Democrats keep learning the hard way that what goes around comes around.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) changed voting rules in 2017 so Democrats couldn’t filibuster Neil Gorsuch’s nomination to the Supreme Court. He did the same for future Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.
This helped President Donald Trump promote three originalist and textualist justices who, ever since, have properly confounded Democrats who wish the Constitution and statutes said what they wanted rather than what the words mean.
Democrats feel cheated, but McConnell was only following the cynical example of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), who in 2013 nuked the filibuster for lower courts nominations. So Democrats are reaping what they sowed, much as they pretend they’re innocents who learned vicious power politics from Republicans. If you break norms and trash principles for immediate advantage, don’t act shocked when opponents respond in kind.
It’s happening again with gerrymandering. Virginia’s Supreme Court looks likely to throw out a grossly distorted congressional map gerrymandered by Gov. Abigail Spanberger (D-VA) and her party so Democrats could win 10 seats while Republicans take just one, despite Trump taking 46% of the state vote in 2024.
Spanberger’s ballot deceptively and therefore illegally suggested — as did former President Barack Obama at his most sanctimonious — that the gerrymander would “restore fairness” and nix Republican efforts to steal elections with redistricting in Texas.
But the latest mid-census gerrymanders didn’t start in Texas and weren’t initiated by Republicans. They started in New York in 2022, when Democrats redrew the map after their state lost a seat during normal redistricting in 2020. By the way, they lost the seat because New Yorkers are fleeing bad Democratic governance, so the state shrinks relative to others.
Democrat and Republican gerrymanders since Trump returned to the Oval Office look like a wash. But Democrats are big losers in the long run because blue states are already more gerrymandered than red ones. There is not a single Republican congressman in New England, despite 40% of voters being Republicans. So there’s more scope for Republicans to add seats at the Democrats’ expense.
But the Democrat future looks even worse than because the Supreme Court has just ruled, rightly, that the Voting Rights Act does not require racial gerrymandering. Louisiana, whose map Democrats were challenging, has suspended May primaries so the state can redraw boundaries without contortions (improperly imposed by lower courts at the urging of Democrats) before voters cast their ballots.
Across the country, mostly in the South, where Democrats fear losing 12 seats, racial gerrymandering wrongly imposed for the past 40 years is likely to be undone. The party’s twisting of electoral boundaries to create racial segregation will collapse and result in Republican gains.
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This may not happen in time for a broad impact on the midterm elections this November. Louisiana springing into action suggests some changes at the margin, but not enough to change the probability of big Democrat gains in November, as is usual for the out-of-power party in midterm elections.
But expect a ferment of congressional cartography before the 2028 presidential contest. Then, Democratic efforts by rigging the rules instead of persuading voters of their merits could collapse around their donkey ears.