August 3, 2026

Gerrymandering Wars

News Source
EXCERPT:

The gerrymandering of House districts is becoming more rampant across the U.S.

The word “gerrymander” was coined in America more than 200 years ago as an unflattering way to describe the political manipulation of boundaries for legislative voting districts by those in charge of drawing them.

The word has stood the test of time, in part because American politics remain fiercely competitive. And with time and technology, politicians have become even more adept at drafting voting districts that benefit their political party.

News Source
EXCERPT:

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) is urging Florida Republicans to move forward with a new congressional map, signaling a counteroffensive after Democrats narrowly pushed through a controversial redistricting referendum in Virginia.

The Virginia measure, approved Tuesday by a razor-thin margin, is expected to dramatically reshape the state’s congressional delegation in Democrats’ favor ahead of the 2026 midterms.

The Progressives won a major battle in the ongoing gerrymandering wars, this time scoring a narrow victory in Virginia. The ballot measure allows the progressives to change U.S. House Districts to effectively take 4 Republican seats away. The now-passed ballot measure faces legal challenges.

Dems Win In Virginia, Could Lose In Court thefederalist.com
News Source
EXCERPT:

Democrats and their well-heeled funders have won their rigged referendum to rig Virginia’s congressional maps, but the political boundary battle isn’t over yet.

Now come the court challenges, and that’s where the redistricting revisionists could lose their big win thanks to their unabashed manipulation of Virginia law.

“It’s illegal actually for a number of reasons,” Jason Snead, executive director of the Honest Elections Project, told me last week, a few days before Tuesday’s election, on The Dan O’Donnell Show in Milwaukee.

Snead asserts that Virginia Democrats, who hold the commonwealth’s political trifecta, have steamrolled the process while abandoning their plastic principles. His election watchdog organization is involved in one of several lawsuits challenging the maps and the referendum that gave Democrats the shaky imprimatur to implement them.

News Source
EXCERPT:

On Tuesday’s broadcast of MS NOW’s “The Last Word,” Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger (D) argued that Republicans “understood that the only way they could possibly maintain a majority in the House of Representatives” “was if they cheated, if they went seeking seats in places like Texas, which is why the president began this effort.”

Host Lawrence O’Donnell asked, “You’ve just come from the House of Representatives, to the governorship, in this last election. In your view, what would it mean if the Republicans were able to conspire with Donald Trump to increase the number of Republicans in the House of Representatives so that they could cling to control of the House of Representatives for two more years?”

Spanberger answered, “Well, I think they very much understood that the only way they could possibly maintain a majority in the House of Representatives — of course, they have a slim, slim majority at the moment — was if they cheated, if they went seeking seats in places like Texas, which is why the president began this effort. Because he knew that, at the midterms, much like, back in 2018, when I was first elected to Congress, that his poor leadership, the chaos that he is creating, the war he’s begun with Iran, skyrocketing gas prices, failed promise after failed promise, would be enough to propel yet another blue wave in a midterm, in the 2026 midterm election.”

News Source
EXCERPT:

Trump’s scheme to steal the midterm election by getting red states to gerrymander more Republican House seats was a poorly thought-out effort with great potential to backfire from the moment it was launched.

The president assumed that Democrats would not fight back. Trump also assumed that red states would line up around the country to carry out his wishes.

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Democrats did fight back by playing by the same rules that Trump established. In California, Democrats romped to a new map that could net them five House seats. While in red states like Kansas and Indiana, Republicans refused to redraw their maps. Ohio Republicans rejected a full-scale gerrymander and went with a fairer map after House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries threatened them with a ballot referendum.

News Source
EXCERPT:

After a narrow loss in Virginia, Republicans are pointing fingers as President Donald Trump’s national gerrymandering fight slips into a stalemate.

Multiple Republicans say the party should’ve spent much more, much earlier to have a better shot at blocking Democrats’ Virginia map, which could give the party as many as four more House seats. And pressure is now growing on Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to make up for Democrats’ gains with a GOP-led redistricting effort in his state, as soon as next week.

“You’d be hard pressed to find a single Republican tonight who doesn’t think the GOP should’ve done more in Virginia. It actually hurts more that it was so close,” said a GOP operative, granted anonymity to speak candidly, like others in this article.

There are mounting signs that Trump and the GOP have used valuable time and political capital on an arduous tit-for-tat that is so far looking like it will be close to a draw. Even if Republicans squeeze out gains in a new Florida map, their total gains are likely to be modest at best.

News Source
EXCERPT:

For the moment, the Democrats have won. Their Machiavellian gerrymandering scheme passed by a slim margin Tuesday night, slicing and dicing Virginia’s congressional districts into a ridiculous jigsaw puzzle that most closely resembles Illinois’ comical maps — meaning they have no logic, other than to rig the result and disenfranchise millions of voters.

 

News Source
EXCERPT:

Virginians voted Tuesday to approve a redistricting map introduced by Democrats that allows wealthy, Democratic residents in northern Virginia to outvote rural residents in the state. 

The new gerrymandered map changes the balance of power from 6-5 to 10-1 in Democrats’ favor, even though the state went just under six points to Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 election. Democrats claim it is a “temporary measure” — existing through the 2030 Census — to combat President Donald Trump.

Former President Barack Obama was one of the chief spokespeople for the new map, alongside Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger, who ran in the 2025 election as a moderate Democrat. 

The map itself is truly something to behold. The so-called “lobster district” — Virginia’s new 7th congressional district proposed by the map — starts up north with a sliver of blue Fairfax County and then splits into two arms just north of Charlottesville, where the University of Virginia is located. The proposed 8th district similarly starts in Fairfax and then snakes down to the area east of Richmond. 

News Source
EXCERPT:

Democrats hope gerrymandering Virginia will give them the edge they need to win back the House. But Tuesday’s special election is proving more competitive than they’d like.

Tight polling and concerns over voter turnout in an atypical April election have many Democratic party strategists and officials preparing for a close finish.

“I always thought this campaign would be close [and] 24 hours out, I believe that to be the case,” Democratic strategist Jared Leopold said on Monday, before the final day of voting.

“Anytime you’re on the ‘yes’ side of a referendum, you’ve got the burden of proof,” he added. “It doesn’t matter what the referendum is, but anytime you’re arguing for ‘yes,’ the other side is going to be arguing for the status quo.”

News Source
EXCERPT:

Maryland’s Legislature is run by Democrats, yet it refuses to gerrymander the congressional districts in its state. Virginia Democrats could learn something from the Free State.

Like it or not, Virginia is constantly comparing herself to next-door Maryland. Out of the 47 seats in the Maryland Senate, 34 are held by Democrats.

Still, those senators chose to leave mid-decade redistricting in a committee drawer rather than comply with former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and his nationwide redistricting campaign.

To be fair, President Donald Trump did say it would be nice if Texas — when ordered by the courts to redraw a few districts because they failed the Voting Rights Act “majority-minority” litmus test — made a few more Republican-majority seats.

News Source
EXCERPT:
A tough pressure campaign from high-profile Democrats has failed to persuade other members of their party in Maryland, where a new congressional map is now off the table.

Democrats enjoy a super-majority in both the Maryland House of Delegates and the Senate, and Democrat Wes Moore has been governor since 2023. Nevertheless, a redistricting proposal that would have threatened the lone Republican congressional seat died in the Maryland Senate when the legislative session ended Monday night.

‘At some point, I am going to have to have a conversation with him if he continues to stand in the way of an up or down vote.’

The Maryland House passed the map overwhelmingly in early February, 99-37.

Gov. Moore pressed hard to pass the map through the state Senate and onto his desk as a way to combat Republican redistricting efforts in Texas and North Carolina, spearheaded by President Donald Trump.

“I think Donald Trump is actively trying to manipulate and change the rules around the November election and beyond because he knows he cannot win on his policies,” Moore told the AP.

Blurb:

As Virginia voters take part in a closely contested redistricting referendum, Gov. Abigail Spanberger is heading toward the final tally with historically low approval numbers.

For the first time since the 1990s, a sitting Virginia governor is polling below historical norms.

According to Washington Post polling, Spanberger’s approval rating stands at 47%—13 points lower than the average approval rating for Virginia governors and below a majority.

Blurb:

The leftists who now control Virginia’s government desperately want you to believe that ripping up a bipartisan congressional map mid-decade for naked political advantage is fair. They insist as much in the language of the absurd referendum question before the commonwealth’s voters next month.

“Should the Constitution of Virginia be amended to allow the General Assembly to temporarily adopt new congressional districts to restore fairness in the upcoming elections, while ensuring Virginia’s standard redistricting process resumes for all future redistricting after the 2030 census?” the ballot asks.

Blurb:

There’s a little bit of good news to report out of Virginia this Wednesday morning that might be a harbinger for how the April 21 gerrymandering referendum being pushed by Democrats will fare. Republican Andrew Rice has won a special election in Virginia’s 98th House District and will now succeed the late GOP Del. Barry Knight, who died last month after representing the Virginia Beach area for over a decade.

 

The U.S. Supreme Court has stopped Progmerican-controlled New York state from disappearing a republican district through gerrymandering before the 2026 election. The decision does not rule out a future evaporation of the sole GOP-held district, but it prevents it from disappearing before the midterm election.

Blurb:

SCOTUS Blocks NY Bid To Redistrict GOP Seat Before Midterms – thefederalist.com

The U.S. Supreme Court shut down a bid by New York courts to redistrict a Republican-controlled congressional seat ahead of the 2026 midterms on Monday.

In its 6-3 ruling, the high court granted an emergency application to temporarily stay (“pause”) a state judge’s efforts to redraw Republican Rep. Nicole Malliotakis’ congressional district. Malliotakis has represented New York’s 11th Congressional District since 2021 and won reelection by 28 points during the 2024 election.

As described by The Hill, “A state judge had ordered the boundaries be redrawn after ruling the district dilutes black and Latino voting strength in violation of the state constitution.” The Supreme Court’s Monday order “granted Malliotakis’s emergency application to block that ruling as the litigation proceeds, effectively restoring her existing district lines for the midterms.”

The high court noted that the New York court’s ruling “is stayed pending the disposition of the appeal in the New York state courts” and the filing of a petition at SCOTUS asking the justices to take up the case. The Supreme Court’s stay will terminate if it declines to hear the case or if it agrees to take up the case and renders a verdict on the matter.

Associate Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson would have denied Malliotakis’ request for relief.

Associate Justice Samuel Alito authored a concurring opinion in which he expressed agreement with the court’s decision and blasted the New York judge’s directive “that blatantly discriminates on the basis of race.” He noted how the “New York Supreme Court (that State’s trial-level court) ordered the New York Independent Redistricting Commission to draw a new congressional district for the express purpose of ensuring that ‘minority voters’ are able to elect the candidate of their choice.”

“That is unadorned racial discrimination, an inherently ‘odious’ activity that violates the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause except in the ‘most extraordinary case,’” Alito wrote. “Extraordinary circumstances exist only when the challenged state conduct is narrowly tailored to achieve a ‘compelling’ interest, and our precedents have identified only two compelling interests that can justify race-based government action: (1) mitigating prison-specific risks and (2) ‘remediating specific, identified instances of past discrimination that violated the Constitution or a statute.’ … Neither of those interests is present here.”

In her dissent, Sotomayor (joined by Kagan and Jackson) accused the majority of “[i]gnoring every limit on federal courts’ authority” by “tak[ing] the unprecedented step of staying a state trial court’s decision in a redistricting dispute on matters of state law without giving the State’s highest court a chance to act.” Such an action, she claimed, “violates basic principles of jurisdiction, federalism, and equity.”

“By granting these applications, the Court thrusts itself into the middle of every election-law dispute around the country, even as many States redraw their congressional maps ahead of the 2026 election,” Sotomayor wrote. “It also invites parties searching for a sympathetic ear to file emergency applications directly with this Court, without even bothering to ask the state courts first. There is much reason to question whether the majority will exercise its newfound authority wisely, but there is no reason to question this: If you build it, they will come.”

Monday’s ruling is the latest in a series of redistricting-related cases to come before the high court ahead of the 2026 midterm elections. Within the past several months, the justices have effectively greenlit maps passed by Texas and California that bolster their respective ruling party’s chances of winning more seats this fall.


Shawn Fleetwood is a staff writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He is a co-recipient of the 2025 Dao Prize for Excellence in Investigative Journalism. His work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics and RealClearHealth. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood


from thefederalist.com

Blurb:

 

Watch Virginia closely. The far-left Gov. Abigail Spanberger is setting out on a path that other Democrats will follow, and that the party will roll out nationally if it wins in 2028. It is a path to authoritarian leftist control and the destruction of our freedoms. Besides the gerrymandered congressional map, she has also allowed for mail-in ballots that will allow enough fraud to keep the Democrats in power forever. Meanwhile she is lightening penalties for violent crime and forbidding local police to cooperate with ICE. This will ensure a terrorized native population and the flooding of Virginia with migrants who will further ensure the left’s total control of the state. And for the left, Virginia is just the beginning.

“5 VIRGINIA CONGRESSMEN: Democrats are rejecting voters to gerrymander our state,” by Rep. Rob Wittman, Fox News, March 2, 2026:

Virginia voters settled the redistricting question in 2020. Nearly two-thirds of Virginians amended our Constitution to create an independent redistricting commission and take map-drawing power away from politicians. The message was unmistakable: stop the gerrymander. Stop letting politicians choose their voters.

Democrats applauded that reform. House of Delegates Speaker Don Scott praised fairness and transparency. Senate President pro tempore L. Louise Lucas declared it would ensure “an equitable, transparent and bipartisan process to ensure our electoral maps are drawn fairly.” Rep. Don Beyer said plainly, “Gerrymandering is cheating. It allows politicians to select their voters, when it should be the other way around.” They were right.

In 2019, Abigail Spanberger said, “Gerrymandering is detrimental to our democracy. Opposing gerrymandering should be a bipartisan priority.” While running for governor, she added, “Short answer is no. I have no plans to redistrict Virginia.”

That was before she took office.

Blurb:

A Virginia judge granted the Republican National Committee a temporary restraining order that halts Virginia Democrats’ gerrymandering efforts to redraw the state’s congressional districts ahead of the upcoming midterms.

The Republican National Committee brought a lawsuit Wednesday to stop what the organization describes as an unconstitutional last-minute power grab by Virginia Democrats. Filing a motion for a temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction, the RNC asked the court to block the implementation of the proposed constitutional amendment. According to local media, Tazewell County Circuit Court Judge Jack Hurley Jr. granted the RNC motion on Thursday.

Blurb:

“Anything you can do, I can do better,” the famous duet from the musical “Annie Get Your Gun,” comes to mind as Republicans in blue states watch their red congressional districts disappear because Democrats turned the tables on President Donald Trump’s plan to push mid-decade redistricting to make it easier for the GOP to hold the House majority. Once Republican states decided to employ this strategy, Democrats would have been derelict not to do the same.

House Republicans leaders are beginning to realize that their chances of midterm victory may shrink because this Pandora’s Box was opened. It’s not just that blue states might create more safe seats than red states might. The debate has energized the Democrat base and allowed their big money donors to argue to the public that this is just another “authoritarian” attempt by Trump to rig the system.

Blurb:

Virginia Democrats are advancing two bills to extend deadlines for receiving and counting mail-in absentee ballots several days after Election Day.

Delegate Adele McClure and State Senator Barbara Favola, who represent Arlington, have introduced companion bills, HB 82 and SB 58, which will extend the deadline for counting absentee ballots in Virginia from noon to 5 p.m. on the third day after Election Day, reported ARL Now.

The Virginia Supreme Court has just given the insurrectionist DNC state the go-ahead to push a referendum that will effectively cancel 4 U.S. House seats for conservatives. DNC Virginia looks to cement its hold on American soil by effectively making it impossible for non-Democrats to ever win in the state again. The referendum, the new district map, will be voted on starting this March through mid-April. The move followed the GOP’s failure to secure a gerrymandering scheme favorable to their party in Indiana, a state they fully control.

The courts have failed at all levels to recognize the constitutional violations of gerrymandering as a principle, which allows political parties to create geographically unnatural voting districts to assure their party cannot be defeated in a general election ever again. Now, millions of conservatives will be effectively disenfranchised from the voting rolls, taxed without representation. SCOTUS continues to allow this unconstitutional practice.

Blurb:

VA High Court Greenlights Dem Gerrymandering Effort – thefederalist.com

The Virginia Supreme Court handed Democrats a massive win Friday, allowing them to move forward with a redistricting referendum that would gerrymander the commonwealth’s U.S. House districts from five Republicans and six Democrats to one Republican and 10 Democrats.

Democrats have been looking for a way to push through their referendum, despite legal challenges and court rulings saying the efforts are illegal, in time for an April 21 special election that would allow the gerrymandered map to take effect before the November general election.

Early voting is set to start March 6.

If the referendum passes, it would allow the Virginia legislature the authority to redraw the congressional maps, instead of its nonpartisan commission. The nonpartisan commission is relatively new in Virginia, coming into play once since its creation by referendum in 2020. In that case, the commission failed to agree on maps, requiring the state Supreme Court to complete the process.

Despite the failures of the commission, the gerrymandering plan from the Democrats is a mid-decade power-grab aimed at disenfranchising Virginians in order to pad Democrat House seats ahead of a potential U.S. Supreme Court ruling on the Voting Rights Act, which already artificially gave Democrats numerous seats based on racial gerrymandering.

 

Former Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares and former U.S. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, both Republicans and co-chairs of a group called Virginians for Fair Maps, which is aimed at stopping this process, put out a statement Friday promising further legal challenges.

“Though we firmly believe this referendum is illegal, the court has allowed it to move forward before final judgement. There will be further legal action on this matter,” they said. “All across Virginia, voters are speaking out against this brazen political power grab that allows politicians in Richmond to choose their own voters. It’s wrong, it’s illegal, and it will fail.”

While allowing the special election to move forward, the Virginia Supreme Court bizarrely set itself up to hear the case after the election occurs, meaning there appears to be three potential outcomes: The referendum fails and the case would likely not be heard; the referendum is approved and the court agrees with Democrats, allowing the gerrymander; the referendum is approved and the court agrees with Republicans, throwing it out.

The last scenario is unlikely, since the court would be seen as nullifying a vote.

Republicans are still talking as if things could go their direction, with state House Minority Leader Terry Kilgore, R-Va., saying, “we’re going to make our case to Virginians that this is unfair. This is unprecedented. And, quite frankly it’s against the law we believe.”

State Senate Minority Leader Ryan McDougle, R-Va., said, “Last October, democrats took an unprecedented step to illegally pass a constitutional amendment at the 11th hour. The judiciary agreed, and the Supreme Court has taken up and fast-tracked the case. Make no mistake, the rule of law will prevail.”

But beyond the legal challenges that they could present, the state and national Republican parties, as well as other organizations, face an urgent need to set their sights on a massive get-out-the-vote operation in Virginia.


Breccan F. Thies is the White House correspondent for The Federalist. He is a co-recipient of the 2025 Dao Prize for Excellence in Investigative Journalism. As an investigative journalist, he previously covered education and culture issues for the Washington Examiner and Breitbart News. He holds a degree from the University of Virginia and is a 2022 Claremont Institute Publius Fellow. You can follow him on X: @BreccanFThies.


from thefederalist.com

The U.S. Supreme Court has officially approved the racist gerrymandered California map created by the DNC, with not one conservative judge dissenting. The ruling means anything goes as far as gerrymandering is concerned, and other states are sure to follow, both blue and red. SCOTUS offered no comment in their approval.

Blurb:

SCOTUS Allows California’s Gerrymandered Map – PJ Media

The U.S. Supreme Court might have just helped Democrats defeat a Republican majority for the 2026 midterm election.

California Republicans filed to block the blatant gerrymandering in their state last month, but the Supreme Court — despite supposedly having a conservative majority that took an oath to uphold the Constitution — sided with California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-Inferno) Wednesday, according to The Epoch Times.

Back in October, Rep. Kevin Kiley (R-Calif.) slammed the redrawn congressional map, saying: “California is already #1 in the nation for poverty, unemployment, and homelessness. So now Newsom has set his sights on a new distinction: #1 in gerrymandering. Princeton’s Gerrymander Project called the Prop. 50 map one of the two worst gerrymanders in the last 50 years.”

The most shocking part is that not even the staunchest conservatives on the court, Justices Sam Alito and Clarence Thomas, reportedly dissented. The Epoch Times reported that the court did not explain why it ruled as it did and why there was no dissension.

Blurb:

A Virginia judge on Tuesday ruled that a Democrat-led effort to radically redraw the state’s congressional districts ahead of the 2026 midterm elections is invalid.

The ruling has dealt a major setback to plans that would have dramatically reshaped the state’s House delegation.

Judge Jack Hurley Jr., of the Tazewell County Circuit Court, issued a ruling declaring a proposed constitutional amendment advanced by the Virginia General Assembly to be procedurally invalid under state law.

Blurb:

The Supreme Court last week ordered California Democrats to respond within a week to a Republican-backed request seeking to block the state’s newly drawn congressional maps from being used in the 2026 elections.

The move, issued by Justice Elena Kagan, who is handling the emergency injunction request, caught many court watchers off guard. Given the court’s recent decision to allow Texas Republicans to keep their mid-decade redistricting plan, most expected the justices to let California’s Democrat-drawn map stand without intervention.

California Republicans argue the new maps violate the Voting Rights Act and the Constitution by relying on race, rather than politics, to redraw at least one congressional district.

Blurb:

 

Democrats, ever desperate for one-party control, filed a lawsuit in October claiming that New York City’s only Republican-held congressional district was unconstitutionally drawn because it allegedly “dilutes black and Latino voting strength.”

The Staten Island plaintiffs, represented by the Washington, D.C.-based Elias Law Group, demanded that the map — which was approved by the Democrat-controlled state legislature and Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) in 2024 — be redrawn such that it’d be virtually impossible for Republican Rep. Nicole Malliotakis to defend her district.

Blurb:

Democrat-controlled Maryland is set to move forward with a plan to draw out its lone Republican-controlled district, a move that will further increase the likelihood of Democrats retaking control of the U.S. House later this year.

The effort began when Democrat Governor Wes Moore established the Governor’s Redistricting Advisory Commission in November 2025. Chaired by U.S. Sen. Angela Alsobrooks (D-MD), the five-member panel of Democrat appointees claimed it heard community feedback and reviewed proposals before voting to recommend new boundaries on December 18, 2025.