By Kevin D. Williamson
Thursday, April 23, 2026
A
columnist sometimes repeats himself. A columnist sometimes repeats himself
for 30 years.
So, one more time: Yes, Virginia, gerrymandering is
normal.
Redistricting is inherently political. When a legislature
does it, it is the most political thing a legislature does. When a political
party does it via referendum, as the Democrats have just done in Virginia, it
is that much more political.
In the case of Virginia, it is also ruthless and, if I am
being entirely honest about my feelings here, hilarious.
Virginia is something pretty close to a 50/50 state with
a small Democratic advantage, if we take as a useful partisan proxy that
Democrats have averaged 51.8 percent of the vote in the five most recent
presidential elections. And, as you might have expected from those numbers, its
House delegation was pretty close to 50/50, too, with a slight Democratic
advantage: six Democrat-leaning seats to five GOP-leaning seats, six current
Democratic members and five current Republican members. And that was pretty much
that, until Tuesday.
It is not as though Democrats were, or are, above
gerrymandering—the practice was named in 1812 for Elbridge Gerry, a member of
Thomas Jefferson’s Democratic-Republican Party (which was the progenitor of the
modern Democrats) who got started in U.S. politics early enough to have signed
the Declaration of Independence—but Virginia put a little distance between the
hacks and ward-heelers on the one hand and the political cartographers on the
other with a commission (“independent,” you understand) that did the map
drawing.
Until the idiots in my home state of Texas got involved.
Acting on orders from President Donald Trump, Texas
Republicans—who enjoy a modest but consistent advantage in their state—decided
to try to wring an additional five House seats out of Texas’s
Republican-leaning population, and decided to do so mid-cycle, no less, rather
than waiting for the usual post-census redistricting. It was an offense against
political norms, to be sure, though its outrageousness was exaggerated.
Amusingly, Texas Republicans are having a bit of buyers’
remorse about that. Those Trump-leaning Tejano districts in the south of the state do
not seem to be as reliably GOP-leaning as Republicans had hoped—the folly of
the straight-line projection is a classic goof—and Republicans are having
internal discussions just now in which they are raising the possibility that
the redraw will end up costing them one House seat on net.
But Democratic states—California and Virginia prominent
among them—already had launched their responses. Under the new map in Virginia,
Republicans will enjoy an obvious advantage in only one of Virginia’s 11 House
districts, down from five. The Democrats basically tried to corral as many of
the Republicans in the state as they could into a single red district, leaving
the rest of the commonwealth free for
them to bustle in.
That’s H.L. Mencken’s democracy in action: Republicans
got what they were asking for, good and hard.
There’s a lot of po-faced GOP snuffling and sulking this
week in Virginia, with Republicans complaining that this kind of thing just
isn’t fair. When the federal government goes after Donald Trump’s political
enemies, Republicans turn their noses up and sniff, “Politics ain’t beanbag.”
Democrats win an election in Virginia, on the other hand, and Republicans are
ready to literally make a federal case out of it.
If any of Trump’s sycophantic little enablers had ever
bothered to read one of those Bibles the president hawks, they might have come
across some observations about living by the sword and dying by it. The same is true for procedural maximalism in
politics. For a long time, that maximalism was something conservatives
complained about: Democrats’ weaponizing confirmation hearings, Democrats’
abusing the filibuster, Democrats’ using parliamentary shenanigans such as
reconciliation to push through legislation they couldn’t hope to pass
otherwise—and, of course, Democrats’ going to court to ask sympathetic federal
judges to deliver to them the political victories they could not win in the
legislatures or at the ballot box. Gerrymandering was kind of a Democratic
thing, too, for a long time, and Democrats did not object to it very much until
Republicans got good at it, having somehow roused themselves from their
traditional comfortable stupor and employing high-tech tools to perform the
political equivalent of laser microsurgery on electoral maps around the
country. Republicans, thus sated, returned to their traditional comfortable
stupor.
But the wheel of history turns, and Democrats eventually
figured out how to do redistricting as successfully—and ruthlessly—as
Republicans.
And so here we are.
There is no way to impose any kind of strict logic or
reason on the districting process. Legislative districts have to be roughly
equal in population, but Americans do not live in rectangular districts of
roughly equal population density. There are always going to be salamander-shaped House districts or those in the form of a
lobster claw—even when the mapmakers are not going entirely
hog-wild in the pursuit of partisan interests. There is no mathematical test to
rely on—the test is seemliness, restraint, and moderation.
No sensible citizen expects that the districting process
will be free from partisan considerations—even when it is executed by
supposedly independent commissions. But it is possible to go too far. And given
the Republican effort in Texas and elsewhere, Democrats are not without an
excuse to bring the hammer down in Virginia.
And Republicans, having been the aggressor, now will play
the victim.
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