Last month, we wrote about Midwestern Republican lawmakers — in Ohio and especially Indiana — defying pressure from the Trump administration to engage in mid-decade redistricting for partisan benefit. This was an off-ramp from spiraling redistricting wars, which Democrats say the GOP instigated with a redraw in Texas.
What they ignore in this “they started it” finger-pointing storyline is the serious injustice of the Census Bureau’s dramatic counting errors in the 2020 census, which wrongly gifted blue states at least half a dozen congressional seats and presidential electoral votes, according to experts. These faulty maps have tainted multiple election cycles, despite the agency admitting to miscounts in 14 states, which overwhelmingly benefited Democrats. Texas’s action could reasonably be defended as a corrective measure to partially mitigate this democracy-undermining problem.
Liberals don’t care about a major error that unjustly benefited their party, of course, so they’ve framed Texas Republicans as the aggressors in the resulting skirmish. California changed its constitution via referendum, undoing a fairly recent change that took redistricting out of the hands of politicians. Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) and company spent heavily to push through a misleadingly worded ballot measure, selling it as an answer to a Trump-backed power grab pushed by the GOP. Setting aside all the substantive problems with their argument, Sacramento Democrats at least had a fairly easy story to tell: Texas fired first, so we’re firing back, in kind. Then came Ohio and Indiana, red-dominated states being urged to alter their maps to add Republican-leaning seats. The Buckeyes decided to pull back from the brink, cutting a deal with Democrats in the state. The Hoosiers rebuffed the White House’s lobbying campaign entirely.
This shifted the trajectory of this partisan battle. Texas “started it” (census screw-up aside), California retaliated, then other red states chose not to escalate further. But now Democrats encircling deepest blue Washington, D.C., are spoiling for an escalation of their own.
In Virginia, the “moderate,” “affordability”-minded party of Gov. Abigail Spanberger (D-VA) has shot out of the gates of its newly won power with a dizzying array of proposed culture wars, tax increases, and power grabs. Even some Democrats have been taken aback by the blitz to redraw the congressional lines to give their party a 10-1 advantage, up from the current 6-5 map. A state court ruled that in their rush to do this, Democrats broke the law several times, but the Virginia Supreme Court has chosen to wait until after the rushed April referendum to rule on its legality. The maps are egregious and indefensible. The ballot measure they’ve jammed through tells voters the redraw is a “temporary” move to “restore fairness” in upcoming elections. This overlooks the fact that, even accepting the Democrats’ premise, California already did this with its eye-for-an-eye move. It also entirely ignores the GOP-led lower-the-temperature climbdowns in other states.
Virginia Democrats are asking voters (in what will likely be a low turnout spring election) to change the constitution by abruptly rejecting the nonpartisan commission approach to redistricting that the Commonwealth’s electorate lopsidedly embraced in 2020, with the backing of most Virginia Democrats.
In neighboring Maryland, an ambitious Democratic governor (who appears to be a serial liar and fabulist about his own biography) and a ravenous Democratic legislature have moved to transform a 7-1 congressional map that is already wildly gerrymandered in its favor into an 8-0 abomination. One cooler head is trying to prevail, however. Bill Ferguson, a Democrat, leads the state Senate in Annapolis. He reportedly spoke to his GOP counterpart in Indiana and effectively forged a cross-aisle gentleman’s agreement: If Indiana Republicans refused to add red seats, Maryland Democrats would honor that de-escalation. The Indiana Senate, much to the chagrin of many Republican voters, held up its end of the bargain. Will Ferguson keep his word?
So far, so good, it seems. But immense pressure is building for him to bust through the agreed-upon guardrail anyway. Democrats have a taste for blood, and their base loves the unbridled aggression. One of the most powerful Democrats in the country, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, appeared on CNN last weekend, vowing to pour tens of millions of dollars into a propaganda campaign backing the Virginia power grab, and warning Ferguson to get out of the way in Maryland. “One man shouldn’t stand in the way,” Jeffries scolded, adding that he may personally intervene. “At some point, I’m going to have a conversation with him if he continues to stand in the way of an up-or-down vote,” he said. CNN’s article describes this newfound zeal for widespread gerrymandering as Democrats’ vision for a “new future of House campaigning. … Jeffries and his team are already looking ahead to states like Washington, Colorado and even Pennsylvania for the 2028 cycle.”
“Republicans started this redistricting war, and Democrats have made clear, we’re going to finish it,” Jeffries boasted. If that’s how Democrats are going to play this, Republicans will have no choice but to go scorched earth themselves. Indiana and Ohio were the olive branches after a tit-for-tat. If the reply is “damn the off-ramp, full speed ahead,” GOP lawmakers in states controlled by red trifectas must unify behind an approach of maximum ruthlessness and pain for the opposition party.
Many political observers across the ideological spectrum believe Republicans have the numbers to win “this redistricting war,” as Jeffries calls it. He may like the sound of the “we’re going to finish it” bravado, but that math doesn’t necessarily agree. It may come down to political will. Democrats have an opportunity to reverse the spiral, following Republicans’ lead. If they refuse, it’s time to counterpunch hard, everywhere. And then get even more aggressive when the (hopefully competent, this time) 2030 census inevitably pushes many seats into red states, thanks to blue state mismanagement and undesirable governance.
If Democrats insist upon consequences, give them consequences.
