Now that Democrats Have Won Virginia’s Redistricting Vote, the Real Fight Begins

When Republicans looked like they would engineer a massive midterm advantage by stealing House seats via mid-decade redistricting, Democrats didn’t wring their hands and whine about the unfairness of it all. They strapped on boxing gloves and punched back, winning retaliatory gerrymanders in California and Virginia to even the score.  

Now “fuck around and find out” memes abound on Bluesky. The New Republic declared that Virginia is where Donald Trump’s mid-decade redistricting scheme “came to die.” Even Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, the very portrait of rule-following, institutionalist Realpolitesse, proclaimed an era of “Maximum warfare, everywhere, all the time.” 

It’s undeniably heartening to see leading Democrats accepting the need for procedural hardball, but nothing actually died in Virginia. The mid-decade redistricting wars were not fought to a truce. They are just getting started, at the Supreme Court and in red states nationwide. And the strategy that worked in the early innings – picking off red seats in California and Virginia to compensate for Texas, Ohio, North Carolina and Missouri – won’t be enough from here. 

 Aside from their rhetorical Patton impersonation, it’s not clear that Jeffries and his colleagues have zeroed in on the right enemy or grasp the limited window for meaningful action before them. Retaliatory gerrymanders that level the playing field for 2026 won’t last. Democrats cannot win one  election and then preside over a placid return to normalcy; the Biden years should have made that lesson clear.

The Virginia and California gerrymanders have been framed around beating Trump and checking his authoritarian impulses. He’s a playground bully. You fight back by punching him in the nose. (The Iranians have absorbed this lesson quickly, even if countless American universities, broadcasters, law firms and corporations haven’t.) Yet Trump will soon depart, unpopular and weak. When he is gone, Republicans will still command half the Senate, enjoy new Electoral College and U.S. House advantages after the 2030 census, and control the Supreme Court into at least the 2050s – unless Democrats both win and act.

The problem is larger than Trump, and goes deeper than winning the 2026 midterms. It is the entire GOP authoritarian project, which has hijacked representative democracy through gerrymanders, geographic skews, and deep structural inequities. And this assault on equal ballot access has been enforced by a right-wing supermajority on the Supreme Court won after years of relentless focus and Leonard Leo and Mitch McConnell’s unapologetic constitutional hardball. 

If Democrats are serious about responding in kind, they need to tether their new fighting spirit to a reform agenda that takes on the interconnected threats to democracy. The plan has to begin with them winning trifecta power in 2028, using it to remake institutions hijacked by the right—and using this power to weather the shifts in political demography ahead.  A baseline set of reforms would include a House based on proportional representation, either packing or limiting the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court, and a serious look at U.S. Senate malapportionment. None of this will be possible without ending the Senate filibuster—something that even these radicalized Republicans, goaded relentlessly by their senescent mad king, have refused to do.

After all, the current redistricting armageddon didn’t start when Trump demanded Texas hand the GOP five additional seats. It began years before Trump, when Republican strategists recognized that winning state legislatures in the 2010 midterms would allow them to install extreme gerrymanders in purple states nationwide that could stifle demographic waves and majority will. The right’s ideological seizure of the voting map then metastasized when Chief Justice John Roberts and the GOP Supreme Court closed the federal courts to partisan gerrymandering claims in 2019, incentivizing politicians to draw the most advantageous maps possible, and leaving voters with little recourse.

And it is Roberts and the Republican supermajority that will have the last word this year. A looming Supreme Court decision in Callais v. Louisiana, a major Voting Rights Act case, could reshape the map even further to the advantage of the GOP. In practical terms, the Court appears poised to rule that states can no longer be required to draw districts that ensure Black and Latino voters can elect candidates of their choice. That would free states like Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi and South Carolina to redraw their maps in ways that dilute minority voting power—potentially eliminating, in a worst-case scenario,  as many as 19 Democratic-held seats across the South, according to Fair Fight Action.

Whenever the Court detonates Callais – and it would be a classic Roberts move to eviscerate the Voting Rights Act, but dust the Court’s fingerprints by postponing the consequences until 2028 – Democrats will need to find double-digit pickups of their own to maintain just the current map. New York, which currently elects 19 Democrats and seven Republicans, will be the first target. Efforts are also under way in Colorado to unwind the state’s independent commission to draw up congressional districts and allow Democrats the opportunity to redraw the map there before 2028; they could certainly craft an 8-0 map given the opportunity. Maybe Democrats even look to have another shot at redistricting in  California next year, and draw a 52-0 map that does away with the remaining four GOP seats. That map certainly exists in a strategist’s desk in Sacramento.