Virginia Democrats won a strikingly narrow victory in last week’s snap election referendum, altering the commonwealth’s constitution by reversing a supermajority-supported ban on partisan gerrymandering. The outcome was opposed by almost 49% of statewide voters, who were subjected to an unremitting and lavishly funded “yes” propaganda campaign that even NPR admitted had sown widespread confusion. Unless the Supreme Court in Richmond follows the lead of lower court rulings and invalidates Tuesday’s result on any number of compelling legal grounds, Democrats’ slim win will empower them to uproot what is considered one of the fairest and most representative congressional maps in the country and replace it with one of the nation’s most unrepresentative maps. The centerpiece of the ubiquitous “yes” campaign was, insultingly, “fairness.”

Critics of the change are understandably howling, for reasons we’ve spelled out in detail in previous columns. The new map would be a monstrosity. “Yes” supporters counter that Republicans are shedding crocodile tears, that red Texas “started” this race to the bottom — a point I’ve addressed in the aforementioned pieces and elsewhere — and that if Republicans were truly offended by partisan gerrymandering, they would join Democrats in banning it. Conservatives aren’t upset about the ugliness of the process or the unfairness of this map, they allege. They’re just angry that they lost.