Virginia’s new congressional map would be country’s most extreme gerrymander

Virginia’s current congressional map, among the fairest in the country, would quickly become one of the most extreme if Democrats carry out their redistricting plans.

Early voting started last week in a referendum that would allow the Democratic-controlled General Assembly to ditch the current map, drawn by an independent authority, and replace it with a Democratic gerrymander that could give the party 10 of the state’s 11 seats, or 91% of its allotment.

The state would then go from an uber-fair map — one in which the parties’ share of congressional districts almost perfectly matches the presidential vote in 2024 — to the worst of all the large states, or those with at least five seats in the U.S. House.

Gerrymandering has been a problem dating to the country’s founding, when Patrick Henry drew lines to try to prevent James Madison from winning one of Virginia’s seats in the first Congress.

Things have run off the rails over the past year as both major parties, driven to grasp every electoral advantage, have orchestrated new maps and pushed the country to the tipping point.

California, already heavily tilted toward Democrats, adopted a map that could give them 48 of the state’s 52 House seats — a staggering 92% in a state where Vice President Kamala Harris won only 58% of the vote in 2024. That 34-percentage-point gap would make California the third-worst partisan gerrymander of the big states, behind Virginia and Massachusetts.

California and Virginia Democrats say they were just responding to Republicans.

At the urging of President Trump, Republicans rewrote maps in Texas, Missouri, Ohio and North Carolina. North Carolina aimed for an 11-3 split in its House delegation, which would be the fifth-worst gerrymander in the country.

“This is a problem on both sides of the aisle,” said Michael McNulty, policy director at Issue One, which advocates for election reforms. “The problem here is the loser is the voter. Gerrymandering is basically allowing politicians to pick their voters, instead of voters picking their representatives.”

Experts expect fewer than 1 in 10 House seats to face a competitive election in November, shifting politics to the primaries, where the parties battle for their fringes.

“It’s sidelining the middle ground. It’s making it harder for Congress to function,” Mr. McNulty said.

One of the more striking aspects of the redistricting push has been the embrace by people who, until recently, decried gerrymandering and backed the idea of independent commissions.

In California, the State Legislature asked, and voters agreed, to suspend a commission-drawn map and replace it with the Democratic-heavy lines.

Virginia voters are also being asked to toss out a map drawn by a commission and blessed by the state Supreme Court.

Democrats have cast the rewrite as an attempt to “restore fairness in the upcoming elections.”

In Colorado, Democrats are pushing a referendum in November to ditch their commission-drawn map and replace it with a Democratic-friendly gerrymander for 2028 and 2030. Colorado currently has one of the fairest maps, splitting eight seats evenly between the parties in a state where the presidential vote in 2024 was 54-43 in favor of Democrats.

Former President Barack Obama, who previously backed independent commissions, supported California’s move to ditch its commission-drawn plan. He has now thrown his weight behind the Virginia Democrats’ effort as well.

He called it a chance to “level the playing field.”

States usually draw their lines once every 10 years, after the decennial census determines how many House seats each state is allocated.

Mid-decade redistricting has happened before, sometimes by court order and occasionally for political advantage. The past year has been without precedent, but it appears to be the new norm.

“We expect this to get worse, as the states that have done mid-decade redistricting are essentially being rewarded for it,” said Deb Otis, director of research and policy at FairVote. “We could end up in a world where the states redistrict every two years.”

FairVote and Issue One said a looming Supreme Court ruling on the Voting Rights Act could reverse a decades-old legal precedent requiring states to draw lines to maximize minority voters’ political power.

Depending on the ruling, Southern states could revisit their maps to erase heavily Black districts that are usually considered guaranteed Democratic seats.

If those go, then Democrats could revisit maps in other states where they are in control, such as New York.

“This has been an unprecedented gerrymandering armageddon this cycle, but it could certainly get worse and involve more states as we head toward 2028,” said David Daley, a senior fellow at FairVote.

The Washington Times’ analysis used the 2024 presidential vote tallies as a yardstick for a state’s partisan lean.

Other options, such as each state’s vote for House members in the 2024 elections, didn’t work as well because of quirks in state voting. In some cases, either Republicans or Democrats didn’t put up a candidate. In Massachusetts, for example, only two of the state’s nine districts even had a Republican running in 2024.

Then there are states that use top-two elections, where all candidates run in the same primary regardless of party and the two leaders face off in the general election. That often leaves districts where the final two are from the same party, skewing the final statewide tallies.

In states where neither of those factors was present, the aggregate congressional vote was usually a close approximation of the presidential vote anyway.

The Gerrymandering Project at Princeton University uses a series of yardsticks to assign a grade to state maps, adding competitiveness and whether maps keep communities together to the partisan fairness measure.

Virginia’s current map, with the 6-5 Democratic advantage, scored an A.

California’s old map scored a B, but the rewrite for this year earns an F.

Smaller states, those with fewer than six seats, can be particularly tough to draw. Splitting three seats in a way that gives the out party a chance is tricky.

In Connecticut, Democrats hold all five seats despite President Trump’s winning more than 40% of the vote in 2024. Republicans hold all five seats in Oklahoma, where Ms. Harris collected 32% of the vote.

Massachusetts is an extreme example. Democrats hold all nine seats in a state where Ms. Harris won 61% of the vote.

Experts said that, given how Massachusetts’ voters are spread out, there aren’t really any pockets of conservatism that would make it easy to draw a Republican seat.

The FairVote folks said one answer is adopting multimember districts with proportional representation, which would make gerrymandering all but impossible.

“Sixty percent of votes for one party should translate into about 60% of seats,” Ms. Otis said. “Tens of millions more voters would get a member of Congress who represents their interests.”

Mr. McNulty said Issue One wants Congress to ban mid-decade redistricting, unless ordered by a court, and to require all states to use independent or bipartisan commissions to draw their lines.

He called for uniform neutral criteria to guide the line-drawing, such as matching geography and respecting communities of interest.

Mr. McNulty said the change has to come from Congress because no party will want to unilaterally disarm in a state it controls, exactly the dynamic playing out now, as states move away from commissions.

“All of these efforts — what have they resulted in? They’ve resulted in basically a trench warfare where the net gain for the parties is none,” he said. “And yet who are the losers here? The voters.”