How an 82-Year-Old Great-Grandmother Became a Master-Class Dem Shitposter
Meet the unstoppable L. Louise Lucas.
THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY HAS SPENT much of the last year trying to rival the GOP’s online dominance. Donors have sunk millions of dollars into new projects aimed at building networks of left-leaning content creators; members of Congress have tried to perfect the art of the direct-to-camera video (with varying degrees of success); Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut and Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker are among the many Democrats who have started their own Substacks; and party leaders like California Gov. Gavin Newsom have added “podcast host” to their resumes.
The conventional wisdom has been that this is all part of a generational shift, one sparked by young politicians like Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, two charismatic thirtysomething New Yorkers whose aura-farming skills are self-evident. But in recent weeks, it’s been an octogenarian Democrat with no national footprint who has been making some of the biggest waves online: Virginia state Sen. L. Louise Lucas.
As the Democratic party has raced to keep up with Donald Trump’s mid-decade redistricting scheme, the 82-year-old Lucas, president pro tempore of the Virginia Senate, has played a leading role in state Democratic lawmakers’ efforts to pass a new map—one that favors their party ten to one, which would be a significant shift from the current breakdown of six Democrats to five Republicans.1 And Lucas has been making her case on X, shitposting about other Democratic-controlled states that have dragged their feet on redistricting and talking trash about her GOP opponents.
Throughout the redistricting fight, she’s made memes of herself as Thanos collecting the Infinity Stones (or, in this case, congressional districts). She’s trolled her Republican rivals, as with this meme making fun of GOP Rep. Rob Wittman for reportedly complaining in private about the redistricting effort (Wittman will likely lose his seat if the new map is approved). Although the Dark Brandon meme felt cringe by the end of the Biden administration, the beaming red laser eyes somehow work for Lucas. She’s shown remarkable fluency in internet slang—from “cuck” to “OOMF”—especially for someone who was born before D-Day.
Last week, Lucas made national news for hitting back at Texas Sen. Ted Cruz after he complained about Virginia Democrats’ proposed new map, posting: “You all started it and we fucking finished it.” It’s that willingness to punch back that has earned her praise from national party figures, including Ocasio-Cortez and Pennsylvania Rep. Brendan Boyle, who told me that he was a “big fan of the toughness and tenacity of Louise Lucas.”
Lucas’s posts have been circulating in Democratic operative group chats over the past few weeks, with one digital staffer telling me that they’ve shown her memes to