The Virginia state Senate on Friday greenlit a constitutional amendment that would clear the way for the Democrat-controlled legislature to redraw the state’s US House maps ahead of this year’s midterm elections.
The move by state senators, following a similar vote on Wednesday in the state House, was the final step needed to send the amendment to Virginia voters.
If the ballot measure is approved this spring, the legislature, rather than the current non-partisan commission, would redraw the state’s congressional maps through 2030.
Virginia is the latest battleground in the ongoing high-stakes battle between President Donald Trump and Republicans versus Democrats to alter congressional maps ahead of November’s elections.
And Virginia Democrats, who currently control six of the state’s 11 US House districts, are aiming to draw up to four additional left-leaning seats.
Republicans are defending their razor-thin House majority in the midterms, and Democrats need a net gain of just three seats to win back control of the chamber.
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) called Friday’s development “a critical step in giving Virginia voters the opportunity to ensure they have fair and equal representation in Congress.”
And charging that “Donald Trump and Republicans are doing everything they can to rig the midterms in their favor through unprecedented mid-decade gerrymandering,” DCCC Chair Rep. Suzan DelBene argued that “Virginians — not politicians — will now have the chance to vote for a temporary, emergency exception that will restore fairness, level the playing field, and stand up to extremists seeking to silence their voices.”
But the Virginia Senate Republican Caucus accused the state Senate Democrats of passing “a partisan gerrymandering amendment to entrench their party in power.”
And the Republican National Committee (RNC) called it a “power grab.”
“This is just the most recent example of Democrats’ multi-decade campaign to gerrymander in every state where they gain power,” RNC national press secretary Kiersten Pels argued in a statement to Fox News Digital. “This is exactly why red states are fighting back to level the playing field after years of states like Illinois, New York, and California drawing their districts to disenfranchise Republicans.”
Virginia Democratic lawmakers have indicated they will release a proposed map later this month.
And on Thursday, a Democratic-aligned nonprofit titled “Virginians for Fair Elections” launched, to urge voters to vote in favor of the redistricting ballot measure.
Aiming to prevent what happened during his first term in the White House when Democrats reclaimed the House majority in the 2018 midterms, Trump last spring first floated the idea of rare, but not unheard of, mid-decade congressional redistricting.
The mission was simple: redraw congressional district maps in red states to pad the GOP’s razor-thin House majority to keep control of the chamber in the midterms, when the party in power traditionally faces political headwinds and loses seats.
Trump’s first target was Texas.
When asked by reporters last summer about his plan to add Republican-leaning House seats across the country, the president said, “Texas will be the biggest one. And that’ll be five.”
Republican Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas called a special session of the GOP-dominated state legislature to pass the new map.
But Democratic state lawmakers, who broke quorum for two weeks as they fled Texas in a bid to delay the passage of the redistricting bill, energized Democrats across the country.
Among those leading the fight against Trump’s redistricting was Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom of California.
California voters in November overwhelmingly passed Proposition 50, a ballot initiative that temporarily sidetracked the left-leaning state’s nonpartisan redistricting commission and returned the power to draw the congressional maps to the Democratic-dominated legislature.
That is expected to result in five more Democratic-leaning congressional districts in California, which aimed to counter the move by Texas to redraw their maps.
The fight quickly spread beyond Texas and California.
Republican-controlled Missouri and Ohio, and swing state North Carolina, where the GOP dominates the legislature, have drawn new maps as part of the president’s push.
And Florida Republicans, in a move pushed by GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis and state lawmakers are also hoping to pick up an additional three to five seats through a redistricting push during a special legislative session in April.
In blows to Republicans, a Utah district judge late last year rejected a congressional district map drawn up by the state’s GOP-dominated legislature and instead approved an alternate that will create a Democratic-leaning district ahead of the midterms.
And Republicans in Indiana’s Senate in December defied Trump, shooting down a redistricting bill that had passed the state House.
But Trump scored a big victory when the conservative majority on the Supreme Court greenlit Texas’ new map.
Other states that might step into the redistricting war are Democratic-dominated Illinois and Maryland and two red states with Democratic governors, Kentucky and Kansas.
Hovering over the redistricting wars is the Supreme Court, which is expected to rule in Louisiana v. Callais, a crucial case that may lead to the overturning of a key provision in the Voting Rights Act.
If the ruling goes the way of the conservatives on the high court, it could lead to the redrawing of a slew of majority-minority districts across the county, which would greatly favor Republicans.
But it is very much up in the air — when the court will rule, and what it will actually do.
