NYT (“Virginia Passes Gerrymandered House Map, Lifting Democrats’ Midterm Chances“):
Democrats maintained their electoral momentum on Tuesday by securing the passage of an aggressively gerrymandered House map in Virginia, which could deliver the party up to four extra seats as it tries to win back control of Congress.
National party leaders had been heavily invested in the outcome, with Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the minority leader, helping orchestrate the statewide Virginia referendum with Democratic state legislators. Speaker Mike Johnson, hanging on to a slim majority, tried to rally the state’s Republicans.
Democrats sought to focus the campaign on President Trump, who instigated the nationwide redistricting fight last summer in Texas to help House Republicans in the midterms. A vote for a gerrymandered House map, Democrats argued, was a vote to help their party stop Mr. Trump’s agenda. The president stayed out of the contest until the final hours before Election Day, when he urged Virginians to block the map.
“Donald Trump tried to rig the midterm elections by gerrymandering the national congressional map,” Mr. Jeffries said in an interview on Tuesday night. “He has failed.”
[…]
The vote in Virginia erased the small structural advantage that Republicans had built in the country’s redistricting battle.
Republicans could still seize back their edge, however, with the prospect of a new map in Florida. And the Supreme Court may well set off a political earthquake with a ruling that upends a key provision of the Voting Rights Act, which could lead to more Republican gains.
But for now, Democrats have averted their fears from the start of the gerrymandering fight that Republicans could gain an overwhelming cartographic advantage. And with the political environment shifting in their favor, they are increasingly optimistic about winning back the House.
Mr. Jeffries, in the interview, made clear that he expected Democrats to claim nearly all of Virginia’s 11 House districts.
“In November, we’re going to win 10 congressional seats in Virginia and take back control of the House of Representatives,” he said.
WaPo (“Takeaways from Virginia’s vote to boost Democrats in national redistricting war“) notes:
The Supreme Court is slated in the coming weeks to deliver a Voting Rights Act decision that could allow Republicans to draw new lines for a swath of additional seats.
Such a ruling would be a boon to Republicans, but it may come too late to have much effect on this year’s midterm elections. Some states have already held their primaries, and others will do so soon, which will prevent them from establishing new districts for this fall. But they could take advantage of the expected decision for the 2028 elections.
The specifics of the ruling will determine whether Republicans can draw more districts in their favor and, if so, how many. If the Supreme Court strikes down a key provision of the Voting Rights Act, Republicans could redraw a dozen or more seats in their favor.
An analysis by the liberal groups Fair Fight Action and Black Voters Matter put the number of districts that could be redrawn as high as 19.
The practicality of this is unclear, given many states have already held their primary elections for the 2026 race.
Regardless, the whole thing is simply outrageous. Virginia is a purple state, with a slight Democratic lean at the presidential level, owing mostly to the rapid growth in recent years of the DC suburbs and exurbs of Northern Virginia. It was very much a red state when I moved here in 2002. The existing districts, which give the state 6 Democrats and 5 Republicans in Congress, is quite representative. The new one, which gives Democrats an advantage in 10 of 11 districts, is simply a disenfranchisement of nearly half the population.
But, of course, Virginia voters weren’t operating in a vacuum. President Trump demanded that red states work to steal seats in a likely-to-fail effort to maintain control of the House in the midterms. While many resisted, some complied. So, California and Virginia actually overturned provisions in their own constitutions requiring nonpartisan districting to fight back.
The result, though, is a furthering of the trend to turn Americans into partisans rather than citizens. So, for example, the new map splits Fairfax County, where I live, across five Congressional Districts. Which effectively means there will be no Member representing the county. Fairfax residents voted to do so by a 39-point margin.
Presuming Florida joins in, as expected, and the courts allow all of these efforts to go through, the net effect on the midterm outcome will likely be negligible. The efforts will largely cancel each other out. But American democracy, such as it is, has been further eroded. And, despite claims from the likes of Gavin Newsom and Abigail Spanberger that these are temporary, emergency measures, I’m skeptical that this won’t be the new normal.
