Today’s Democrats hate President Donald Trump so much that they’re willing to abandon long-held positions and twist themselves into pretzels in their determination to defeat him.
Take, for example, the case of Virginia’s current redistricting referendum. Democrats in the Old Dominion, empowered by their victories in last fall’s off-year election, are raising and spending tens of millions of dollars campaigning to win voter approval for their scheme to redraw the state’s congressional district boundaries to flip the state’s U.S. House delegation from a 6-5 Democrat-to-Republican advantage to a possible 10-1 Democrat-to-Republican advantage.
That possible four-net-seat gain is twice as large as the Republicans’ current margin of control over the House and, more importantly, could be the deciding factor in determining which party controls the House after November’s elections.
REJECT VIRGINIA’S ELECTION-RIGGING CONSTITUTIONAL REDISTRICTING AMENDMENT
To move from a relatively evenly divided 6-5 map to a grossly lopsided possible 10-1 map, political cartographers had to think outside the box. After all, it’s not as if 91% of Virginia’s voters regularly vote for Democratic candidates for the House; in fact, in the 2024 election, GOP House candidates won almost 51% of all the votes cast statewide for House candidates, while Democrat candidates won just 48%.
So rather than adhere to state laws mandating that “districts shall be composed of compact territory,” the mapmakers split counties, cities, and communities of interest in new and exceedingly creative and noncompact ways.
For instance, Fairfax County — which is home to a little more than 800,000 of the state’s almost 6 million registered voters, and which regularly votes better than 2-to-1 Democrat — was split into no fewer than five congressional districts, so its very large and very deep blue voter base could be spread around liberally (no pun intended) to enhance the odds of all five redrawn districts electing a Democrat to the Congress.
The proposed map would, as one academic expert on gerrymandering says, “replace the unbiased map with an extreme Democratic gerrymander.”
The new map will take effect only if the state’s voters approve an amendment to the state’s constitution in a referendum to be held by April 21. That’s because Virginia voters decided by a 2-to-1 margin not even six years ago to change their state’s constitution to take the line-drawing power out of the hands of the politicians and put it into the hands of a so-called “independent redistricting commission.” To be able to draw a new gerrymandered map, Virginia Democrats must get Virginia’s voters to agree to amend their constitution. Again.
Just to get that ballot question in front of the voters, Virginia’s Democratic lawmakers had to pass the proposed amendment through the General Assembly twice — once last fall, before the off-year election, and again this year, in the new session of the state legislature.
To support the amendment now, Virginia’s Democrats find themselves having to reverse positions they took just a few short years ago, when they passed the original constitutional amendment to create the independent redistricting commission.
For instance, the majority leader in Virginia’s state Senate, Scott Surovell of Fairfax, described the current redistricting process, which will be changed if his proposed amendment succeeds at the ballot box, as “a fair bipartisan redistricting process,” and described his proposed constitutional amendment as an amendment “that none of us wanted to bring to the floor.” A sterling endorsement, that.
Democratic Gov. Abigail Spanberger (D-VA), sworn in just two months ago, moved fast to backflip on the issue. In 2019, she declared in a social media post, “Gerrymandering is detrimental to our democracy. … Opposing gerrymandering should be a bipartisan priority.” Then, in last fall’s campaign, she said when asked, “I’ve been watching with interest what other states are doing, but I have no plans to redistrict Virginia.” Now, post-backflip, she’s recorded a new TV ad in support of the redistricting effort.
Perhaps the most flexible Virginia Democrat is Rep. Don Beyer (D-VA), whose northern Virginia district would be changed dramatically. In January 2020, he wrote in support of the effort to amend the state’s constitution to create an independent redistricting commission, saying, “Gerrymandering is cheating. It allows politicians to select their voters when it should be the other way around. It creates and is reinforced by gridlock.” Writing of the independent redistricting commission, Beyer said it “is an enormous improvement on the undemocratic system Virginia has had for centuries.”
VIRGINIA REDISTRICTING BALLOT MEASURE COULD STILL BE STRUCK DOWN AFTER VOTING, EXPERTS SAY
But now Beyer speaks approvingly of going back to what he called an “undemocratic system” that allows “cheating.” In remarks to NBC News, Beyer said, “We have to effectively make the case that even though this seems unfair to Virginia, it’s totally fair for America, for those of us who believe that taking back the House is the most significant thing we can do to stop Donald Trump.”
And there you have it. Virginia Democrats’ effort to amend the state’s constitution to put the line-drawing power back in the hands of the politicians so they can draw “an extreme Democratic gerrymander” is not about fairness; in fact, one of its proponents even acknowledges it will make the system unfair to Virginia. But that’s no problem for Virginia Democrats — because in the end, it’s really all about doing everything that can be done to “stop Donald Trump.”
Jenny Beth Martin is Honorary Chairman of Tea Party Patriots Action.