Virginians will decide this week if their commonwealth will become the laughingstock of the nation when it comes to clumsy partisan gerrymanders.
On Tuesday, voters will consider a measure that would take Virginia’s redistricting powers away from a bipartisan, citizen-driven commission and return it to the Democrat-controlled state legislature. For months, Virginia voters have been subjected to a deluge of television ads and direct mail flak backed by national Democrats who hew to an established narrative: the gerrymander, while it may seem extreme, is a necessary, temporary response to Republican agitation across the country to hold the House of Representatives despite the will of the people.
If Democrats get their way, five congressmen who live in driving distance of the Beltway’s swanky Army Navy Country Club would represent the bulk of Virginia’s population. To Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger and her allies — a who’s who of Democrats that prominently features Barack Obama — the is not an obviously-unrepresentative scrawl of a map that will turn a competitive purple state into a hard blue stone, but a desperate move motivated by GOP extremism. In this story, they are the heroes defending Democracy.
It’s an audacious claim. Virginians should loudly reject Democrats’ attempt to carve the face of the mother of presidents out of mere spite for the persistence of Donald Trump.
Virginians by now have received enough mailers on the measure to fill the back of a Karen’s Subaru. One such leaflet stresses that supporting Democrats’ power grab is the only way to defend democracy. This is par for the course for Democrats in the Trump era, who are more than happy to violate their most sacred principles in order to defend them.
You know the drill by now: you can only stop Trump’s disrespect of the Constitution by packing the Supreme Court; bureaucrats are justified in ignoring orders to block Trump’s anti-government policies; and it’s Republicans who have no respect for law and order, which is why we should identify and harass members of ICE and their families.
Democrats’ proposed redistricting map is notably not included in any of the mailers, nor in any of the television ads, nor is it even displayed in polling places at the behest of Virginia’s board of elections. That should be enough to indicate how much it resembles the scrawls of an irate toddler. It is even too extreme in the mind of the commonwealth’s viciously partisan and historically unpopular governor, who thought a 9-2 map would at least allow a modicum of self-respect. Spanberger was overruled by Richmond Democrats, who insisted that only a 10-1 majority Democrat redraw would do, in a state which Kamala Harris won with less than 52% of the vote.
Perhaps the greatest lie advanced by Obama and others pushing this new arrangement is that it will be “temporary.” Should Virginia upend its current representation — which is still majority Democrat, mind you — it will do so thanks to the backing of well-moneyed national interests who seek a permanent advantage in the narrowly divided House, a cheat code for getting a leg up on their Republican opponents in future elections.
No one on the Democratic side of the aisle will ever want to give that up. If Virginians decide to endorse this unrepresentative move under the false belief that it will be adjusted in the future, they just don’t know how politics works. These maps were drawn specifically to include the home addresses of aspiring Democratic candidates. There’s no bottom to this well.
There is another path. If Virginians reject this offensive gerrymander, even after a metric ton of flyers and ads backed by a shockingly large amount of out of state cash, they will send a very different message, one that respects order and rejects extreme partisanship — one that national Democrats will be forced, all too reluctantly, to learn from.
The Virginia Way used to mean something. It can mean something again.
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