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Virginia Democrats have rammed through a snap election, initiated just weeks after they took full power in Richmond, to try to change the state constitution and redraw the commonwealth’s congressional maps prior to the November midterm elections. According to recent judicial rulings, they’ve violated the law in barreling through this process. But the state Supreme Court has decided to wait until after the hastily arranged referendum takes place to decide whether it was conducted illegally.
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Many legal observers believe the process is tainted at every level, having breached legislative rules, state law, and Virginia’s constitution itself. Whether the relevant high court agrees with this assessment remains to be seen. Either way, voters shouldn’t roll the dice. Voting against this amendment is the only way to guarantee its failure. And it richly deserves to fail.
Democrats are seeking to uproot an overwhelmingly supported amendment ratified by Virginians just six years ago — in a regularly scheduled, high-turnout presidential election, mind you — which stripped redistricting authority from politicians, in favor of a bipartisan commission. This was the thorough but straightforward ballot question posted to Virginians in the 2020 referendum:
Should the Constitution of Virginia be amended to establish a redistricting commission, consisting of eight members of the General Assembly and eight citizens of the Commonwealth, that is responsible for drawing the congressional and state legislative districts that will be subsequently voted on, but not changed by, the General Assembly and enacted without the Governor's involvement and to give the responsibility of drawing districts to the Supreme Court of Virginia if the redistricting commission fails to draw districts or the General Assembly fails to enact districts by certain deadlines?
The “yes” side won in a landslide, with roughly two-thirds of voters answering in the affirmative. The redistricting process was changed, with the clear and decisive assent of the people. The resulting map features six seats occupied by Democrats and five by Republicans. For reference, in the 2024 general election, Democrats won the statewide popular vote in House of Representatives races by a combined margin of 51%-48%. A 6-5 map is among the fairest and most representative in the nation, just as Virginians wanted it to be.
The new map Democrats have drawn up, which they’re not allowing to be displayed in polling places as voters decide whether to back their new scheme, would shift the partisan balance from 6-5 to 10-1. They’d achieve this by exploiting liberal Northern Virginia as the vote-generating hub throughout nearly the entire state, with fully five of the new districts snaking out of deep-blue Fairfax County. Yes, five members of Congress, all from the same party, could conceivably reside in one single county, while simultaneously living in five separate districts.
We also know that some of these new districts, which look as ridiculous as one might expect, were explicitly drawn for individual, named politicians. This is a form of corruption that brazenly violates the spirit of Virginia voters’ lopsidedly passed rule change at the beginning of the decade. And yet, the shameless touchstone and Orwellian buzzword Democrats have attached to this disgraceful enterprise is, astoundingly, “fairness.”
Consider the astonishing ballot verbiage they’ve engineered to yank the result of Tuesday’s vote in their favor, and contrast it with the 2020 question quoted above. To put a finer point on it, this is how Democrats are describing altering the state constitution to reinstate partisan gerrymandering to award themselves four new congressional seats:
Should the Constitution of Virginia be amended to allow the General Assembly to temporarily adopt new congressional districts to restore fairness in the upcoming elections, while ensuring Virginia's standard redistricting process resumes for all future redistricting after the 2030 census?
People who believe this “temporary” claim would be well-advised to remember that politicians lie and “evolve” as a matter of course. Recall that one of Virginia’s incumbent senators once solemnly pledged to serve only two terms in the upper chamber, if elected. He never wanted to become “a lifetime politician,” he said years ago, so he promised voters that serving in the Senate would be a mere “temporary” role for him. He is running for reelection, seeking a fourth six-year term. In politics, “temporary” status quos that are proven to be beneficial to entrenched and powerful interests have a way of morphing into permanency.
As for the “restore fairness” bit, that’s a genuinely outrageous way to describe a power grab that would transform one of the country’s most proportional and fairest congressional maps into what some experts say would become the least representative, least fair map in America. Democrats claim they’re going to “restore fairness” by … reducing the footprint of the political party supported by 48% of commonwealth voters to one lone seat, or just 9% of the House delegation. Doing so would “instantly transform Virginia from the most proportionally accurate congressional map in America to, by a wide margin, the least,” as explained by this analysis.
“Gerrymandering is detrimental to our democracy,” one prominent Virginia politician intoned not long ago. The same person further explained that partisan redistricting is an abuse of power that amounts to “weakening the individual voices that form our electorates.” On the campaign trail several months ago, the source of those quotes, now-Gov. Abigail Spanberger (D-VA), was asked if she’d seek to redistrict Virginia if she won.
Her response? “Short answer is no.”
“Virginia, by constitutional amendment, has a new redistricting effort that was put in place and first utilized in the 2021 redistricting,” she continued, touting the 2020 amendment cited above, which she and most high-profile Democrats all publicly and vocally supported. “I have no plans to redistrict Virginia.”
Clear cut.
Flash forward a handful of months, and the very first bill Spanberger signed into law as governor established Tuesday as the special election date to do the very thing she told voters she would not do. She has fully endorsed and promoted the “yes” campaign.
Spanberger pretends this is about “leveling the playing field” after Texas engaged in mid-decade redistricting to gain up to five new red-tinted congressional districts. She’s blamed Trump, quoting him as saying he’s “entitled” to more seats. As we’ve covered previously, this tendentious tale requires ignoring the facts that New York Democrats went first, the Census Bureau’s admitted and inexcusable counting errors in 2020 robbed red states of at least half a dozen seats to which they were, indeed, entitled, and California Democrats have retaliated in tit-for-tat fashion against Texas.
The proverbial playing field has already been leveled. The Virginia push represents a fresh and radicalizing escalation by Democrats, who have ignored recent off-ramps and good-faith climbdowns by Republicans in Indiana and Ohio. Apologists for this scheme will point to North Carolina, where legislative and court battles over redistricting have raged back and forth for many years; Missouri, where Republicans have moved to add one red seat in a Trump plus-18 state; and Florida, where Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) is preparing for a potential Supreme Court ruling that would upend the constitutionality of congressional maps across the Southeast.
Setting all of that context aside, Spanberger saw these skirmishes playing out last year and preemptively rejected the idea of getting Virginia involved in them. That’s what she told voters on the trail, before immediately and shamelessly flipping positions upon assuming office. This is lying, bait-and-switch politics at its worst. Spanberger’s intense focus on partisan and ideological adventures, while getting openly bullied by the loudmouth leftists who lead the state legislature, is also a betrayal of her anodyne “moderate” and “affordability”-minded campaign. It’s why her approval rating has already fallen farther and faster than any Virginia governor over the last three decades.
But the burning question right now is whether Old Dominion voters will reward this power-hungry treachery on Tuesday. We shall see. Public polling suggests a close race, with the “yes” side holding a slight advantage. Proponents of the gerrymandering scheme have run on-air ads virtually unopposed for months. It has been maddening and mystifying to watch how flat-footed the “no” side has been — stumbling out of the gates, and never really recovering to make a clean, popular argument against a return to partisan gerrymandering.
If the “yes” side prevails, there will be plenty of time for recriminations, with a key ruling looming from Virginia’s Supreme Court. As of right now, however, finger-pointing accomplishes nothing, and hoping for a judicial bailout, no matter how valid, is an unacceptable risk.
NO, CALIFORNIA DEMOCRATS CAN’T DO BETTER THAN THIS
This monstrosity can be defeated at the ballot box. “It all comes down to Election Day,” one analyst concluded, having reviewed the early voting data and trends. Vote no, Virginia.
Non-Virginians should also keep an eye on this, as Tuesday’s outcome will impact not only the national 2026 political landscape but also inform gerrymandering wars moving forward.
