Jeffrey Blehar writes for National Review Online about a clear goal for Virginia Democrats.
Democrats are fully content to reap 100 percent of the rewards, as they transform Virginia into what they believe (with good reason) to be an impenetrable Democratic gerrymander for the next three election cycles.
Spanberger’s approval ratings have dropped significantly since the redistricting push, but then again why would she care? She can’t run for reelection in Virginia anyway, so her goal is to make herself an attractive vice-presidential candidate for whoever next wins the Democratic nomination. And she has already done so. (Interpret every move of the Spanberger administration through this lens, and you will soon find yourself able to predict them outright.)
But there is also a longer-term goal behind Spanberger’s redistricting initiative. (The short-term one is obviously to give the Democratic Party another four seats in Congress for the next six years.) The real hope is that she can starve the statewide Republican Party into irrelevance over the next half decade by denying it the opportunity to develop a bench. That also has knock-on effects: A party shut out of power tends to turn on itself and radicalize. Its powerlessness becomes demoralizing to the traditional conservative electorate. Ever more extreme or culturally unacceptable candidates crop up in a state where only moderate Republicans have any hope of winning statewide.
Don’t think it can happen? I live in Illinois; I’ve seen this collapse happen to my state’s GOP since 2005. (Our downward progress went in perfect Hemingwayesque fashion: “Gradually and then suddenly.”) As many northern Virginia Republicans will tell you, the state GOP has been doing this for years without a bit of help from the Democrats. But Spanberger is clearly working from the Illinois playbook, first pioneered by former state House speaker (and current jailbird) Mike Madigan: leaning into the state’s demographic changes to utterly suffocate the GOP at a critical moment. There’s ample reason to think the play will work. I can’t lie to Virginia Republicans this morning about their chances. But . . . you have my sympathies.
