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When President Trump last summer implored Republicans to launch a nationwide gerrymandering blitz to pad their narrow House majority, the fight he started did not seem fair. GOP lawmakers had both the will and the power to draw their party new seats, while Democrats were hamstrung by limits of their own making. The question was not whether Republicans could expand their edge in Congress, but by how much.
This morning the landscape looks a lot different, after Virginia voters yesterday approved a lopsided new House map that could hand Democrats an additional four seats that Republicans currently hold. The Democratic redistricting victory is the party’s second in a statewide referendum. When combined with new lines that California voters endorsed in November, Democrats have now succeeded in drawing districts that will likely yield them nine more seats this fall, at least matching what Republicans have been able to achieve in states that they control. By some measures, Democrats have jumped into the redistricting lead, bolstering their chances of winning back the House majority in the midterm elections.
The battle is not over. The GOP-dominated Florida legislature will hold a special session next week to consider redistricting, and the Democratic victory in Virginia could help Governor Ron DeSantis win over lawmakers who are reluctant to press the Republican advantage too far. Officials in both parties expect the Supreme Court to issue a ruling in the coming months that will weaken if not eviscerate a key part of the Voting Rights Act, which would allow states such as Louisiana and Alabama to carve up districts now held by Black Democrats. (Such a decision would have an even larger impact in southern states come 2028.)
But for now, Trump’s move to open this new front in a centuries-old gerrymandering war between the parties looks like an enormous tactical blunder. Republicans have appeared taken aback by the ferocity with which Democrats have responded—and the speed with which they’ve set aside their drive to ban gerrymandering in the name of good government. In both California and Virginia, Democrats swamped the opposition in campaign spending, using the redistricting referenda to rile up a party base seeking any opportunity to push back against an unpopular administration. The margin of victory was much narrower in Virginia, where Republicans accused Democrats—wishfully, it turned out—of overreaching with a push to take 10 out of 11 seats in a state that had a GOP governor only a few months ago. (Democrats currently hold six of the state’s House seats.) “If they would have done a more measured map, they would have blown this thing out,” Zack Roday, a Richmond-based Republican campaign strategist, told me.
Like other GOP operatives I spoke with, Roday defended the White House’s gerrymandering push, however risky it has turned out to be. “Your job is to contingency-plan on all of these pieces. And I think they fully knew what could happen,” he said, calling the move, on balance, “a worthy gamble.” “You have to do everything you can to gain that advantage, given the cycle, given the environment that we’re in.”
Democrats joined this fight at a distinct disadvantage. The party had spent years not only warning about the evils of gerrymandering but backing legislation and ballot measures to prohibit the practice where they could. (A Democratic effort to pass a federal gerrymandering ban fell to a Senate filibuster in 2022.) States, including California and Virginia, had given power over redistricting to non- or bipartisan commissions, forcing Democrats to seek permission from voters to override the panels through expensive snap elections. Republicans, having never embraced redistricting reform in the first place, had no such limits in the states they controlled. All they had to do was pass new maps through GOP-dominated state legislatures. Texas was the first to move, as Republican lawmakers enacted newly drawn districts in August, overcoming a bid by Democrats to deny quorum in the legislature by fleeing the state.
In California, Democrats, led by Governor Gavin Newsom—seeking a political win ahead of a likely 2028 presidential bid—responded quickly and aggressively to the Republican gerrymander in Texas. They drew up new House lines targeting five GOP-held seats and buttressing several more of their own battleground districts. Voters endorsed the move overwhelmingly in a November referendum. Democrats enjoyed several advantages in California, beginning with a huge, deep-blue electorate. Another was timing: The election occurred at a moment when the GOP gerrymandering drive was peaking and offered voters angered by Trump’s moves to consolidate power their first opportunity to push back.
That edge had faded by the time the campaign arrived in Virginia, a lighter-blue state where voters had nevertheless just delivered a sharp rebuke to Republicans five months earlier. Democrats again significantly outspent the opposition, but Republicans used the highly partisan gerrymandering effort to tarnish the state’s new governor, Abigail Spanberger, who had run as a bridge-builder focused on affordability. Democrats tried to replicate their winning message in California by imploring Virginia voters to “level the playing field” against Trump. But the recent struggles of the GOP’s own redistricting drive threatened to sap some of the urgency from the Democratic campaign in Virginia. After Republicans added seats in Texas, Missouri, North Carolina, and Ohio, resistance within the party’s legislative caucuses blocked them from doing so in Indiana and Kansas.
Democrats had an opportunity to match or even exceed the total seats gained through gerrymandering—a prospect that seemed unthinkable when Trump launched his redistricting war last summer—but they did not prevail everywhere. Opposition from the state-Senate president in Maryland thwarted the Democrats’ bid to target the state’s lone House Republican, and an effort to pursue redistricting through the courts fell short in New York. That left Virginia, where, despite being outspent, Republicans were turning out in strong numbers after losing badly in November. Democrats held on, but the tight margin—with most precincts reporting, the referendum was winning by around three points—raised questions about whether national Republicans should have devoted more of their considerable war chest to the race. “I would have thought that this amendment would be passing by double digits,” Chaz Nuttycombe, the founder of the nonprofit group State Navigate and a close observer of Virginia politics, told me yesterday. He questioned the Republican strategy. “In all likelihood, they’re going to be losing four seats in Congress after tonight. So it’s like, why didn’t they get in on this?”
The redistricting race now moves to Florida, and Roday told me he was rooting for DeSantis to succeed in winning a new map to put Republicans back on top. “This is the way the world is now,” he said. “It’s 218 by any means necessary.” The only solace he took from the defeat in Virginia was the hope that Democrats might finally have to cede their claim to the moral high ground on gerrymandering. “This holier-than-thou notion that Democrats have,” Roday said. “That charade is over.”