds play for him, he got a bucket there, and then I think he got two rolls, an and-1 and just a smart player doing smart things.”
Up next for Stanford is a road trip to Wake Forest and North Carolina. Up first will be Wake Forest on Wednesday, January 15th. Tipoff is set for 3:30 PM PT on ESPNews.
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Virginia
Chemical leak at a West Virginia plant kills 2 people and sends 19 to hospital, officials say
INSTITUTE, W.Va. — A chemical leak at a West Virginia silver recovery business on Wednesday killed two people and sent 19 others to the hospital, including one in critical condition, authorities said.
The leak occurred at the Catalyst Refiners plant in Institute as workers were preparing to shut down at least part of the facility, Kanawha County Commission Emergency Management Director C.W. Sigman said.
A chemical gas reaction occurred at the plant involving nitric acid and another substance, Sigman said at a news briefing. He added that there was “a violent reaction of the chemicals and it instantaneously overreacted.”
“Starting or ending a chemical reaction are the most dangerous times,” Sigman said.
The chemical reaction that was believed to have occurred during a cleaning process produced toxic hydrogen sulfide, Kanawha County Commission President Ben Salango said.
Among the injured were seven ambulance workers responding to the leak, officials said.
Other people were taken to the hospitals in private cars or even in one case a garbage truck, Sigman said.
One person was in critical condition, Salango said.
Vandalia Health Charleston Area Medical Center, one of several hospitals in the area, was treating multiple patients, some brought by ambulance, while members of the community were arriving Wednesday afternoon asking to be checked, hospital spokesman Dale Witte said.
Witte said patients were experiencing respiratory symptoms including cough, shortness of breath, sore throat and itchy eyes. They were being evaluated in the emergency room.
WVU Medicine Thomas Memorial Hospital in South Charleston said in a statement it has cared for a dozen patients, including eight who arrived by personal vehicle and were not at the scene but were in the area at the time. It said those injuries were not considered life-threatening.
A shelter-in-place order was issued for the surrounding area and lifted more than five hours later. Officials said all the deaths occurred on the plant site.
“You had to get really close to the facility to smell it,” Sigman said.
The leak required a large-scale decontamination operation in which people had to remove their clothes and be sprayed down, authorities said.
Catalyst Refiners works to remove silver from what remains of chemical processes and can find thousands of dollars of the precious metal just by vacuuming the floors in a plant’s offices, Sigman said.
Ames Goldsmith Corp., the owner of Catalyst Refiners, said it is saddened by the deaths and its thoughts were with all those affected and their families.
“This is an unfathomably difficult time,” company President Frank Barber said in a statement released at the briefing. “Our thoughts and prayers are with our colleagues and their families.”
Ames Goldsmith promised to work with local, state and federal officials as they investigate the leak. The federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration has opened an investigation into what happened, a spokesperson said, adding that the agency has six months to complete its examination.
Silver is in a number of items ranging from circuit boards and other electronics, photographic and X-Ray films and jewelry. Nitric acid is used to dissolve materials, leaving behind silver nitrate that can be processed to recover pure silver. Recovery businesses can also crush or sandblast items with silver and use magnets or differences in density to sort out the precious metal.
Sigman said Ames Goldsmith recovers silver from the various plants at the Institute complex “and they’ll use it again. When they vacuum their carpets in their office, they recover so many thousands of dollars’ worth of silver out of it just vacuuming their carpets.”
The plant is located near Institute, a community about 10 miles west of Charleston, the state capital. The plant is in a region known as West Virginia’s “chemical valley,” although many plants that lined the area along the Kanawha River and produced hazardous materials have closed or changed ownership in the past several decades.
Raby writes for the Associated Press. Jeffrey Collins in Columbia, S.C., and Gary Robertson in Raleigh, N.C., contributed to this report.
DALEVILLE, Va. (WSET) — Heads up, Virginia Iconicks! Nick Jonas is having a show in Danville in June!
The superstar is set to perform on June 11 at Caesars Virginia’s venue, The Pantheon.
SEE ALSO: Danville sees unusually high voter turnout for redistricting referendum, registrar says
He announced the concert in an Instagram post, revealing a six-stop tour spanning up and down the East Coast.
“Six nights with you this June!” Jonas said in the post. “I’ve been wanting to do a run like this for a while. Something that feels a little closer, playing through different releases from over the years. A few of my favorites, a lot of your favorites and sharing the stories behind them as we go.”
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You can reserve tickets on April 23.
Tuesday night, Virginia approved a ballot measure to redraw the state’s 11 congressional districts to give Democrats a significant edge — salvaging Democratic hopes of flipping control of the House of Representatives in the fall.
In case you need a refresher, congressional redistricting — or the process by which states define the districts that House members represent — usually happens once per decade, after a new census.
That all changed over the summer when President Donald Trump urged Republicans in Texas to redraw their congressional maps early, to shore up the GOP’s tiny (currently one-seat) congressional majority and give the national party a boost during 2026 midterms. Texas Republicans created new maps in the summer, giving the GOP a new edge in five districts.
Democrats in some blue states also mobilized, kicking off a wave of mid-decade redistricting in both Democratic and Republican-controlled states that has undone some of the final remaining electoral norms of the Trump era. In November 2025, California voters approved a ballot measure that redrew maps to add up to five Democratic seats — neutralizing the Texas GOP gerrymander.
Virginia is not California, however. Though it has tended to vote for Democrats in presidential and gubernatorial elections since 2000, the state is swingy and had a Republican governor, Glenn Youngkin, until January. That made the Virginia redistricting campaign — a vote on a constitutional amendment to bypass the state’s normal mapping process until the next census — even more complicated and unpredictable.
Voters complained about confusing messaging from both sides of the campaign, and many independent voters were uncomfortable with a partisan power grab. The “Yes” side relied heavily on direct appeals from former President Barack Obama, who reassured voters that the move was a justified response to Trump’s moves to tilt the House election. The “No” side ran ads that also featured earlier clips of Obama decrying gerrymandering in prior years, and ads and mailers aimed at Black voters that portrayed the referendum as a betrayal of civil rights activism to protect voting rights.
Republicans also appealed to regional concerns, warning rural residents that they would be put into awkward districts that lumped them with distant Northern Virginia suburbs.
That was reflected in the final results of the election — rural regions of the state turned out at a high rate. The electorate, overall, was more Republican than the electorate that swept in complete Democratic control of the state government during last year’s elections. Meanwhile, big urban centers, like Richmond, Virginia Beach, and the Washington, DC suburbs of northern Virginia, would turn out enough Democratic and independent votes to carry the measure statewide. In the end, the race was closer than expected, but the “Yes” side was comfortably on track for a majority win as of publication time.
While the “Yes” victory in Virginia is another major win for Democrats nationwide, the results of the 2026 redistricting wars have been more haphazard.
Across the country, political infighting, reluctant legislators, and timing constraints have headed off other redistricting efforts on both sides of the aisle. Now time is running out for any additional efforts: Primaries are already beginning across the country, and election preparation has to begin soon in those that haven’t started yet.
The state of the redistricting wars
Currently, Virginia’s congressional delegation is split 6-5 in Democrats’ favor; the referendum approved on Tuesday night asked voters to rejigger the map to favor Democrats in 10 districts, netting four seats.
Combined with redrawn maps in California, Missouri, North Carolina, Texas, Ohio (mandated by the state constitution), and Utah (due to a court decision), the Virginia vote creates the possibility that Democrats enter the midterm elections with a one-seat edge based on past voting patterns.
At the moment, Democrats stand to gain one seat
- California: -5 GOP seats (+5 DEM seats)
- Missouri: +1 GOP seat
- North Carolina: +1 GOP seat
- Ohio: +1/2 GOP seats
- Texas: +5 GOP seats
- Utah: -1 GOP seat (+1 DEM seat)
- Virginia: -4 GOP seats (+4 DEM seats)
Up until now, this electoral arms race had become a “close to a wash,” Barry C. Burden, an elections expert and political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told me.
“Even though Republicans are doing it in more states than Democrats are, they’re not making big gains outside of Texas,” Burden said. “And there are so many other factors in play that I think make it difficult to know exactly how the maps will play out.”
Not every state has thrown itself into the mix. Despite intense pressure from national parties, Democrats have so far turned down opportunities to squeeze out seats in Illinois, Maryland, and New York, while Republicans stood down in Indiana, Kansas, and Nebraska.
That leaves one last big redistricting wild card: Florida.
Gov. Ron DeSantis has wanted to redraw his state’s maps since Trump made his appeals, yet the effort has been mired in GOP infighting, a lack of preparation, and faces a state constitution that bars partisan redistricting, although the courts approved Republican-friendly maps in its last redraw. The state legislature was supposed to meet for a special session this week to create anywhere from one to five seats, but that meeting was delayed until April 28.
“It’s a big state, so that would give Republicans a lot of opportunity,” Burden said. “But they already have a map that’s pretty favorable to Republicans, and there’s a little more concern that spreading Republican voters more thinly across more districts might really put them at risk.”
That’s related to one big electoral wild card: whether the rightward shift of Latino and Hispanic voters since 2020 holds firm in a midterm year. In redrawing at least two districts, Texas Republicans bet that this trend will hold firm. Yet polling of these voters nationally, and some off-year election results, suggests that Trump’s 2024 gains may have evaporated, or reversed, because of discontent over the economy, Trump’s mass deportation agenda, and a general sense of chaos and instability that many of these voters trusted Trump to steady. That opens the possibility for the Texas gerrymander to come up short — a scenario Florida Republicans might not want to risk.
“Texas acted earlier, so it was at a time when maybe Trump and Republicans didn’t look as vulnerable going into 2026,” Burden said. “But now that we’re just months away, it’s clear Republicans are going to have a difficult environment in November.”
None of this factors in the effects of a potential Voting Rights Act decision by the Supreme Court this year or future redistricting efforts ahead of 2028. The Court has so far declined to issue a ruling on provisions of the landmark 1965 law that prohibited states from breaking up communities of minority voters, which led to the rise of majority-minority districts to boost nonwhite representation. A handful of states could still redraw their districts were the Supreme Court to decide the case during this term.
With the latest vote, though, we may be nearing the end of the redistricting wars — for this cycle, at least.
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