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Home » Virginia Democrats vote for the mother of all gerrymanders

Virginia Democrats vote for the mother of all gerrymanders

The New Neo Posted on by

They tried it because they’re about grabbing power by hook or by crook, and they succeeded:

Virginia voters went to the polls Tuesday to vote on a referendum that would empower the Democrat-controlled state legislature to redraw the commonwealth’s congressional map.

The vote was in favor, and this means that according to the plan the number of Democrat to Republican districts in the state will change from 6-5 to 10-1. The 6:5 ratio pretty much reflected the actual proportions of Democrats to Republicans in the state, whereas 10:1 is ridiculously skewed. But only the courts could stop this now. The legal challenge:

The case centers on whether lawmakers violated the Virginia Constitution by keeping the special session open for nearly two years to pass the redistricting measure, a move critics say was an abuse of legislative authority. …

Democrats have argued to the Supreme Court that the General Assembly has broad constitutional authority to manage its own legislative sessions and procedures, including extending a special session, and that nothing in the Virginia Constitution explicitly prohibits how this particular session was handled.

The Honest Elections Project’s brief argues otherwise.

“If you look at what the law requires, it’s very clear that Governor Spanberger and her allies are steamrolling the process to try to launch a power grab,” Snead said.

The Democrats in Virginia are saying “the Republicans made us do it!” – arguing this is only a response to GOP efforts at redisticting.

More:

The [Virginia] Supreme Court decided in March to allow the referendum vote to move forward while it considers Republicans’ arguments challenging how the map amendment was passed by way of a special session.

“It is the process, not the outcome, of this effort that we may ultimately have to address,” the state’s highest court found. “Issuing an injunction to keep Virginians from the polls is not the proper way to make this decision.”

But an ounce of prevention would have been worth a lot of cure. Perhaps the Court hoped the populace would vote against it, and then the Court wouldn’t even have to rule. Now, of course, do they vote to undo the will of the people? I doubt it; here’s why:

Political and legal experts in Virginia agree the state Supreme Court is not overtly ideological, with many describing it as “small-c conservative,” leaning heavily on tradition and precedent rather than handing down ideologically right-wing rulings. And many observers say the court is wary of wading too heavily into political fights. But this time, it’s unavoidable.

“It’s kind of a state Supreme Court tradition to stay away from political matters whenever they can. They like to leave the legislating to the legislature. …

Virginia is one of only two states where the legislature elects Supreme Court justices. Because the state has had divided control for much of the past quarter century, the balance of the court’s justices were appointed by bipartisan compromise. The court’s current seven members include one justice who was elected when Democrats had sole control of the General Assembly, three when Republicans controlled both chambers and three when control of the legislature was split.

Some further background:

While state legislatures can redraw congressional maps in some states, Virginia voters in 2020 approved a constitutional amendment that created a bipartisan commission to draw their state’s map. Tuesday’s referendum set aside the current maps drawn up by the commission, replacing them with maps that were drawn by the Democratic-controlled General Assembly. The previous system will be put back in place after the 2030 census.

It’s so transparently unfair, basically disenfranchising nearly half the state. But it might be allowed to proceed. Would the case then end up in the US Supreme Court?

Comments

Virginia Democrats vote for the mother of all gerrymanders — 50 Comments

  2. The Virginia Supreme Court hoped that the voters would reject the measure so that they wouldn’t have to issue a ruling. If the process not the outcome was the crux of the issue, then they should have been able to rule before the election was held.

    Fact is that the Dems violated the law in multiple respects in order to push this through. And essentially Fairfax County, which effectively gets 5 out of the 10 seats in the new map, decided the election. If the VASC had any integrity, they would throw this measure out. But given that they allowed the election in the first place, I’m not holding my breath.

    May be time to start looking for a new place to live.

  3. 51% of Virginia’s voters (largely located in Fairfax county) voted themselves 91% of the commonwealth’s congressional seats. I’m fine with hardball politics–both parties do it. But to claim that this procedurally and substantively outrageous process was “fair” is outrageous. For the balance to shift from 6-5 to 10-1 necessarily means that there are quite a few districts with a small liberal advantage. I hope this fires up the Republicans and backfires on Spanberger and her gang of socialists.

  4. Chad King:

    Until Trump was elected, the GOP never played hardball except for the Bush-Gore election case.

  5. The only other hope is a VA law which requires voter amendments to be phrased “neutrally” on the ballot. This one was grossly biased. Perhaps the VASC could use this to throw out the vote. But if they’re elected by the legislature, which is currently dominated by Dems, they are at risk.

  6. I hope the VA Supreme Court does the right thing, but I’m not holding my breath.

    Gee, wasn’t Trump brilliant to start a mid-decade gerrymander war? Remember when all the Trumpers argued that there would be no consequences because blue states were already as gerrymandered as they could be? Tired of all the winning yet?

    And to those who supported the TX gerrymander and criticized Indiana Republicans for not following suit, what is the threshold? How much gerrymandering is too much? Everyone can agree that 51% of Virginians voting themselves 91% of the state’s share of House seats is bad. OK, then what’s the limit between acceptable hardball politics and too much? Why was Texas OK and VA not?

    And if your answer is “Democrats made us do it,” how are you any different than VA Democrats who are making the same argument?

    At some point, escalation must end, or we’ll have no republic left. Unfortunately, I’m not holding my breath on that one either.

  7. Mildly put, Bauxite, Democrat gerrymanders preceded Trump by a good long time. We’re currently fairly heavily gerrymandered in NC, in favor of Republicans, following a hundred years or so of Democrat suppression and even violence (see the Wilmington massacre of 1898). In my recent memory, there was a black Dem district which included parts of Greensboro and snaked down I-85 to collect voters in Charlotte.

  8. Kate – So what’s your criticism of VA Democrats? If everyone does it, it must be fine. No problem. Right?

  9. Not my quote, but I wish it were:

    “The right thinks about power the way a wine snob thinks about alcohol. The left thinks about power the way an alcoholic thinks about alcohol.”

  12. How is this different from GOP efforts to redistrict in Texas and other states?

    I think gerrymandering should be illegal. But the GOP seems to have started this latest round, and Dem states like VA and CA have responded.

  13. Yet again proving that the one and only true principle that guides and motivates Democrats (perhaps more precisely left-leaning Democrats) is power.

  14. Gerrymandering is like first past the post or winning the Electoral College while losing the popular vote or anything else people complain of, it’s been baked into the system for a long time. There are only a handful of states that don’t gerrymander, and one of them doesn’t need to because it’s completely Left-dominated anyway. (States with only one district of course can’t). Any state that wishes to can do it, or not do it, without reference to what any other state does.

    Bauxite’s “Trump Trump Trump” theory of this round of gerrymandering is completely false, as usual. Both parties have been doing this every chance they get. Texas drew a district around Tom Delay in 2003. The Republican State Leadership Committee’s REDMAP project was launched in 2010, years before Trump came down the gilded staircase.

  15. I don’t think they can actually manufacture a 10-1 map with Virginia’s electorate. They’ll end up with a mess of marginal districts they have trouble defending.

  16. Niketas Choniates – Wrong. Mid-decade redistricting is not something that parties have been doing all along.

  17. Art Deco – I don’t think they’ll have that much trouble defending those seats in a blue wave, which is what this year and 2028 are likely to be.

    2030 will be the first midterm of the next Democrat president, so that could be a good year for Republicans. With nationwide ballot harvesting, the end of voter ID, and four new Democratic Senators from Puerto Rico and DC, though, it may not matter.

  18. @Bauxite: Mid-decade redistricting is not something that parties have been doing all along.

    Everyone saw that I gave you an example, the Texas redistricting done by Republicans in 2003. Trying to gaslight people doesn’t help your case any. Other interested people, seeing that you lied, will probably find others on their own.

    For three days in October of 2003, Tom DeLay left his duties as majority leader of the House of Representatives and worked out of the Texas state capitol, in Austin. During the previous year, DeLay had led his Republican colleagues there in an effort to redraw the boundaries of the state’s congressional districts. For more than a century, congressional redistricting had taken place once every decade, after the national census, but the Texas Republicans were trying to redraw lines that had been approved just two years earlier. Several times during the long days of negotiating sessions, DeLay personally shuttled proposed maps among House and Senate offices in Austin. Once, when reporters glimpsed DeLay striding through the corridors of the state capitol, they asked him about his role in the negotiations. “I’m a Texan trying to get things done,” he said.

    Before the end of the month, the Republicans had pushed their plan through both houses, and it paid off in November of 2004. The Texas delegation in the House of Representatives went from seventeen to fifteen in favor of the Democrats, to twenty-one to eleven in favor of the Republicans. Martin Frost was the third-ranking Democrat in the House when the Republicans eliminated the district he had represented for twenty-six years. “I knew what DeLay was doing,” Frost told me. “I didn’t like it, but he wasn’t just trying to get me, he was trying to get as many Dems as possible. I went ahead and ran in one of the other districts. It was almost impossible to win, and I didn’t. But I went out with my boots on….”

    In the spring of 2003, Texas Republicans, who were now dominant in both the State House and Senate, proposed a new congressional map that promised to add between five and seven new Republicans to the Texas delegation. At the time, DeLay said that, with fifty-seven per cent of Texas voters backing Republicans for Congress, it was only fair that the G.O.P. control more than fifteen of the thirty-two seats in the U.S. House. If a mid-census redistricting was necessary to align the seats with the popular vote, the Republicans argued, so be it.

  20. Leftist shenanigans a-go-go (continued)…

    ‘”Fine People” Hoax Uncovered in SPLC Fraud Scam’—
    https://www.sashastone.com/p/fine-people-hoax-uncovered-in-splc
    H/T Powerline blog.
    Key grafs:

    …Trump’s DOJ has indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center for funding the [Charlottesville] Unite the Right rally, among other hate groups. Here is the mic drop:…

    The indictment can be read by clicking here…

    It is a little like how the FBI entrapped Muslim men to bring necessary scalps to the public in the war on terror, and did the same thing with the Gretchen Whitmer kidnapping, the find “MAGA extremists,” conveniently before the 2020 election, and again with January 6th, though there hasn’t been sufficient evidence to nail that one down yet.

    In the case of the SLPC, it looked like they needed a constant supply of racists, White Supremacists, and extremists to justify the donations….

  21. In addition to this possibly illegal redistricting in Virginia, Spanberger just re-signed Virginia into the popular vote compact, which, if in effect for the 2024 election, would have sent all Virginia’s electoral votes to Trump despite a majority for Harris.

  22. Look at the actual ballot language in the photo here:

    https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2026/04/on-the-virginia-referendum.php

    So the Virginia Supreme Court let the initiative go forward. On the substance, that is one way courts avoid (aka weasel out of) making hard decisions now. But they usually do so because the *substance* is controversial.

    In this case, though, the phrasing is so obviously bogus, biased, tendentious, you name it, that the court should have struck it down. In my state, I am 99% certain that the supreme court would have dealt with that language summarily.

  23. @Kate:If in effect for the 2024 election, would have sent all Virginia’s electoral votes to Trump despite a majority for Harris.

    The Dems know that, and would, if cheating on the front end in places where they have overwhelming majorities wouldn’t do it, challenge the election on the back end in every precinct across the country that would get them enough additional votes. I don’t think they’re worried a bit. The compact was not in effect in 2024 so they didn’t do the work they would have done if it had been.

  24. Niketas Choniates – Words mean things. One example is not “both parties doing it all along.” I think you have Texas in 2003 and Georgia in 2005 as the only examples of voluntary mid-decade redistricting before this year, both done by Republicans BTW.

    So your statement that both parties have been doing it all along couldn’t be more wrong. No, it hasn’t been happening all along and no, it hasn’t been both parties.

    Someone is gas-lighting here. It isn’t me.

  25. Kate – VA Dems just did the constitutional amendment creating the “non-partisan” redistricting committee to prevent Glenn Youngkin and the then-GOP-controlled legislature from doing the districts from the 2020 census before reversing themselves last night.

    I think there is nearly zero chance that VA Democrats would allow their electoral votes to go to a Republican.

    FWIW, I’ve never understood how the popular vote compact is consistent with the Compact Clause of Article I. Dems would have to also control Congress and the presidency to bless it and/or control the courts in order to actually implement it.

  26. @Bauxite: I think you have Texas in 2003 and Georgia in 2005 as the only examples of voluntary mid-decade redistricting before this year, both done by Republicans BTW.

    You keep moving the goalposts. First you say Trump started it, then you say it didn’t happen before Trump started it, then you say it happened but both parties weren’t doing it just Republicans. Unless Trump has a time machine, Trump didn’t start it, and your original point is shown to be false.

    Either you knew all this all along and were trying to deceive people into thinking this is something Trump started, or you just throw anything out there that can be twisted against Trump without regard for if it’s actually true. Lots of us have caught you doing both of these, and I don’t know why you keep it up. As soon as we see the handle “Bauxite” we all know what you are going to say and discount it.

  27. @Bauxite:I’ve never understood how the popular vote compact is consistent with the Compact Clause of Article I.

    This is simple. States can vote their Electoral College votes in any way their legislature directs. It’s not a real “compact” with other states. They are just saying that they will direct their electoral college votes a certain way, when certain conditions are met. It’s not like a treaty that Alaska signs with Nebraska.

    States act in concert with other states all the time. They use model acts, executive agreements, and set up trigger laws. In Virginia vs Tennessee (1893) the Supreme Court ruled that not just any agreement between states was a “compact” in the sense of Article I.

  28. I notice Bauxite completely ignored the Democrat coup d’état in Wilmington, NC, in 1898, in which an elected Republican city government was forcibly removed from office, with some deaths, and a racist Democrat government established in NC which lasted for about a hundred years.

    Our current R gerrymander isn’t as extreme as the threatened one in Virginia. The districts are reasonably compact; none of these snake or lobster claw districts.

  29. Please note that in Virginia as in other states, it’s not hard to contrive a mechanistic set of rules to construct districts for conciliar bodies which minimizes exercises in discretion. In spots where discretion is needed, you can assign it to the lowest level of judiciary whose geographic jurisdiction encompasses the whole area to be subject to discretionary partition. The thing is, you have to accept some measure of variation in the population of constituencies. In re the lower house of the Virginia legislature, the range in district populations would be somewhere between 62% and 125% of that of the statewide mean. The procedures manual for such a system would be brief and could be enacted as an appendix to the state constitution. Our flatfooted appellate courts do not permit such a system to be enacted because the ghost of Wm. J. Brennan would not be pleased.

  30. Art Deco – I don’t think they’ll have that much trouble defending those seats in a blue wave, which is what this year and 2028 are likely to be.
    ==
    Thanks for the wishcast.

  31. Niketas Choniates – They’re your goal posts, man. You are the one who said both parties do this all the time. That’s what I responded to.

    The failure to live in reality here is actually becoming jarring. What Trump did in strong-arming state party members to do a mass mid-decade redistricting is completely unprecedented. Now that there’s a (predicted) backlash that hurts, very few around here are willing to admit that Trump’s initial provocation had anything to do with it.

  32. Kate – Huh? Do you really think anyone is going to accept a 19th century insurrection as justification for a 21st century gerrymander war?

    And still, if NC’s gerrymander is OK, but VAs is not, how do you draw the line? How do you make a rule to tell when a district is “reasonably compact” or what is a “snake or lobster claw district?” That’s why the Supreme Court punted on gerrymanders. There’s no objective way to detect them (except when the other guy did it).

  33. This Virginia redistricting is just a preliminary event and demonstrates, yet again, that demonkrats play hardball and they will do absolutely anything to gain and retain power.

    When the Dems take Congress and the presidency they will pack the SCOTUS, bring in PR and DC as states, formally allow non-citizens to vote in any and all elections, open up the borders to allow in millions of illegals, get rid of the filibuster, arrest and indict Trump and any of his main supporters, totally nationalize health care, “informally” declare that Israel is a pariah state, re-establish US /Iranian relations as it was during the Obama era, etc. etc.

    It will be a bloodless coup d’etat, because the constitution will be totally ignored as a result of the packing of the SCOTUS; imagine a bunch of Justice Jacksons on the court.

    But hey, it’s up to the voters and it is the voters that will destroy our constitutional republic.

    California, NYC and Chicago are just mini-examples of what will occur in the USA when the demonrats take power.

  34. The VA redistricting just proves my view that Democrats (big D) are ignorant, stupid or evil.
    John Tyler (above) say it very, very well. I second his concerns.

  36. Add that Bauxite, CC™-R, is a particular type of Democrat, a sneaky one, but with the other characteristics.

    You should note that CC™-R will say nothing about Barry’s link to Democrat methods in VA.

  37. @Bauxite:What Trump did in strong-arming state party members to do a mass mid-decade redistricting is completely unprecedented.

    Self-contradicting garbage.

    You seem to think no one can read what you first wrote, and watch you shift from comment to comment. The words are still up there, I checked.

    Nothing about mid-decade redistricting was unprecedented. You just got through admitting that–after you were confronted with an example you pretended not to know about and then further confronted with your denying it had happened after having been confronted with it.

    And of course you add an evidence-free assertion that Trump “strong-armed” state-level Republicans into doing it, which is more garbage.

    Gerrymandering has always gone on, it has always been done by both parties, and it has been done mid-decade before, and it has always and only been up to the individual state or sometimes a Federal court how to draw their districts.

  39. What everyone here is ignoring is that the result of all this Gerrymandering is that battle lines are being drawn. With the second coming of Roger Taney in Roberts, I believe we’re experiencing Déjà vu all over again.

  40. Niketas Choniates – You don’t do English that well, do you?

    Trump didn’t strong-arm the state parties? Oh? Who threatened to primary the state legislators if they didn’t vote for redistricting? Whose organization is financing the primaries against Indiana GOPers who didn’t tow the line?

    Regarding my supposed “self-contradiction,” it ain’t me babe. This is what you wrote:

    “Bauxite’s “Trump Trump Trump” theory of this round of gerrymandering is completely false, as usual. BOTH PARTIES HAVE BEEN DOING THIS EVERY CHANCE THEY GET. Texas drew a district around Tom Delay in 2003. The Republican State Leadership Committee’s REDMAP project was launched in 2010, years before Trump came down the gilded staircase.” (I added the emphasis.)

    Your statement is completely and totally FALSE. “This round of gerrymandering” is being done in the middle of the decade at the president’s insistence. It is absolutely NOT the case that “both parties have been doing this every chance they get.” So one party doing mid-decade redistricting twice in the modern era, over 20 years ago, without the presidential strong-arming, is “both parties . . . doing this every chance they get?” Again, words mean things.

    The lengths that people will go to avoid noticing the bad effects of Trump’s tactical choices would be impressive if it wasn’t so sad.

  41. JackWayne on April 22, 2026 at 2:51 pm said:

    “……What everyone here is ignoring is that the result of all this Gerrymandering is that battle lines are being drawn……”

    My ignorant take on the present state of political affairs in the USA is we are now reprising the 1850s political climate. ; compromise and debate in Congress is non-existent. The demonkrats , in particular, thru their actions and words, have one goal and one goal only; attain and maintain ABSOLUTE power using any and all means.

    You know, the former Czechoslovakia peacefully split up in 1993 and became two independent nations; the Czech Republic and Slovenia.
    There is no reason why this is not possible in the USA.

  42. @Bauxite: You wrote what you wrote. I wrote what I wrote. Everyone can judge for themselves, and is doing so. Doesn’t matter how many caps you use. You can’t successfully gaslight people about your own words when they’re up at the top. We can see the attempted redefinition happening from comment to comment.

    You’re welcome to continue to try, just makes you less credible the more you try it.

  43. It will become a 1 party state like California and a few others are.
    And trying to turn Congress against President Trump

  44. the Dems maximize their advantages, the possums in Utah and Indiana, play by ‘marquise of queensbury rules,’ actually mike pence, has removed all doubt, and he is demonstrating enemy action, (indiana promised in return for maryland and temu obama, not gerrymandering,) guess what happened next

    as Brian Kemp and Doug Docey, both allowed the fraud to perpetuate itself in 2020, in Georgia and Arizona, a scorpion will follow its nature for it’s own purposes, ostensibly the possums will do the right thing (why are you laughing)

    Desantis rightfully sought to balance the short changing Florida had received in the Census, the next round of redistricting will be coming up

    progs play to win, stacking the Supreme Court in Wisconsin to prevent a challenge to their gerrymanders, a long time ago, the tea party pushed to hold the Court in the abramson matter back in 2012 when the walker recall fell through,
    with thune, blocking the SAVE act, maybe a dakota prairie dog is more apt

    he is also blocking accountability on the lawfare front,

  45. Anyone looking at the proposed VA map can see the contortions required to produce control of the whole state through northern Virginia.

  46. miguel cervantes:

    You write that Thune “is blocking the SAVE Act.” But why do you think he’s doing that? The typical response to that question that I see around the blogosphere is that he just doesn’t want it to pass because he’s a Democrat in Republican clothing, or just because, or whatever.

    But those people never deal with the fact that he doesn’t have the votes. I wrote about that here as well as here.

    You might say if Thune really wanted it he could twist more arms. Maybe; maybe not. Note that the Democrats really wanted it during the Biden years, are very good at arm-twisting, but didn’t get it because of Sinema and Manchin. There’s a limit to what can be done.

  47. I don’t think there’s any comparison to any redistricting the GOP has done recently. The new Virginia map is far more extreme.

  48. That was quick. A VA circuit court just ruled the Ds new map unconstitutional. Of course the VA SC has to rule

  49. Why would anyone think the vote was honest anyway? Everything the donkeys control is putrid and rotten. If they had the votes they wouldn’t have to cheat.

    Based on the comments on the local Facebook, my very blue county doesn’t seem actually anywhere near as blue as the vote.

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