Redistricting Insanity
Destroying democracy in order to save it.
ABC7 (“Virginia governor approves amendment to allow Dems to gerrymander Congressional districts“):
Among the first bills Abigail Spanberger signed into law as governor Friday morning was placing a constitutional amendment on the ballot to allow Democrats to gerrymander Congressional districts.
Democratic lawmakers in Virginia and on Capitol Hill want to redraw Virginia’s 11 congressional districts so they can pick up four U.S. House seats in November as President Donald Trump urges red states to redraw their district lines to be more favorable to Republicans in time for the 2026 midterm election.
Virginia’s current district lines were drawn by the Virginia Supreme Court.
Right now, Virginia is represented by six Democrats and five Republicans in the U.S. House, a fair reflection of the commonwealth’s electorate. But that could soon change.
If voters approve of the Democrats’ newly proposed House district map, Southwest Virginia would likely be the only area in the commonwealth that has a Republican member in the U.S. House of Representatives, while ten Democrats would represent everywhere else.
In the last U.S. House election, 51 percent of Virginia voters voted Democrat, and nearly 48 percent voted Republican.
“Do you think that a 10-Democrat-and-a-one-Republican map is fair to close to half of Virginians who have not voted Democrat in recent elections?” reporter Nick Minock asked Democratic State Senator Dave Marsden.
“Well, as you know, the whole purpose of this is to respond to what the President has initiated in Republican dominating states,” said Marsden. “And if you lie down in front of a truck, you get run over, so you better fight back.”
“What we’re trying to do is save democracy right now,” Democratic Senate Majority Leader Scott Surovell told Minock on Friday. “Virginia’s having to step up and fight back for what Texas, Missouri, and North Carolina and eventually Florida looks like in April are going to do to us, and basically they’re trying to silence Virginia’s voice in Congress.”
FFX Now (“Proposed redistricting map splits Fairfax County into five Congressional districts“):
Party leaders rolled out a map that’s projected to give Democrats an advantage in 10 of Virginia’s 11 Congressional districts, and as expected, much of that comes at the expense of Northern Virginia — the bluest part of the state.
Fairfax County alone, which is currently covered by the 8th, 10th and 11th Congressional districts, would be split into five new districts under the proposed map. Most of them would spread far out west, with one reaching as far as Shenandoah County.
Despite concerns about diluting representation for Northern Virginia voters, given the political differences between the urbanizing region and more rural parts of the state, it’s all part of a process of “leveling the playing field,” Senate President pro tempore L. Louise Lucas (D-18) told reporters Thursday.
“These are not ordinary times, and Virginia will not sit on the sidelines while it happens,” she said. “We made a promise to level the playing field, and today, we’re keeping our promise … We said 10-1 and we meant it, and we are proud to deliver a map that stands up for democracy.”
House Speaker Don Scott (D-88), who represents the same Portsmouth area as Lucas, noted that Republicans in Texas, North Carolina and Missouri have heeded President Donald Trump’s call for GOP-led states to redraw their Congressional districts ahead of this November’s midterm elections.
“We’re putting [the maps] out in the open and allowing them to be debated the way they should be in a democracy,” Scott said. “We’re going to leave it up to the Virginia voters. Maps are ready, Virginia’s ready.”
Here’s the projected outcome of all this:
Obviously, there is some risk for Democrats here in that the margins in several heavily blue districts would shrink considerably. Still, going from six likely Democratic seats to ten is quite the coup.
While the image quality is a bit subpar, WDBJ CBS7 provides a useful comparison of the two maps:
We’ve gone from district lines that reasonably track county lines to something that’s quite obviously gerrymandered.
This is all a gross violation of the Virginia Constitution, which, thanks to an amendment a few years back, mandates that the lines be drawn by an independent commission rather than partisan actors. In order for this to go into effect, Virginia voters will have to amend the Commonwealth’s Constitution to allow it.
The process of mid-decade redistricting requires a formal amendment to Virginia’s constitution. HJ4 would give the General Assembly the authority to modify Congressional districts at any time before Oct. 31, 2030, shifting that power away from a bipartisan redistricting commission established in 2020.
Both the House of Delegates and the state Senate have passed the bill, and it was signed into law by Gov. Abigail Spanberger this morning (Friday). In order to take effect, however, voters must approve the amendment in an election tentatively scheduled for April.
Whether Virginia will be allowed to hold that special election remains uncertain. A Tazewell County judge ruled last month that Democrats failed to follow the proper procedure for a last-minute redrawing of the maps for 2026 — a decision that will soon be taken up by the state’s Supreme Court.
One suspects that the courts will ultimately allow the amendment and the resultant gerrymander. The US Supreme Court allowed California’s similar effort to go through earlier in the week.
This is, of course, all wildly undemocratic. Not only does this map not even coming close to mirroring the partisan leanings of Virginians, but it undermines the whole concept of the House of Representatives, which is supposed to represent local interests. Splitting Fairfax County (which leans heavily Democratic) into five different Congressional Districts is an absolute abomination.
At the same time, it would be foolish for Democrats to unilaterally disarm in this fight. As noted, President Trump himself has urged red states to create more Republican seats to forestall his losing the already-slim majority in the midterms. Given the stakes at hand, Democrats could hardly not follow suit.
Nonetheless, a bipartisan arms race to disenfranchise the citizenry is less than ideal.
Senator Lucas’ response to Ted Cruz’s whining about the new map:
“You started it and we fucking finished it.”
This sort of thing is not exactly new.
Back in 1980ish when I lived in OK, the state vote was pretty evenly split, half D, half R. The state had 5 D congresscritters, 1 R.
I had moved there from CA, which, back then, had mostly R congresscritters, very few D.
Which can be said about much of our system, including the absolutely bonkers situation in which the Democratic candidate for President wins the majority of votes, but the Republican ends up with the Presidency thanks to the Electoral College.
Republicans started this sh!tshow, and have mucked around with redistricting for YEARS. I’ve noted before that my time in Republican politics saw an almost single-minded dedication on the part of the party to redraw lines. This is a Republican-created problem. They own it. That it may result in blue states gerrymandering in kind? So be it. FAFO.
@Jen: Even when I was voting Republican, it had become clear to me that, on the state level at least, there was a lot of effort by the party to skew the system to make it harder for Democrats to win elections or even to vote.
That said, gerrymandering is hardly a uniquely Republican gambit. Most of the studies have shown that it cancels out at the national level. (See, for example, Brookings’ “The gerrymander myth” and Washington Monthly’s “The Decline and Possible Resurrection of Radical Gerrymandering.”) It does appear that the more blatant efforts this year will wind up skewing Republican, but we’ll have to see how the court battles fall out.
Regardless, as I note in the OP, I don’t expect Democrats to disarm. Indeed, I advised against it back in 2022. That doesn’t make it good for democracy.
This is highly undemocratic, small d and capital D. The Kochtopus put a lot of thought into how to win power without a majority. Part of that effort went into buying the Supremes. The Supremes write the rules. Roberts and his accomplices wrote a rule that partisan gerrymanders are OK. (And they seem about to write a rule that racial gerrymanders are once again OK.) VA, and CA, are playing by the rules. But as @James Joyner: notes, it’s likely to work to the GOPs advantage in the end. I expect that deep in bowels of the Kochtopus there’s a very sophisticated analysis that reassures him.