Virginia’s proposed new congressional map, which gives Democrats all but one seat in a state that still votes more than 40% Republican, is sparking new debates over the proper use of political power.
Conservatives in particular are split over whether Virginia Democrats’ aggressive gerrymander is an abomination to be condemned or an example red states should follow ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.
President Donald Trump urged Republican-led states such as Texas to pursue mid-decade redistricting to help the GOP defend its razor-thin House majority by creating new pickup opportunities for the president’s party. Some red states heeded Trump’s call. Others, like Indiana, demurred.
But blue states have answered with redistricting pushes of their own. California voters approved a map backed by Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA), a likely 2028 presidential candidate, to counter any Republican gains in Texas. Maryland Democrats’ new map could erase the state’s last Republican-held House seat.
Nowhere has been quite as audacious or lopsided as Virginia. If approved by voters and allowed by the courts, the commonwealth’s congressional map could be up to 10-1 Democratic.
All of Virginia’s statewide elected executive officers, including the governor, were Republicans as recently as mid-January. (Democrats swept the off-year elections in Virginia last November.) Former Vice President Kamala Harris won just 51.8% of the vote against Trump there in 2024. Large swathes of the state south of the Washington, D.C., suburbs remain heavily Republican. The current split in the Virginia congressional delegation is just 6-5 Democratic, though both senators are Democrats. Virginians haven’t elected a Republican to the upper chamber since George Allen in 2000.
Beyond the merits of the individual state maps in question or partisan gerrymandering in principle, however, conservatives are debating whether this is a prudent use of political power.
Some conservatives would like to see Republican-led states be as ruthless in pursuing partisan advantages in the drawing of congressional maps as they legally can be, precisely because Democrats have shown little hesitation in wielding such political power themselves.
Many blue states were arguably already more gerrymandered than their Republican counterparts before the current redistricting wars started. In California, Democrats held 82% of congressional seats in a state Harris won with 59% of the vote, while Republicans occupied 66% of Texas’s congressional seats in a state where Trump received 56% of the vote.
If the redistricting fight doesn’t end up benefiting Republicans this November, many conservatives will maintain that Trump shouldn’t have picked this battle in the first place. Others will say that Republicans in Indiana should have defended their constituents’ political interests with the same vigor as Democrats in California and Virginia.
“Trump just caught up … to what the Democrats are doing,” Terry Kilgore, the top Republican in Virginia’s House of Delegates, told reporters on Monday.
The New Right, ascendant under Trump, has applied this logic to other political questions. Many of these conservatives support Trump’s push to eliminate or sharply curtail the Senate filibuster on the grounds that it would help Republicans legislate now, even if Democrats would likely follow suit the same next time they hold a majority in the chamber.
Only former centrist Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema kept the Democrats’ last Senate majority from junking the filibuster, which effectively creates a 60-vote majority threshold for passing most legislation, and they are both gone. Other conservatives, such as retiring Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY), the longtime GOP floor leader in the Senate, have argued that this is a shortsighted move that would allow Democrats to enact their full liberal wishlist the next time they enjoy unified control of the federal government.
Trump has long contended that Republicans aren’t as willing to fight as their political opponents, an assertion that has endeared him to the party’s base for the past decade.
“They’ll [Democrats] find a reason to impeach me,” Trump warned House Republicans at their members’ retreat last month. “We don’t impeach them. You know why? Because they’re meaner than we are. We should have impeached Joe Biden for 100 different things.”
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Trump would undoubtedly say the same thing about the Justice Department’s failed attempt to indict six “seditious” Democratic senators, while pointing to his own multiple indictments by prosecutors aligned with or appointed by Democrats.
“What’s good for the elephant is good for the good for the donkey” has replaced the old saying about the goose and the gander.