Well, they did it. It wasn’t pretty, but the will to power doesn’t require moral victories; it just needs to win. And it only needs to win once.
We have previously editorialized against the brazen hypocrisy of Democrats’ pushing a mid-decade, maximalist, partisan 10–1 congressional map in a 6–5 or at best 7–4 purple state — a map that allows voters inside the Beltway to govern much of red, rural Virginia — just six years after Democrats talked 60 percent of state voters into enacting a “nonpartisan” redistricting process in order to prevent Republicans from drawing a map once Glenn Youngkin took office.
The most egregiously broken promise is Governor Abigail Spanberger’s, who — when she was asked the question while still seeking votes in Virginia, which she never needs to do again — said in August 2025:
Short answer is no. . . . Virginia by constitutional amendment has a new redistricting effort that was put in place and first utilized in the 2021 redistricting. I’ve been watching with interest what other states are doing, but I have no plans to redistrict Virginia.
At the time, as CNN reported, the Democrats’ view was that it was better to conceal their plans:
“Policy-wise, I think everybody wants it,” said one Democratic operative working on the statewide races. “But is this what we want the closing argument to be on the campaign?”
This is the modus operandi that James Carville illustrated recently when discussing other radical steps Democrats might take in order to pursue a “one man, one vote, one time” approach to the political system: “Don’t run on it, don’t talk about it, just do it” once you have power, so it’s too late for voters to do anything about it. Term-limited in a state with two Democratic senators, Spanberger correctly intuited that her loyalty is to the national Democratic establishment and its primary electorate, not to her state’s citizens.
A great many Virginia voters didn’t appreciate the deception and the raw power politics. Spanberger won the state by 15 points; at this writing, the “yes” vote seems to have passed by a hair, entirely on the strength of Fairfax County and other Beltway communities that voted in favor of their narrow local interests against their neighbors.
National Republicans, conservatives, and right-populists who sat out this fight while their own party was outspent by multiples should be embarrassed by the outcome. With such a slight margin of victory for Democrats who poured massively disproportionate resources into the race, it seems clear that a more energetic deployment of leaders and cash might have turned the tide.
The result suggests that Indiana Republicans, several of whom stood nobly against a mid-decade redistricting of their own red state, were fools to think there is still any reward for playing fair. That said, if the environment is hostile to Republicans this fall, they may be thankful that they didn’t play for maximizing the seats in play in the Hoosier State. Democrats, in a less favorable year, could regret this map in Virginia — unless they can change the national rules in the interim.
The closeness of the result is largely a factor of local sentiment and the glaring nature of the Democrats’ volte-face. But it does suggest that fury at Donald Trump has its political limits.
The Virginia Supreme Court can still rule that this whole plan is unlawful under state law. It should do so. But that will require the courage to stand against a popular plebiscite. The justices should consider the close division of that vote if they fear to stand on principle against the outcome.