Brittany Bernstein writes for National Review Online about a significant vote this week among North Carolina’s northern neighbors.
On Tuesday, Virginia voters approved a measure that will allow lawmakers to redraw the state’s congressional lines to make ten of the state’s eleven districts more favorable for Democrats.
The new map is designed to allow Democrats to pick up as many as four seats in the upcoming midterm elections.
The newly passed constitutional amendment will temporarily bypass the state’s bipartisan redistricting commission to implement a new congressional map until 2030, when mapmaking responsibilities will return to the commission.
Throughout the campaign, Republicans called out Democrats for pushing a measure to bypass the bipartisan redistricting commission, which voters approved just six years ago by an almost two-to-one margin.
“No amount of money is going to let Virginians ignore what they saw when those maps were published,” Mike Young, the campaign manager for Virginians for Fair Maps, told NBC News ahead of the election. “And no amount of money is going to make them undo what was passed just five years ago, to take politics out of this process.”
Nearly $100 million was spent campaigning on the measure. Just one month ago, Virginians for Fair Elections, the pro-referendum group, had spent 17 times more than Virginians for Fair Maps on ads. By Monday, the pro-referendum group had only spent three times as much.
Democrats, for their part, argued that they were giving their party a fighting chance after Republicans moved to gerrymander districts in several other states.
“We’re giving Virginians a chance to vote — which Republican states have not done — about whether they want to have a congressional delegation that will stand up against Donald Trump’s tyranny if he tries to interfere with our elections,” Senator Tim Kaine (D., Va.) said last weekend.
Virginia is the latest state to redraw its maps to give one party an edge in the midterms. A back-and-forth between the parties began when Texas advanced a map favoring Republicans last year.
