It’s over.
It’s been over for a while, but now it’s really over. The U.S. Supreme Court, in a single sentence, has put an end to Democrats’ drive to redraw Virginia’s congressional districts in time for the November elections.
The Virginia Supreme Court killed the plan last week but state Attorney General Jay Jones appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. There was no realistic expectation on either side that the U.S. Supreme Court would take the case — which turned entirely on an interpretation of the state constitution; there was no federal question involved — but Jones had to be seen doing something. So he did, throwing the legal equivalent of a Hail Mary pass in football.
Late Friday, the U.S. Supreme Court posted on its website: “Application (25A1240) for stay presented to The Chief Justice and by him referred to the Court is denied.” The court spent more keystrokes listing the name of the case than it did spelling out the action.
The news broke about dinner time on Friday. Somewhere, some Republican ought to be ordering lobster — a nod toward the demise of the crustacean-shaped 7th District that Democrats had tried to draw and which was promptly dubbed “the lobster district.”
Nothing has really changed since my prior analysis of the Virginia Supreme Court ruling, except now we have finality. This is akin to going to the movie and staying until after the credits to see if there’s any post-credit scene. This is that post-credit scene. The main character — a hero to some, a villain to others — really is dead.
At least for this election cycle.
Those may be the key words. U.S. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries has vowed a major push in Democratic legislatures to redraw lines for the 2028 elections, so Virginia may see all this come back again. The sequence for that would need to start in next year’s General Assembly to pass the amendment again, then wait until after the fall 2027 elections to pass it again in early 2028, to set up another special election in spring 2028. That sequence depends on two assumptions: that Democrats still have an appetite for redistricting after this fall’s election (if they win big, do they really need it?), and that Democrats still control the General Assembly come 2028. Democrats have handed Republicans an issue for the 2027 General Assembly elections: Do you want to see redistricting come back or not?
All those are questions for another day — likely lots of other days.
For now, for those of you just joining us in progress, let’s recap some key points.
Democrats messed up.
Those who say the Virginia Supreme Court ruled on political grounds are correct to the extent that conservatives voted one way and liberals another, and there were more of the former than the latter. However, keep in mind that the decision before them was not whether this was a good map or whether redistricting was a good idea, but instead was a procedural question that ought to be nonideological: When does an election begin?
Democrats argued that the election was solely Election Day, so the legislature passing the amendment the first time a week before last fall’s gubernatorial vote met the constitutional requirement of an intervening election. Republicans argued that the entire voting process, from the first day of early voting until Election Day, counted. The court agreed with the latter.
The irony is that the Virginia Supreme Court delivered an opinion that essentially detailed how early voting is not some new-fangled liberal innovation but is part of an American tradition that predates the U.S. Constitution. In any other context, this would be a ruling that Democrats — who have always been more pro-early voting than Republicans — would celebrate. (See more on that here.)
The problem is that Democrats messed up. They discounted the legal jeopardy of waiting until late October to pass redistricting. To be fair, Texas didn’t complete its redistricting until late August 2025, and that’s what triggered this whole round of mid-decade redistricting. Democrats would have had to act exceptionally fast to convene the legislature before early voting began last Sept. 18. Still, they could have. They didn’t, and didn’t take the prospect of the Republican arguments about early voting seriously enough.
Instead of blaming the Virginia Supreme Court, Democrats ought to be blaming Jeffries — he was the one pushing for Virginia to redraw its lines. Did he have no attorneys who could have raised this concern? This was not some obscure, after-the-fact argument Republicans came up with; it was a question all along and Democrats ignored it. If a doctor dismissed a warning sign on a patient’s chart as no big deal and several months later the patient died, the family might be ringing up a malpractice attorney. This seems akin to political malpractice but no Democrats are demanding to know what went wrong.
Republicans may not have tilted the national playing field as much as some think
Democrats argued that they had to counter the Republican states that were redrawing their districts to squeeze out Democrats and create more Republican districts. For all the commotion, the Republican gains may not be that significant.
After the Virginia Supreme Court ruled that Virginia’s election had been unconstitutionally placed on the ballot, The New York Times analyzed the national advantage for Republicans at six to eight seats. Republicans will pick up more as Southern states move to eliminate Black-majority districts — held by Democrats — in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent ruling on the Voting Rights Act. It’s unclear how many more seats that will net Republicans — some estimates run as high as 15, but not all Southern states will redraw lines this year.
Those are all bad numbers for Democrats, but these are bad numbers for Republicans: The average seat change in midterms over the past five cycles has been for the president’s party to lose an average of 31 seats. Republicans have undoubtedly advantaged themselves through redistricting, but have they advantaged themselves enough? Political analyst Kyle Kondik of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics wrote this week that while Republicans have created more seats for themselves, “This is a redistricting deficit that we favor Democrats to overcome, but it’s also enough of a Republican edge that it could allow them to save their House majority this November under the right circumstances.”
Will those circumstances be right, though?
President Donald Trump’s approval ratings remain terrible. G. Elliot Morris, who analyzes election data in his Strength in Numbers newsletter, wrote this week: “You can’t gerrymander a bad approval rating.” He went on to note: “Trump’s net approval is historically weak for this point in a presidency — and his approval on handling prices and the economy is even worse than Joe Biden’s low.”
We still aren’t sure who’s running for Congress
We think we know — we know who’s announced, at least. However, in every election cycle there are always some candidates who turn out to be more noise than action, and fail to collect enough signatures to make the ballot. Redistricting has pushed all the usual schedules later than usual. May 26 is the deadline for congressional candidates to file, so we won’t know until sometime after that who has actually qualified for the ballot.
After that, the next election comes up fast: Early voting for the Aug. 4 primaries begins June 18.
We’ve begun the process of updating our Voter Guide but we won’t have a complete revamp until after the Department of Elections tells us who is really on the ballot. For instance, the assumption is that the 5th District race this fall will feature former Rep. Tom Perriello, D-Albemarle County, against Rep. John McGuire, R-Goochland County. However, there are other, lightly funded, candidates in both parties. Will we see both Democratic and Republican primaries there before the main event? We’ll let you know when we know.
For now, the operative quote is one from Winston Churchill after the British victory at El Alamein in 1942: “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”
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