Iran is not the only war Trump started, but appears to be losing.
Virginia became the latest state to gerrymander its congressional districts ahead of the midterm elections. Tuesday, a referendum to redraw the state’s maps passed by 3%, 51.5%-48.5%. The likely effect is to turn the current 6-5 Democratic majority in Virginia’s US House delegation into a 10-1 advantage.
Vox estimates that this result puts the Democrats one seat ahead in the redistricting battle that Trump started in Texas. Florida could still tip the balance in the GOP’s favor, but probably not by much. [1]
Prior to the current round, partisan gerrymandering had more or less balanced out: In 2024, Republican House candidates got a small majority of the votes and their party wound up with a small majority of the seats, as they should have.
Republicans have gone to court to prevent Virginia’s new map from taking effect. A circuit-court judge blocked implementation, but was overturned by an appeals court. The case goes to the Virginia Supreme Court today. The deadline for candidates to file to be on the ballot is May 26, so this process can’t take long.
Marc Elias writes in his Democracy Docket blog:
Republicans are asking the courts to throw out 3 million votes in an election that they lost.
For Republicans, democracy is nothing more than a word.
They are content if every person who waited in line to vote or took time off from work to cast their ballot did it for naught. They seek a result that would mean that every election worker who worked the polls wasted their time. They want the people who knocked doors or canvassed on either side of this question to feel as though they have accomplished nothing.
Meanwhile, here’s how the so-called “liberal media” has covered this story.
When Trump started this battle by pushing Texas to redraw it already-gerrymandered maps, hoping to gain five Republican House seats, The Washington Post characterized Democratic opposition as a “freakout”, and reassured its readers that “What’s happening in the Lone Star State is not a threat to democracy.”
But here’s the Post editorial board’s response to the Virginia vote: “Virginia plunges America deeper into the gerrymandering abyss“. It characterized the referendum as “a power grab by Democrats”. The New York Times produced a similar spin, highlighting how “Democrats Once Loathed Gerrymandering. Now They’re Pushing for It.“
But there’s no mystery here, and no hypocrisy to expose. AOC summed up the Republican reaction to the vote as “Wah, wah, wah” and explained the larger context:
Listen, Democrats have attempted and asked Republicans for 10 years to ban partisan gerrymandering. And for 10 years, Republicans have said no. Republicans have fought for partisan gerrymanders across the United States of America, and these are the rules that they have set.
One notable attempt to end gerrymandering was the For the People Act, which Nancy Pelosi pushed through the House, but Republicans filibustered in the Senate. AOC says that deal is still available. [2]
If Republicans decide that they would like to revisit a ban on partisan gerrymandering, I welcome them. We have the bill right here to end this all today. But they don’t want to, because they like pursuing and continuing to enact an unfair electoral landscape, and so we have an obligation to defend ourselves.
This obligation to “defend ourselves” represents a major change in Democratic tactics, beginning with Gavin Newsom’s aggressive response to the Texas gerrymander. Previously, Democrats had tried to cast themselves as the good-government party, avoiding the bad-faith tactics that Republicans have used to seek power. [3]
But perversely, joining Republicans in the gutter may ultimately work a good-government purpose. Now that Republicans realize they could lose too, perhaps a bipartisan consensus against gerrymandering will finally develop.
[1] All such estimates are iffy, because voters may not vote the same way they have in recent elections.
Gerrymandering works by spreading a party’s majority thin to stretch it over more districts. So a miscalculation could result in a previously safe seat flipping.
For example: Suppose a state has a 51-49 partisan majority. The majority party could gerrymander its congressional districts so that each district gives it the same 51-49 advantage, setting up the possibility that it could win all the House seats. However, even a small shift in the political winds could turn the situation around and give the other party all the seats.
This question arises particularly in Texas, where the new maps are based on the 2024 results. However, polls indicate that many Hispanics who voted for Trump in 2024 may regret their vote, or may not see themselves as Republican voters generally. So trying to gain five seats conceivably could result in losing a few seats the GOP had thought were safe.
[2] AOC might have added that liberal Supreme Court judges have tried to find gerrymandering unconstitutional, but conservative justices have supported it, arguing that district maps are a “political question” to be decided perhaps by the very legislatures that have been gerrymandered to lock in one-party rule.
A related court case should be decided soon: In Louisiana v Callais, the Court appears to be ready to drive the final nail into the coffin of the Voting Rights Act. Current interpretations of the VRA require states to draw a certain number of minority-majority districts, so that Black or Hispanic voters have a chance to elect congresspeople to represent their interests. Without this stipulation, a state could spread its minority populations across multiple districts and elect White-only congressional delegations. While this change would likely not take effect until the 2028 elections, it could result in as many as 15 Black House members in the South losing their seats.
[3] For example, Biden re-established the wall between the White House and the Justice Department that Trump had torn down in his first term. Arguably, Merrick Garland’s desire to end DOJ’s politicization is the reason that the Trump indictments appeared so slowly, which allowed him and the partisan Supreme Court to run out the clock.
The Weekly Sift 