We were told we needed to gerrymander our state to stop Donald Trump. The argument went that, without those extra Democratic seats, we might lose our chance to check his power in Washington.
The day after the election, the Associated Press had called control of both the House and Senate for Democrats by large margins. In Virginia, Elaine Luria defeated Jen Kiggans in the 2nd District, while Shannon Taylor defeated Rob Wittman in the 1st. Votes are still being counted, and the final size of the majority was not settled. But the central question had been answered: Democrats won the House without Virginia’s proposed gerrymander, gaining over 40 seats. They did it with our existing, fair congressional districts still in place.
The people who insisted in April that we had to gerrymander Virginia to fight Trump were wrong. They used fear to sell a proposal whose central premise defied both history and common sense.
The signs of a blue wave were clear by last November. Abigail Spanberger won the governorship by 15 points and carried eight of Virginia’s 11 congressional districts, including the two held by Republicans that flipped last week. A January poll found that 62% of Virginia registered voters disapproved of Trump. Voters were worried about the cost of living while Trump seemed more focused on his White House ballroom. MAGA faced a Republican revolt over releasing the Epstein files. And by April, Trump had also taken us into an unpopular war with Iran. There was plenty for Democrats to run on without asking Virginians to give up fair districts.
I joined other longtime opponents of gerrymandering, including former state senator Chap Petersen, a Democrat, and former Gov. George Allen, a Republican, in making the case that Virginia should not gerrymander. Trump was wrong to start this latest round of partisan map-rigging, but Virginia didn’t need to join the food fight. We could let voters decide who should represent them in the fairly drawn districts Virginia has.
The historical record gave us good reason to expect substantial Democratic gains. From 1934 through 2022, the president’s party lost an average of 27 House seats in midterm elections. A Democratic pickup of 20 seats would hardly have been extraordinary. In Trump’s first midterm in 2018, Democrats gained a net 40 seats and took back the House. The claim that they couldn’t win without changing Virginia’s map had no sound basis in that record. The final score appears to be Democrats gaining 41 seats this year.
Those pushing the gerrymander used a legitimate fear of Trump to sell a false choice: rig our maps or let him win. They asked us to let fear do the thinking, as though the threat were too great to question their response. The more serious the danger, the more carefully we needed to think about what we were being asked to give up.
I do understand why many voted yes in April. I share their concerns about Trump and his threat to our republic. However, I disagree with the politicians who told Virginians that cheating to win was a necessary response. It was not.
I spent years working with Republicans and Democrats to get politicians out of the business of drawing their own districts. Plenty were happy to support reform when the other party controlled the maps, and less enthusiastic when they saw a chance to draw their own. That was part of the reason we needed redistricting reform in the first place. We should now be working toward a national ban on partisan gerrymandering that applies to both parties. Virginia’s voters deserve fair districts, and so do voters in Texas and California.
Now we have an answer to the question at the heart of April’s debate: Did Virginia need to gerrymander its districts to check Trump’s power, or could we trust voters to do it themselves? The voters — in Virginia and nationally — have given us their answer.
Brian Cannon is a democracy reform advocate who helped lead Virginia’s bipartisan redistricting reform effort from 2015 to 2021 and works on election reform initiatives nationally. He was a leading spokesman against the proposed constitutional amendment that would have allowed mid-decade redistricting in Virginia.
