There’s no way to sugar-coat the blow to short-term and long-range Democratic prospects inflicted by the recent U.S. Supreme Court and now Virginia Supreme Court decisions. But it’s important to game it all out, and I tried to do that at New York:
In a decision that caps a disastrous ten days for Democrats struggling to offset Republican congressional gerrymanders, a 4-3 majority of the Virginia Supreme Court struck down the constitutional amendment referendum that voters narrowly approved on April 21. That nullifies the new congressional map that would have given Democrats an estimated net gain of four U.S. House seats in November.
The court majority agreed with a highly technical argument from the GOP that the Virginia legislature didn’t follow the required procedures for enacting a constitutional amendment before taking it to voters. The key vote in the legislature was first taken while early voting for the 2025 general election was underway. Thus, the court reasoned, the legislature did not allow for an intervening election to begin and end before taking the proposed amendment up again. The majority opinion also addressed the obvious question: Why didn’t the court halt the referendum instead of letting it proceed and then overturning a decision by voters? The decision claimed that since Democrats had warned against a judicial intervention on the eve of a referendum, they could not now object to a post-referendum ruling.
Democrats may try to secure a federal judicial intervention to reverse this decision by Virginia’s highest court. But it’s hard to imagine it succeeding, given the composition of the U.S. Supreme Court that stands at the end of any appeal process. On April 29, a 6-3 U.S. Supreme Court majority in Louisiana v. Callais unleashed a new round of Republican partisan gerrymanders by gutting Voting Rights Act protections for minority representation in Congress and state legislatures. That very day, Florida’s Republican legislature enacted a secretly developed redistricting plan designed to flip four congressional seats, citing the Callais decision as a supporting argument for ignoring a state constitutional ban on partisan gerrymanders.
Depending on how far southern legislatures go in exploiting the U.S. Supreme Court’s permission slip to wipe out majority-Black congressional districts between now and November, what had been a national gerrymandering arms race that Democrats had largely fought to a draw is now tilting very heavily toward the GOP. The Florida map-rigging, if it stands, plus the reversal of Virginia’s Democratic gerrymander along with new gerrymanders in other southern states, could add up to a net Republican gain of roughly a dozen U.S. House seats. There could be court challenges to several of these GOP gerrymanders, particularly Florida’s. And a large enough Democratic wave in November could very easily wipe out the apparent GOP advantage: Democrats could flip two seats in Virginia even under the old maps.
But make no mistake: Donald Trump’s audacious and unprecedented effort to thwart a likely midterm loss of control of Congress by shifting the maps in his party’s favor has gained new life thanks to courts in Washington and now in Richmond. He should give his habitual judge-bashing rhetoric a break.
