How’s that plan to hold onto the Republican majority in Congress going?
In yet another loss for president Trump and his floundering gerrymandering blitz, Virginia voters approved a Democratic-led redistricting measure on Tuesday that will likely give Democrats four additional congressional seats and a chance to take control of the U.S. House this year.
With 97% of the vote in, the measure had passed with 51.5% approving and 48.5% voting against it. State and national Democrats celebrated Tuesday’s win, which still has to face a number of hurdles as legal challenges to the proposal continue to play out in court.
“Virginia voters have spoken, and tonight they approved a temporary measure to push back against a President who claims he is ‘entitled’ to more Republican seats in Congress,”Democratic Gov. Abigail Spanberger said in a statement following Tuesday’s referendum. “Virginians watched other states go along with those demands without voter input — and we refused to let that stand. We responded the right way: at the ballot box.”
“Tonight, Virginians refused to let Trump play games with Americans’ right to fair representation,” DNC Chair Ken Martin said in a statement on Tuesday. “Voters are turning out in droves to put an end to Trump’s billionaire-first agenda and Republicans see the writing on the wall.”
Former president Barack Obama, who has been an outspoken supporter of the proposal, also cheered Tuesday’s Democratic victory.
“Congratulations, Virginia! Republicans are trying to tilt the midterm elections in their favor, but they haven’t done it yet,” he wrote in a post on X on Tuesday night. “Thanks for showing us what it looks like to stand up for our democracy and fight back.”
“Fairness won,” Democratic Majority Leader of the Virginia Senate Scott Surovell chimed in in a statement. “Accountability won. And the Commonwealth that gave America its constitution has once again reminded the nation what the Constitution is for.”
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Tuesday’s referendum will change Virginia’s state constitution, and gives the Democratic-controlled General Assembly the authority to redraw the state’s congressional district lines. Since 2020, this authority is typically reserved for the state’s nonpartisan redistricting commission. The referendum gives the General Assembly the authority to temporarily bypass that commission to redraw lines.
The new map will give Democrats four additional congressional seats — meaning Democrats are expected to hold 10 of the state’s 11 seats in the U.S. House after the midterm elections. This is a significant change: up until Tuesday, Democrats held six of the state’s 11 seats.
See here and here for a bit of background. There’s still litigation before the Virginia Supreme Court that could derail this, but no one seems too worried about it now. Slate’s Jim Newell provided some more details.
Last summer, when the White House was kicking off its attempt to insulate the House GOP majority by taking on midcycle redistricting, a GOP operative told Politico that Trump’s team was applying “maximum pressure on everywhere where redistricting is an option and it could provide a good return on investment.”
The unofficial launch date of this process, the brainchild of White House political aide James Blair and Republican mapmaker Adam Kincaid, was July 15, 2025, when Trump told the Texas Republican delegation that he was eyeing a five-seat pickup in the state with redrawn maps.
“This totally set our world on fire, and flipped us upside down,” John Bisognano, president of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, told me in an interview on Tuesday. The NDRC had been founded by former Attorney General Eric Holder, in coordination with President Barack Obama and then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi, ahead of the 2020 Census to narrow the yawning structural advantage in the House that Republicans had formed over the previous couple of redistricting cycles.
“Donald Trump was clearly, I would say very clearly, threatening to bring us back to that age of 2014, 2010, when it was nearly impossible for both parties to compete for the House of Representatives,” Bisognano said.
The logic of Blair and others was that the party coalition had changed the previous five years—especially with Hispanic voters in south Texas shifting sharply red—so if they had the opportunity to solidify those shifts into seats, they should take it. Trump had a more characteristic description of the dynamic in Texas.
“I got the highest vote in the history of Texas,” Trump said in early August, “and we are entitled to five more seats.”
Republicans further believed that Democrats would struggle to respond in kind because of the way blue states had hamstrung their own mapmaking discretion. Blue states like California, Virginia, Colorado, and Washington had amended their constitutions to put redistricting into the hands of bipartisan commissions. Red states didn’t futz around with such good-government preciousness, and after Texas changed its map, the push would continue in Missouri, Ohio, North Carolina, Florida, and Indiana.
“And so we found ourselves in this current moment, with this massive decision before us,” Bisognano said. “AG Holder”—who still chairs the NDRC—“quickly was able to come to the reality that we need to adjust our own tactics in order to try to rebalance the playing field.” Blue-state constitutional safeguards against gerrymandering, in other words, needed to be put on hiatus—and quickly.
And so California moved first and set the model for Virginia to follow. Through a referendum that voters approved late last year, California suspended the maps drawn by the California Citizens Redistricting Commission through the 2030 cycle and replaced them with new maps giving Democrats up to five new seats. That neutralized Texas’ move.
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The Virginia gerrymander is, on its own terms, a dirty job. This is a light-blue state that Kamala Harris only won by 5 points in 2024, and the proposition was to give Democrats a 10-to-1 representational advantage in Congress. The districts in the new map are painful on the eyes. Four districts extend southward from the northern Virginia suburbs of D.C. to drown out rural communities with which they have nothing in common. The 7th District, which looks like a scorpion, is appropriately dastardly, stretching from mountainous country in the western part of the state straight to expressways over the Potomac River into Washington D.C.
What especially upset Virginia Republicans already apoplectic over this, though, was the language of the referendum itself: It asked voters whether they wanted to suspend the existing, neutral map through the 2030 census and adopt the new map in order to “restore fairness in the upcoming elections.”
There’s nothing fair about this map for Virginia Republicans. And by all means, they should address their many reasonable complaints to James Blair.
Oh, there is much wailing and gnashing of teeth over this. And as in every 80s coming-of-age movie in which the picked-on protagonist finally decks the bully after being pushed too far and summoning up the will to stand up for himself, it’s so delightful to see.
Now, this isn’t the end of the story. As noted, there’s the litigation, and Florida may take a crack at some further mapmaking mayhem, if they’re not too spooked by recent special election results. And then there’s this, also from the Slate piece.
The end of the 2026 battle, then, may be within sight, with a rough outcome determined: basically a wash, but possibly favoring Democrats if the political wind stays at their back. But the war will rage on into 2028.
One shoe that hasn’t dropped in time to affect 2026 maps is the Supreme Court decision in Louisiana v. Callais, which could neuter Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act and, with it, its protection of majority-Black congressional districts. If the Supreme Court does land that way, Republican states across the South will eliminate one majority-Black district after another, giving Republicans an opportunity to net maybe another dozen seats. That would compel more Democratic states like Colorado, Washington, Illinois, New York, New Jersey, and others to respond in kind by further gerrymandering their states.
It’s probably too late in most states to do any further mapmaking, but for sure if the Voting Rights Act is thrown in the trash it will be open season for 2028. Remember that the first map drawn in Texas – by some random dude, but still – would have given the Republicans something like 33 seats, at least under 2024 conditions. I have no idea what it might look like for 2026, but it would still be ugly and there may be stronger versions of it. The best defense against that is going to be electing a lot of Democrats this year. And maybe, in the world we would like to have in 2029, some new laws to defang both the mad redistricters and the corrupt Supreme Court that has enabled them. More from TPM here.