Republicans Started a Nationwide Fight Over Redistricting. Did They Just Lose? |
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In 2020, Virginia voters amended the state constitution to put redistricting in the hands of a bipartisan commission to reduce partisan gerrymandering. Less than six years later, on Tuesday night, Virginia voters said to hell with it all and approved a ferocious Democratic gerrymander of their state. The new map, if it survives some last legal checkpoints, is expected to give Democrats 10 of the state’s 11 congressional seats this fall, a four-seat increase from the current map.
The referendum result neuters whatever advantage Republicans had built—or even builds out a small one for Democrats—in the midcycle redistricting war that Donald Trump kicked off last summer by insisting Texas Republicans redraw their maps. That doesn’t mean that there’s anything in the long run for anyone to celebrate here. This redistricting war will continue, aggressively, into 2028. Millions and millions of Americans now live in newly rigged and incoherent districts that don’t adequately represent them. A new norm for state legislatures to redo maps when it suits their fancy, instead of every 10 years, has been established.
But for 2026, at least, Republicans initiated a dirty process and were met with a successfully dirty response from national Democrats. And if Republicans keep pushing, it will be “maximum warfare, everywhere, all the time,” House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries, potentially a hair too hyped up on Tuesday night, said in a statement.
That Jeffries line sounded familiar. 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........