Lawmakers are hoping voters are so incensed by Trump that they’ll back one of the most partisan maps in the country.
Virginia Democrats are pitching their aggressive mid-decade redistricting gambit as a common-sense counterweight to Trump-backed gerrymandering efforts nationwide. They may soon find out whether Virginians are so incensed by the GOP’s hardball tactics elsewhere that they’ll allow their own representatives to tilt the playing field in the commonwealth.
If the Supreme Court of Virginia overturns a circuit court judge’s ruling which blocked the state referendum on process grounds, Democrats will be able to present the new map to voters this spring, bringing them one step closer to advancing one of the most partisan congressional maps in the country.
“I think we all wish we weren’t doing this, but we’re doing it because Donald Trump decided to weaponize redistricting mid-decade, and he is expecting, ‘I’m going to get red states to do my bidding, and blue states won’t,’ and you just can’t launch something like this without expecting a response,” Senator Tim Kaine said in a brief interview with National Review on Monday evening.
“It’s unfortunate, but if that’s the way the president is going to play the game, we can play it that way too,” he added.
Anticipation over how Virginia’s highest court might rule has complicated both parties’ campaign and advertisement strategies, as both sides weigh how much to spend on the airwaves over a ballot initiative that may or may not go before voters this spring. If the court allows Democrats to move forward and voters pass the April referendum, they’ll agree to throw out the commonwealth’s current six-to-five Democratic advantage in favor of an ultra-blue map that shifts the balance to a ten-to-one margin.
The proposed map slices highly populated Fairfax County into five skinny congressional districts, stretching the ultra-Democratic suburbs of Northern Virginia into oddly configured districts that fan down into rural parts of the state. The map tosses the southwestern chunk of the commonwealth to Republicans in one ruby-red district.
A circuit court judge blocked the map late last month on process grounds in a win for GOP politicians who argue that the redistricting power grab violates the commonwealth’s constitution and disenfranchises voters by giving Republicans just 9 percent congressional representation in a state that gave Trump 46 percent of the vote in 2024.
So far, the Virginia Supreme Court “has shown no inclination to save their illegal referendum,” says Mike Young, a Republican operative with the GOP’s anti-gerrymandering group Virginians for Fair Maps.
Even if Virginia’s highest court allows the map to go before voters, Republicans maintain that there is already an aggressive legal and political effort underway to combat the redistricting gambit.
Meantime, Democrats insist that their hardball tactics are necessary to level the playing field nationwide. And they’ve seized on Texas Republicans’ decision last year to kickstart the 2025 gerrymandering wars that have since metastasized into a nationwide test of party will ahead of the 2026 midterms.
Or, as Virginia Democrats’ octogenarian Senate Pro Tempore Louise Lucas characterizes the dynamic in crass terms earlier this month: “You all started it, and we f***ing finished it.”
With three years left in Trump’s second term, “The most effective way to resist the things we don’t like is to take back the House,” says Representative Don Beyer (D., Va.), who maintains that his constituents are frustrated by Republican-backed gerrymandering efforts in North Carolina, Texas, and Florida. “This is one way that makes it possible.”
Following in California Democrats’ footsteps, Virginia’s newly empowered Democrats are pitching their 2026 gerrymander as a temporary counterweight to Republicans’ mid-decade redistricting efforts elsewhere. To advance their preferred map, Democrats will need to convince voters that Republican gerrymandering efforts elsewhere merit a change to the state constitution, which was amended in 2020 following a Democrat-backed referendum that stripped redistricting power from the General Assembly and handed it to an independent redistricting commission. That ballot initiative passed with 66 percent of the vote.
“There was a big Democrat push in 2020 — they put millions and millions of dollars into it. Spanberger went on the record saying that gerrymandering is terrible,” Representative John McGuire (R., Va.) said in an interview with NR. “But now that they’re in power? Hypocrisy. They flip and change their tune. But not only did they just flip their tune, they’re being more egregious than any other state.”
McGuire said it’s a mistake for Democrats to compare Virginia to other states like Texas, which does not have an independent redistricting commission. “Virginia is not Texas, and Texas has different laws,” he added. “Their laws allow them to do this. Our laws don’t.”
The same Democrats who are now projecting unity on a ten-to-one map had their fair share of disagreements over the map’s margin and lines behind closed doors.
As General Assembly leaders debated which map to put before voters, Spanberger officials spent early February privately cautioning Democratic lawmakers about the operational nightmare that might ensue for the Virginia Department of Elections if state legislators settled on one of the proposed ten-to-one maps over the proposed nine-to-two map, National Review reported last week.
On the administrability question, Kaine acknowledged to NR that Spanberger “had some worries about some of the plans that were on the table, but what last week showed was that the House and the Senate and the Governor and the federal delegation all basically said: ‘We can do this,’” he said in a nod to Spanberger’s sign-off on one of the ten-to-one maps.
The main question for Spanberger was whether her state election board could effectively implement the new map on such a compressed timeline, he said. As her sign-off last week demonstrated, Kaine added, “She believed the map that they chose was one that she could implement.”