OPINION:
In the off-year elections in November, Virginia Democrats took back all three statewide offices and netted 13 additional seats in the state House of Delegates.
It wasn’t a blue wave. It was a “green wave” of money, a tsunami of campaign cash, that enabled some Democratic legislative candidates to outspend Republican rivals by as much as 14-to-1, according to a postelection analysis by Cardinal News, a nonpartisan news website that covers Southwest and Southside Virginia.
Now, four months later, the congressional district gerrymandering referendum that the Democratic majority rammed through the General Assembly has been fast-tracked to an April 21 statewide vote.
Early voting begins Friday, and the pro-gerrymander side has already been saturating the airwaves with ads pushing the scheme while Republicans are engaged in unilateral disarmament. The referendum is shaping up as a repeat of the November fiasco.
It shamelessly calls for overturning a bipartisan congressional district outline crafted just five years ago and replacing it with a map that would make Elbridge Gerry himself blush. The Princeton Gerrymandering Project’s statistical model evaluates the partisanship of congressional boundaries, and it deemed Virginia’s existing map worthy of an A.
By contrast, the proposed revision would render Virginia’s among the most aggressively rigged districts in the country.
The goal, backed by “centrist” Gov. Abigail Spanberger, is to flip Virginia’s U.S. House delegation from a relatively even six Democratic and five Republican cohort into a lopsided 10-1 Democratic supermajority.
Democrats are spending huge sums to push a “yes” vote on the referendum, which would effectively disenfranchise roughly half of Virginia’s electorate. They are doing so, in the risible claim in the referendum question itself, to “restore fairness.”
House Majority Forward, an arm of the congressional Democratic leadership, has donated $10.3 million to the budget for an advertising blitz. Combined with loot from Big Labor and the usual left-wing outfits, the committee backing the initiative will dispense more than $21 million, according to data from the Virginia Public Access Project.
The organization opposing the change, Virginians for Fair Maps, has less than $300,000 in its coffers. “I don’t understand why Republicans aren’t stepping up with big bucks. So much is at stake in this race,” Katharine Gorka, chairwoman of the Fairfax County Republican Party, told The Washington Times.
Former Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a Republican with an estimated $500 million net worth, for example, could afford to chip in a healthy amount, as could the likes of Elon Musk. It’s troubling that the deepest pockets have given up on the Old Dominion.
It’s wishful thinking to expect the Virginia Supreme Court to strike down the amendment as unconstitutional after it passes, given that the justices didn’t intervene before it went on the ballot in the first place.
The Democrats’ appeal of a Tazewell County Circuit Court judge’s injunction against the referendum apparently won’t be heard by the state’s highest court until after next month’s plebiscite. That’s akin to locking the proverbial barn door after the horse has escaped.
Finally, does anyone really believe Virginia Democrats’ promise would return to the status quo ante of the nonpartisan redistricting commission after the 2030 U.S. census if they achieve their desired 10-1 supermajority?
Unless Republican big-money donors want Virginia forcibly tipped from a purple state to one that is midnight blue, it’s for them to pony up for an all-out campaign to defeat this anti-democratic Democratic move.
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