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.
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