David’s view
RICHMOND, Va. — Winsome Earle-Sears asked a telling rhetorical question on Monday at a press event in front of Virginia’s state Capitol.
“Virginians have told us, loud and clear, that they want voters to choose their legislators, not the other way around,” Earle-Sears said, decrying a Democratic redistricting push alongside her state’s five Republican members of Congress. “So what changed?”
President Donald Trump started this avalanche of attempts to redraw congressional maps, of course. What began with a quick push in Texas has spread from California to Florida, and from Indiana to Kansas.
If this keeps up, the future of House elections in many states will be determined by the most recent makeup of their legislatures, a messier version of what the Senate was before the 17th Amendment was ratified in 1913. That would benefit the president’s party — for now.
But the current redistricting wars still leave Republicans like Earle-Sears at a conspicuous disadvantage. She’s stuck using the same argument that national Democrats did when they passed legislation that would ban partisan gerrymandering (which they still favor): Politicians shouldn’t be able to choose which voters they’d like to face.
Before Trump changed things by urging Texas Republicans to delete five Democratic House seats, Virginia Democrats were cheering the independent redistricting commission that voters had approved by a landslide five years ago. These days, they’re moving on a constitutional amendment that would undo its work.
If Democrats hold the state legislature next week, they can put that amendment on the ballot next year; if it passes, and Abigail Spanberger beats Earle-Sears in the race for governor, Democrats can then redraw the state’s congressional map.
“While we oppose gerrymandering, the reality is it’s happening now in states across the country,” said Joan Porte, the president of Virginia’s League of Women Voters chapter, when I asked for their view on the remap.
“We ask for a transparent process and that legislators do not dilute or divide the voting power of communities that have been historically and continuously targeted by manipulative map-drawing,” she added.
Anti-gerrymandering campaigners got the LWV on their side in 2010, when the commission was approved. But the group has not gotten involved in California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s push for a ballot measure that will take out five Republican-held House seats and is on track to pass next week.
In Virginia, the chapter has not taken a position on Democrats’ effort to undo the commission.
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The call for “fair maps” that once dominated independent redistricting advocacy has now become the appropriated property of those who want partisan remapping. In Indianapolis, the new GOP group that will run ads against Republicans who don’t erase Democratic seats this year is called “Fair Maps Indiana.”
Indiana Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith, a supporter of eliminating both of the state’s Democratic-held House seats, explains it like this: “We deserve fair representation in Washington.”
And in California, Newsom washed away what was once “deep support” among the state’s voters for independent redistricting, as Politico described it three months ago.
In purple states like Virginia and North Carolina, the fight is getting waged inch-by-inch, on more uneven territory.
Republicans have made it basically impossible for the current version of the Democratic Party to win North Carolina’s legislature and take control of its redistricting; that’s because Democrats get their margins of victory from urban and close suburban areas that can be easily directed into isolated blue “vote sinks.”
And unlike in other states, only the legislature can put measures on the North Carolina ballot. Why would the state’s Republicans trade a lock on power for a chance of ever losing it?
In Virginia, Earle-Sears doesn’t have the power to stop Democrats’ plan. The GOP’s hopes are in the details; Democrats need to pass their constitutional amendment language now, pass it again next year, and get voters to approve it, without running into legal trouble. State Attorney General Jason Miyares rushed into the fray on Monday with a memo arguing that Democrats had not displayed their proposal long enough in advance of the special session called to pass it.“What’s the difference between us and Texas? We have a [constitutional amendment] that we just adopted,” Virginia GOP chairman and state Sen. Robert Peake said on Monday, after a reporter asked why Republicans were for gerrymanders elsewhere but against them in Virginia.
That’s true enough — but constitutions can be changed. In Colorado, Attorney General Phil Weiser, who’s running for governor, has said he’d back an amendment to wipe out the independent commission his state created in 2018.
Democrats didn’t start the year expecting to borrow tricks from Newsom, the embodiment of the sort of California liberalism that Republicans everywhere else like to run against. But his willingness to throw out independent commissions, and his success in getting Democrats to follow him, is rippling throughout his party. Next up, a bigger challenge for Democrats: whether they are willing to tell Black members of the party that they should sacrifice some safe seats for a shot at the majority.
Notable
- For The New York Times, Shane Goldmacher and Laurel Rosenhall get inside the Newsom brain trust as it rolls toward an expected Proposition 50 win. “Now that millions of Californians have already cast their ballots and final-week airtime has been booked, the window for a last-minute opposition flurry has all but closed.”
- In Politico, Andrew Howard studies how red states with Voting Rights Act-mandated majority-minority seats are preparing for a Louisiana v. Callais decision that goes their way. Leading GOP candidates for governor of South Carolina want a “clean sweep,” wiping out the district now held by Rep. James Clyburn.