Virginia Democrats Get Their Comeuppance

National Review Online

Friday, May 08, 2026

 

Schadenfreude isn’t the most elevated emotion, but it’s impossible not to revel in it after the comeuppance of Virginia Democrats.

 

They blew by any number of legal obstacles to draw perhaps the most absurdly lopsided congressional map in the country, and congratulated themselves for their audacity.

 

They took a congressional map that favored Democrats 6–5 and made it one that would favor Democrats 10–1 — in a purplish state where Republicans held all the statewide offices as recently as last year.

 

This required amending Virginia’s constitution in a misleadingly worded, lavishly funded referendum that passed by a narrow margin a few weeks ago.

 

Virginia had previously amended its constitution to make an independent commission responsible for drawing district lines. To bypass the commission and impose the new heavily gerrymandered lines, Democrats had to reamend the constitution and do it on an expedited basis to produce their four new Democratic seats by the 2026 midterms.

 

They duly violated various rules to get their result and assumed that once a ballot measure had been passed by the voters, nothing would be done to reverse it. It was a perfect plan — except for the possibility that the Virginia Supreme Court might do its job, and sure enough, it just did.

 

The court ruled that the amendment is rendered invalid by Democrats’ failure to abide by the constitution’s strictures. To ensure that all amendments are the product of extensive deliberation, the constitution says that the General Assembly has to pass a constitutional amendment; then there has to be an intervening election for the General Assembly; and after that, the General Assembly has to pass the same amendment. Only then does the amendment go to voters.

 

In their zeal, Democrats used a special session of the General Assembly to initially pass the amendment in late October last year, even though early voting in the General Assembly elections had already started. This denied those voters knowledge of the constitutional amendment; the whole idea is to afford voters the opportunity to pass judgment on assembly members for votes for or against a proposed amendment. And so Democrats had frustrated one of the purposes of the amendment process.

 

This isn’t even a close call. Of course, there is much weeping and gnashing of teeth on the left.

 

Why do Republicans get to redistrict in their states, and Democrats can’t in Virginia? Well, if Republicans similarly violate their state constitutions, their efforts should get blocked, too. But there’s no getting around the fact that the Virginia Constitution determines how the Virginia Constitution is amended; there’s no break-glass provision if Democrats want to match or exceed the gerrymanders in Republican states.

 

How dare the Virginia Supreme Court decide this question after Virginia went to the trouble of holding a referendum, and after the public voted? This is especially rich given that Democrats opposed the court’s deciding the question before the vote. Indeed, their lawyers told the court that it had to wait until after the vote to rule — and won that argument at the time. They hoped that the justices would be too cowardly to overturn a ballot measure that had already been voted on, and they lost their big gamble.

 

This chapter in Virginia political history has been low and unedifying, but at the end of the day, the law prevailed.