By Rosaland Tyler
Associate Editor
New Journal and Guide
Senate President Pro Tempore Louise Lucas recently sat down with a CNN reporter and explained how she became “a trash-talking, meme-posting great-grandmother” who has become one of the most powerful women in Virginia.
At age 82, Lucas has pulled Virginia into a fight that could define the midterms. However, Lucas said her social media posts tend to say what many people are thinking. Whether it’s the X post that shows her standing over her kitchen trash can and stuffing an anti-abortion bill from the former governor into it or a Facebook post that shows her fists encased in big red boxing gloves during her reelection campaign, her posts aim to teach Democrats a lesson: How to be mean like the Republicans.
“You all started it and we f**g finished it,” she wrote in a X post in February about the redistricting issue that voters will decide on April 21.
The CNN story covered details that many locals already know. Lucas grew up in the Jim Crow South, became one of the first women to graduate from the apprentice program at the Norfolk Naval Shipyard, where she became its first female shipfitter.
According to CNN, “She helped push through what could be one of the most extreme political gerrymanders of the 2026 election cycle.
The map she and other Democrats want voters to back in an April 21 referendum could help their party win 10 of Virginia’s 11 US House seats in November.”
“Next year I’m going to help our House of Delegates members get on social media so they can keep up,” said Lucas, whose bold and unapologetic social media posts have won her a celebrity status among her many followers.
Lucas is a longtime civic activist and in June 1984 she began her formal political career by becoming the first African American woman to serve on the Portsmouth City Council.
Lucas has served as a Virginia state senator, representing the 18th District in the southeast region of the state since 1992. Democrats won a majority of seats in the 2019 Virginia Senate election, so Lucas succeeded Republican Stephen Newman as the Virginia Senate’s president pro tempore. She is the first woman and first African American to hold that office. She also chairs the Committee on Finance and Appropriations, the first African American in that role.
