Virginia Voters Give Democrats a Big Win in Redistricting Fight

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3The war in Iran isn’t the only fight that Donald Trump picked that isn’t working out the way he thought. On Tuesday night, voters in Virginia handed him and the GOP a heavy defeat in the mid-decade redistricting battle the president started when they approved a new map that is expected to gain the Democrats four seats in the commonwealth if it is upheld by the state Supreme Court. 

“Congratulations, Virginia! Republicans are trying to tilt the midterm elections in their favor, but they haven’t done it yet,” said former President Barack Obama in response to the vote. “Thanks for showing us what it looks like to stand up for our democracy and fight back.”

Obama featured heavily on both sides of the battle in Virginia. In deceptive campaign materials, the “No” side used an image and a quote from the former president to pretend that he was against redrawing the map. 

In the end, it didn’t work, as “Yes” is expected to prevail by about 3-4 points. 

This isn’t how Trump imagined things to go when he urged Texas Republicans to gerrymander their map some more to shore up his party’s slim majority in the House. While the Lone Star State complied, Democrats (for once) fought back against this attempt to rig the midterms. 

First, voters in California passed a ballot measure changing their map to one that is expected to net Democrats five seats. Together with one seat they gained in Utah as the result of a court decision, their victory in Virginia would essentially nullify all of the GOP’s moves in Texas as well as Ohio, Missouri, and North Carolina.

Republicans have one more card to play in Florida that could give them an overall edge. However, in light of the Democrats’ recent success in special elections and the national mood that has turned against Trump and the GOP, it is possible that it will not be overly aggressive. 

In other words, when it’s all said and done, the two sides may end up fighting to a draw. 

The loser is democracy.

Yes, Trump started this, and California and Virginia let voters decide instead of state politicians, but gerrymandering is bad. We understand why Democrats had to fight back, and it was the right decision. They couldn’t (and shouldn’t) just roll over as Republicans were dismantling democracy. 

Still, the Virginia delegation in next year’s Congress will now likely consist of 10 Democrats and just one Republican even though it is a fairly closely divided state. In deep-blue California, Democrats will make up 90 percent of the state’s congressional delegation.

And then there is the dark money that poured into this race. 

Together, the two sides will end up having spent more than $100 million in Virginia, and if you want to know where that money came from, then you are out of luck. That’s because dark money groups that don’t have to disclose their donors raised the vast majority of the funds.

The referendum could have been even more expensive if Trump, who would be the main beneficiary of Republicans holding on to their congressional majority, had spent some of the hundreds of millions still sitting in his campaign accounts. 

Alas, even though he is barred from running again, the president mostly sat out this fight apart from a couple of social media posts urging his supporters to vote “no.”

More than anything, what this campaign should show us is that it is high time for campaign finance reform and a ban on gerrymandering, both of which are things Democrats have proposed and the GOP has blocked. 

Unfortunately, it is too much to hope that Republicans will have a change of heart now that they are on the receiving end of a redistricting effort that targets them instead of the other way around.