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The best thing Republicans can say for themselves in defense of Virginia’s Tuesday vote to overhaul its congressional map is that the vote was close. With a win margin of only three points, the “no” vote on the successful constitutional amendment to redistrict the state performed better than the GOP’s 2025 gubernatorial nominee, Winsome Earle-Sears, and its attorney general nominee, incumbent Jason Miyares.
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But “almost” and “overperforming the generic ballot” in politics don’t matter much after election night. The fact is that one-third of the state’s population in the indigo metropolis of Northern Virginia successfully usurped virtually all of the national representation of the state’s rural and lower-income enclaves. Despite the slew of “Don’t Fairfax Me” lawn signs across the South, the entirety of the state is indeed “getting Fairfaxed.” The only real cold comfort for conservatives is realizing what that actually means.
DEMOCRATS ARE LOSING THE WORKING CLASS ONE MOVING TRUCK AT A TIME
I live in Fairfax County, so when I relay the practical implications of what “getting Fairfaxed” actually means, I say it not with schadenfreude, but with sorrow.
Fairfax County Public Schools, formerly one of the best in the nation, is now a financial, academic, and practical disaster. Forced to fire 275 teachers to offset a $121 million budget shortfall, FCPS saw a quarter of its students fail their 2025 state standardized testing. Despite a 56% increase in its budget from 2015 to 2025, FCPS saw its enrollment shrink more than any other district in the country in that decade. Barely half of the school year is composed of full, five-day weeks in class on the FCPS calendar, and that excludes the multiple weeks off to accommodate Fairfax’s inability or refusal to shovel snow.
Fairfax’s dedication to serving as a sanctuary city for criminal illegal immigrants has also gifted it at least three of the county’s five murderers this year. According to the Department of Homeland Security, three of the men accused of committing murder this year in Fairfax — Abdul Jalloh, Misael Lopez Gomez, and Anibal Armando Chavarria Muy — were all illegal immigrants. Muy had a previous criminal record, as did Jalloh, who Immigration and Customs Enforcement had previously tried to deport, but was blocked by the Biden administration from doing so. The other two murder suspects were Chhatra Thapa, who was killed by police, and Justin Fairfax, the state’s former lieutenant governor, once a Democratic Party rising star who apparently graduated from sexually assaulting women to murdering them.
Technically speaking, Tuesday’s vote has no bearing on state or local governance. But looking at the map of intentionally uncompetitive districts indeed serves to drive down Republican turnout in national elections, which in turn trickles down into local ones. Over time, the explicit goal is to Fairfax the entire state from the national to the local level. If the GOP is locked out of power for six years, the party’s state infrastructure runs the risk of entirely collapsing in that time.
The map itself illustrates just how intentional the act of Fairfaxing was. The Census Bureau estimated last year that Fairfax County had 1.17 million residents, rendering it the 42nd most populous in the nation. Tuesday’s vote gives the county a whopping five districts in Congress. For reference, Allegheny County in Pennsylvania, which has 57,000 more residents, is only served by two congressional districts, as is Franklin County, Ohio, which boasts 200,000 more residents than Fairfax. Fairfax County will have more House votes than Manhattan (population: 1.66 million) and as many as Queens (population: 2.36 million) and Brooklyn (population: 2.65 million).
My old congressional district used to span from McLean to just southwest of Mount Vernon, theoretically navigable by Metro and two buses in a little over two hours. My new district will now begin at Washington National Airport and continue until Yorktown. As in, “The Battle of.” As in, a three-hour drive and 150 miles of distance. The infamous “lobster claw district” will connect the Pentagon to west of the Shenandoah Valley and the rural-residential suburbs of Richmond. In fact, you could travel through four of Fairfax’s five new districts in under an hour and a half without once getting off the D.C. Metro.
So, it doesn’t exactly matter that out of 133 of the state’s counties and independent counties, the amendment only won the support of 38 of them, or less than 29%. The whole point is that Fairfax County voted for the amendment by nearly a 40-point margin, and that’s the electorate that has been deliberately anchored into five of the nation’s new congressional districts.
The only actual consolation prize for Republicans is not likely the courts, which have historically deferred to even the worst excesses of the state Democrats and probably won’t serve as a last-minute deus ex machina for the GOP. Rather, it’s the fact that by creating the indigo consensus so strong that the state can go along with the Fairfax agenda, Democrats might ultimately lose congressional representation in the long run anyway.
JUNGLE PRIMARIES AND THE CURIOUS TIMING OF SWALWELL’S DOWNFALL
On Tuesday, that “lobster claw” district only voted for the amendment by a 0.3 point margin, and two blue districts voted yes within a five-point margin. The GOP actually won three of the new districts, not only the one the map was supposed to grant them.
Furthermore, five of the fastest-growing counties in the state all voted against the amendment by a double-digit margin. By contrast, the University of Virginia found that net-outmigration has been higher in Fairfax County since the start of this decade than in any other place in Virginia.
Democrats may be able to torture maps, outspend the GOP 3-to-1, and play President Donald Trump’s misguided redistricting game against him. But at the end of the day, demographics continue to be destiny, and for Democrats, the sort of governance exemplified in Fairfax County may very well doom them to lose the game, even if they rigged it anyway.
