Virginia Democrats tried to rig the state’s congressional map 10-1 in their party’s favor. Instead, they just handed Republicans a big redistricting win that Republican-controlled Indiana refused to deliver.
The Virginia Supreme Court struck down Democrats’ proposed redistricting map as unconstitutional on Friday, and as The Federalist’s Assignment Editor Elle Purnell pointed out, “Virginia Democrats have done more to deliver seats for Republican voters than Indiana Republicans have.” In other words, Virginia’s warped gerrymandering scheme was a driving force behind GOP decisions to redistrict in Florida and other red states.
The court held that the proposed gerrymandered map that would have eradicated four Republican held seats violated the state’s constitution. The 4-3 decision noted that constitutional amendments must be passed by two different General Assembly sessions before they can be presented to voters, “mandating an intervening election of the legislature to give the voting public a chance to kick out legislators if citizens do not like a referendum that went through the initial passage phase,” The Federalist’s Breccan Thies explained. Democrats passed the referendum on Oct. 31, 2025, just days before Nov. 4 Election Day and weeks after the start of early voting.
“In this case, the Commonwealth submitted a proposed constitutional amendment to Virginia voters in an unprecedented manner that violated the intervening-election requirement in Article XII, Section 1 of the Constitution of Virginia,” the court ruled. “This violation irreparably undermines the integrity of the resulting referendum vote and renders it null and void.”
The massive failure was not cheap, with the state spending more than $5 million to pay for the special election while activist organizations raised upwards of $60 million to mislead voters on the proposition, Axios reported.
But the political cost for Democrats seems to exceed the monetary cost.
Virginia Democrats didn’t merely lose their own attempted power grab. They helped escalate a national redistricting fight that Republicans were better positioned to win. According to ABC 33/40, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed the state’s new map to “erase Democrats’ four-seat gain in their gerrymander push in Virginia.” CNN seemed to indicate in April that Virginia’s referendum galvanized a push for redistricting in Republican states as well. As Federalist CEO Sean Davis pointed out, Democrats’ Virginia gambit gave the GOP redistricting efforts in Tennessee and Alabama additional momentum.
In other words, once Virginia Democrats made clear they were willing to disenfranchise half their state, any lingering restraint Florida and other Republican-led states may have had went out the window, and after the Supreme Court’s decision clarifying Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, Republicans had every reason to create new maps.
Virginia Democrats tried to add four seats and failed, but in the process they inspired Republican states to redistrict and secure additional seats for the party. In other words, Virginia Democrats have likely done far more to expand the Republican map than the Indiana Republicans who refused to redraw their map months ago.
Last year 21 out of 40 Republican state senators voted against redistricting the Hoosier State, which currently has two Democrat seats and seven Republican seats. (Of the seven incumbent GOP senators who voted no on redistricting, five lost their primary bids just this week, with one race still to be called.) Notably, 59 percent of Indiana voters voted for President Donald Trump in the 2024 election. As state Sen. Liz Brown pointed out in these pages, Republican voters in Indiana currently hold an advantage similar to that held by Democrats in Massachusetts, yet none of the Bay State’s nine congressional seats is held by a Republican.
Luckily for Republican voters, Virginia Democrats inadvertently did the work that some Republicans were unwilling to do themselves.
