On Tuesday, Virginia voters approved a constitutional amendment that will allow Democrats to draw new maps, handing them control of 10 of 11 U.S. House seats in a state that Kamala Harris won by just five points in 2024. The result should be a shock to the senses for Republicans nationwide that it’s time to get serious about redistricting – starting with a push in Florida next week.
What Americans witnessed over the past three months in Virginia was one of the most corrupt, dishonest – and well-funded – campaigns in American history. As I detailed back in March, Democrats appear to have blatantly violated the plain language of the Virginia Constitution multiple times in advancing the amendment in the first place. (Multiple court cases challenging that process are still ongoing, but it seems unlikely that the state supreme court will now effectively overturn the election results by ruling the amendment invalid.)
Democrats also intentionally and egregiously deceived voters – from the talking points they used to sell the gerrymandering amendment to the ballot language itself. The Princeton Gerrymandering project gives Virginia’s current congressional map an “A” as one of the fairest in the country, while the proposed new map will be statistically the most gerrymandered and unfair map in the nation.
Yet Democrats outrageously wrote a ballot question stating that a “yes” vote was to “restore fairness.” In reality, a “yes” vote takes Virginia’s already fair map and destroys it to create an unfair map. We will never know how many voters were confused by this intentionally misleading language.
Regardless, Virginia, a state that has leaned Democrat in recent years but remained a battleground state, will now have a more lopsided Democrat map than California, Illinois, or New York. A state where Republicans consistently win 45-48 percent of the vote will have just one Republican member of Congress.
There are undoubtedly plenty of lessons for Republicans to draw from this defeat. The “no” campaign opposing gerrymandering was massively outspent, with as much as $70 million pouring in to support the “yes” campaign – mostly from national Democrats and Dark Money groups. The “no” campaign, meanwhile, was largely funded at the grassroots level – a spirited and admirable effort, but one that will always struggle to compete against deep-pocketed liberal elites.
But while a post-mortem of this specific election is perhaps in order, Republicans’ biggest takeaway should be that Democrats are willing to be as ruthless as necessary – even violate the law – in pursuit of power. Republicans’ only option is to respond with similar determination.
Democrats will cry that “Republicans started it” with Texas’s mid-decade redistricting effort. But this line conveniently places the starting point for the “redistricting wars” in July 2025. That narrative ignores New York’s mid-decade redistricting effort in 2024, and decades of egregious Democrat gerrymanders in states like California, Illinois, and New York.
As Vice President JD Vance pointed out on X, New England’s six states – with a total of 21 U.S. House seats – consistently vote about 40 percent Republican but send zero Republicans to Congress. Within this context, Texas’s redraw was actually a relatively mild response that only partially offset rampant unfair maps in Democrat states.
In light of Virginia’s new maps that will almost certainly send four more Democrats to Congress, Republicans should immediately begin pursuing aggressive redistricting efforts everywhere they can – starting with Florida. Governor Ron DeSantis has called on legislators to hold a special session to add as many as five new GOP seats.
Republicans must also avoid fiascos like the one that unfolded in Indiana earlier this year, when a handful of Republicans in the state legislature blocked an effort led by their own party to draw out two Democrat members. That shameful episode could be the difference in who wins control of the House come November. Indiana notably votes far more Republican than Virginia does Democrat.
Republicans were undoubtedly dealt a serious setback on Tuesday, but the battle is far from over. What matters now is that the GOP steels its resolve to fight fire with fire – or else be gerrymandered into a permanent minority.
Shane Harris is the Editor-in-Chief of AMAC Newsline. You can follow him on X @shaneharris513.
