In all the jubilation surrounding the Virginia Supreme Court’s surprise rejection of the state’s attempt to amend the state constitution and create a 10–1 Democratic congressional gerrymander in place of its currently drawn lines, some nagging thoughts lurk in the corner of my head:
1.) The holding of the Virginia Supreme Court is already being contested loudly by the usual national morons: Hakeem Jeffries declared that “the decision by the Virginia Supreme Court to overturn the will of more than three million voters will not stand” (narrator: yes it will), while the New York Times’ Jamelle Bouie demanded that Virginia voters “call their delegates and senators and demand that they ignore this illegitimate ruling.”
2.) Virginia Democrats, for the most part, have not joined this chorus. State house speaker Don Scott declared in a press release that “we respect the decision of the Supreme Court of Virginia.” Governor Abigail Spanberger lowered the rhetorical temperature as well, looking instead toward November: “I am disappointed by the Supreme Court of Virginia’s ruling, but my focus as Governor will be on ensuring that all voters have the information necessary to make their voices heard this November in the midterm elections because in those elections we — the voters — will have the final say.” As for Louise Lucas, president pro tempore of the Virginia State Senate and herself the original mastermind behind the gerrymander? Well, she has other problems right now.
3,) Both Spanberger and Scott know full well what other readers may have forgotten in their celebration: Virginia Democrats could have another redistricting referendum on the ballot for voters as soon as November 2027, provided they dot their procedural i’s competently this time. And there is no necessary reason to believe the state will field a more favorable electorate in November 2027 than it did in April 2026.
4.) This is going to put the Florida Supreme Court in a fascinating position. All through the yearlong progress of the Gerrymänderrung, the national tit-for-tat timing has been impossible to miss. In Florida, Ron DeSantis very purposefully waited until after Virginia voted on its absurd gerrymander to announce his own hardball play: a new map that shifts Florida from a 20–8 R/D state to a (notionally) 24–4 one. I was certainly far less concerned about legal niceties back when I was still fulminating about how a purple state had been suddenly converted into a state run by five guys from Fairfax County, but DeSantis’s proposed map faces its own serious legal hurdles, quite different from those that faced Spanberger in Virginia.
In 2010, as Floridians were electing Rick Scott to the governor’s mansion and Marco Rubio to the U.S. Senate, they also overwhelmingly passed the “Fair Districts Amendments,” which banned either (1) violating “compactness” in drawing district lines, or (2) drawing districts “with the intent to favor or disfavor a political party or an incumbent.” (There is also statutory language about racial gerrymandering that the recent Callais decision has rendered legally void.)
DeSantis’s new map will have no problem meeting the first challenge — Florida’s redrawn lines are superficially quite pleasing — but he will have a heavier lift explaining to the court how lines that push Debbie Wasserman Schultz into a historically black district and Jared Moskowitz into Trump Country haven’t been drawn with “the intent to disfavor a political party or incumbent.” There are many clever legal arguments to be made — as an eminently careful man, DeSantis has publicly emphasized the importance of “fixing” a flawed 2020 census — and I will be sure to follow them. But we’re about to find out how sharp the teeth are in Florida’s constitutional redistricting amendments.