Hypocrisy was triumphant, as it usually is in arguments over redistricting, in Virginia this week, as voters approved a “fairness” constitutional amendment allowing the Democratic-majority legislature to enact a congressional districting plan which is expected to increase Democrats’ edge in its congressional delegation from 6-5 to 10-1. This is a state in which Vice President Kamala Harris carried over President Donald Trump by a 52% to 46% margin.
Before this year, Virginia Democrats had been bragging about the bipartisan redistricting process they created and voters approved in 2020. Each party was to appoint an expert, and if they agreed on a plan, it was adopted. After the 2020 Census, Virginia’s congressional map was drawn by political scientists Bernard Grofman and Sean Trende, a longtime friend of Grofman. The result was four strongly Democratic districts, four less strongly Republican ones, two narrowly Democratic seats in Northern Virginia, and one true toss-up in the Hampton Roads region.
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In a Democratic-leaning year, as 2026 appears to be, Democrats could easily win seven or eight of these seats, and, in a more Republican-leaning year than 2024, Republicans could easily win six or maybe seven. About what you’d expect in a 52-46 Democratic state.
But when Trump successfully urged Texas Republicans last summer to revise their post-2020 plan and said he hoped they might win an additional five seats, Virginia Democrats sidelined — just temporarily, they said — their heartfelt commitment to bipartisan districting and set about putting in place their plan to gain four seats.
The good news is that there’s a penalty, exacted by voters, for hypocrisy. Texas Republicans’ new plan looks unlikely to net the promised 5 seats, given the collapse of Trump’s popularity among Hispanic voters, a majority force in the Lower Rio Grande Valley.
And Virginia voters’ approval of the Democrats’ plan by only 51% to 49% margin, in a state that elected Democrat Abigail Spanberger governor last November by a 58% to 42% margin, suggests that their new bacon strip may not elect all Democrats (my candidate is the lobster-shaped 7th district).
Who started all this? Virginia Democrats blame Texas Republicans. National Democrats, including former President Barack Obama and his attorney general Eric Holder, blame Republicans empowered by Tea Party gains in the 2010 off-year elections, just in time to redistrict with the new 2010 Census figures.
Partisan districting goes back a lot farther than that. The original gerrymander was produced by America’s fifth vice president, Elbridge Gerry, who was born in 1744. Gerry, a revolutionary and a ditherer, signed the Declaration of Independence and attended the Constitutional Convention but declined to sign the document. He professed to oppose political parties but, as a Massachusetts anti-federalist, designed an Essex County district that a cartoonist famously depicted as a salamander — the original gerrymander.
Before the Supreme Court imposed equal population requirements in 1964, partisan redistricters — Nelson Rockefeller Republicans in New York, Pat Brown Democrats in California — ran wild, packing the other side’s backers in high-population districts and preserving in amber traditional but depopulated party seats.
Rockefeller Republicans in 1962 grabbed all the fast-growing suburban seats, carved three out of Democratic New York City, and gave Upstate Democrat Samuel Stratton a district that stretched from Schenectady almost to Albany. Brown Democrats in California grabbed the fast-growing state’s eight new districts and won three more besides. That was almost enough to make John F. Kennedy the only president between 1934 and 1998 to see an off-year net gain for his party in House seats.
But the equal-population standard disciplined the redistricters and, strictly applied, still does. There’s a limit on how much you can advantage your side, and there’s a danger that if political alignments change — and they usually do in the 10-year period between censuses — that a seat you created for your own side will go the other way or that your side will miss out on gains that you simply did not anticipate.
The voters, it turns out, have the final say. In Upstate New York, Stratton held on to his elongated district seat throughout the 1960s and retired undefeated in 1988, while Democrats picked up four suburban and three Upstate districts in the Lyndon B. Johnson landslide of 1964. In California, five of the House seats Democrats created for themselves went Republican as Gov. Pat Brown (D-CA) was swept out by future President Ronald Reagan in 1966.
The most colorful partisan redistrictor was San Francisco Rep. Phillip Burton (D-CA), who honed his skills in the 1970s and in the post-1980 cycle produced a convoluted California map that increased Democrats’ edge there from 24-19 to 28-17, and Burton intervened in other states as well.
I remember him muttering as he walked by me in the Capitol, “They’re putting too much of Grant County in Kastenmeier’s [Wisconsin] district,” and spending an evening watching him down tumbler glasses of vodka (no ice) and smoking unfiltered Pall Malls, talking districting all over the nation.
Burton died suddenly at 56 in 1983, and his widow, Sala Burton, who succeeded him in Congress, endorsed as her successor local housewife and former state Democratic chairman Nancy Pelosi on her deathbed four years later.
The 1970s and 1980s were Democrats’ golden redistricting years. Newt Gingrich’s Republicans ended Democrats’ House control after 40 years in 1994, and in the 1990 cycle, Republican state legislators, in Florida and other Southern states, teamed with black Democrats to create black-majority districts, leading adjacent seats shorn of heavily Democratic precincts.
In the 2000s and especially in the post-Obamacare 2010s, Republicans had a demographic advantage in redistricting: Democratic voters became highly concentrated in central cities, sympathetic suburbs, and university towns, while Republican voters were more evenly spread across the rest of the country. That Republican advantage has lessened in the Trump years, as many areas outside million-plus metro areas have become heavily Republican, while Hispanic and black areas in central cities, at least in 2024, have become less Democratic.
Still, the most grotesquely shaped congressional districts post-2020 have been in heavily Democratic Illinois, where the district shapes on a map look like bacon strips extending outward from politically connected Chicago wards and close-in suburbs extending out across miles of prairie. Virginia Democrats’ plan, provided it’s approved by the state supreme court, is of a similar ilk. You can drive across five district lines in a few minutes in Northern Virginia’s Arlington or Fairfax counties, knowing all the while that it might take four or five hours to drive through those districts’ extensions out to the Shenandoah Valley or Southside.
Equally grotesque, in my view, are Republican maps that slice up Democratic central cities with just about the right population for a single district. Examples include the post-2020 Tennessee plan that slices up Nashville, and the post-2024 Missouri plan that slices up Kansas City. A similar plan in Indiana was defeated in December 2025 by Republican state senators. It would have sliced Indianapolis four ways and divided the historically Democratic steel mill areas around Lake Michigan (where Chief Justice John Roberts grew up).
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My own experience analyzing and occasionally drawing districts, starting in the post-1960 cycle, convinces me there’s no politically neutral way to define what is unduly partisan districting. Supposedly nonpartisan commissions staffed by political scientists produce what you’d expect from a profession that votes 95% Democratic. Electing House members statewide or by proportional representation severs any members’ connections with localities and disenfranchises millions in large states.
Virginia Democrats actually did a pretty good job of creating a minimally partisan redistricting process. Now six years later, they’ve voted to kill it — only temporarily, they say. Proof once again that, as I wrote some years ago, all process arguments are insincere, including this one.
