Virginia Democrats popped the champagne last month. After winning roughly 51.5 percent of the vote, they secured the right to redraw the state’s congressional map to give themselves 90-plus percent of the representation. Their proposed map, although it could still be blocked by the state Supreme Court, would cause as many as four Republican-held House seats to flip in the next election.
State House Speaker Don Scott (D) called the referendum vote a rejection of President Trump. Former President Barack Obama called it a check on Republican power grabs. The national media ridiculously treated it as a win for democracy.
I call it more of the same.
Democrats, using the machinery of state government, bypassed a voter-created bipartisan redistricting commission to draw a map giving their party an electoral advantage in 10 of Virginia’s 11 congressional districts. The current split is 6-5 in Democrats’ favor, and the prospective new map is closer to a 10-1 lock. That is not democracy. That is dominance dressed up in the language of fairness.
To be clear, Republicans started this fight — at least in the current election cycle. (Some Republicans point the finger at New York Democrats for starting it during the 2024 cycle.) Trump is the one who pushed multiple Republican-led states to redraw their congressional maps mid-decade specifically to fortify the party’s House majority against the historical headwinds of a midterm election. Texas responded, and new maps there could yield five additional Republican seats. The gerrymandering arms-race was already underway. Republicans in Missouri joined the fray, as did Democrats in California. Although some states declined to participate — Republicans in Indiana, specifically — Democrats in Virginia went nuclear.
But two parties racing each other to the bottom is not a defense. It is a description of the problem.
The real losers here are not Republicans or Democrats. They are voters — specifically the voters who will now live inside congressional districts designed not to represent them, but to contain them. When maps are engineered to guarantee outcomes, candidates stop competing for the full district and start performing for their base. The general election becomes theater. The only election that matters is the primary, which draws the most ideologically activated and most partisan slice of the electorate.
The result is a Congress that does not look like the country it represents — and increasingly, cannot talk to it.
Think about what competitive elections actually demand of a candidate. They have to earn votes they would not otherwise receive. They have to persuade skeptics, address concerns outside their comfort zone, build coalitions beyond their base. Candidates who know they cannot lose a general election are accountable to no one but their most reliable supporters.
Safe seats do not produce statesmen — they produce career politicians.
This is an especially bitter irony for Black voters in Virginia and across the country. For decades, majority-minority districts were sold as a mechanism for Black representation. Pack enough Black voters into a single district, and you guarantee a Black congressman. But a packed district is a politically neutered one. When a representative wins with 80 percent of the vote, there is no leverage left. The voters who delivered that landslide have nothing left to negotiate with. Their representative does not need to deliver for them — only to show up. Guaranteed seats breed guaranteed complacency.
I want representatives who have to work for every vote, every cycle. Voters deserve candidates who are accountable because losing is actually possible — not candidates who treat their district like a lifetime appointment.
Obama had recorded a video urging Virginians to vote yes for the twisted 10-1 map, framing the referendum as a defense of fair representation. This is the same Obama who, for most of his presidency and post-presidency, explicitly spoke out against partisan gerrymandering. In 2016, he called gerrymandering “a rigged system” and pledged to fight it.
Opponents of the Virginia measure used his own past statements against him, pointing to the contradiction. Obama’s defenders say the context has changed — Republicans moved first, so Democrats had to respond in kind. That argument has a logic to it, but it also places an expiration date on any claim to principle.
If your commitment to fair maps only holds when they help your party win, you do not have a commitment to fair maps. What you have is a preference for winning.
Again, the Virginia result is not the end of this fight, since the state Supreme Court is still considering legal challenges that could invalidate the referendum entirely. And with the recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling that makes gerrymandering harder to challenge in court, the next round could be even more extreme. Republicans in Florida have already used that ruling as an excuse to draw an even more favorable map for themselves. The tit-for-tat will continue.
But there is a better model. Several states, including Arizona, Michigan, Iowa and California — well, before its recent reversal — have used independent redistricting commissions that remove map-drawing from the hands of the party in power. These are not perfect systems, since partisans often find ways to influence them. But the principle is sound: Voters should choose their representatives, not the other way around. An independent commission, with clear criteria for competitive and geographically coherent districts, is the structural answer to a structural problem.
Democrats spent tens of millions on the Virginia campaign — a multiple of what opponents raised. That money went toward buying a map, not toward building a message. It went toward locking in outcomes, not competing for them.
If the party is serious about rebuilding trust with the working-class, Black, and Latino voters it has been hemorrhaging, it might consider that voters can tell the difference between a party fighting for them and a party engineering a method to go around them.
Winning a map is not the same as winning an argument. The first delivers seats, but the second delivers a mandate — a majority that actually means something.
Democracy can never be a guarantee of outcomes. It is always a contest. When a party — either party — decides the contest itself is too risky to leave to voters, it is telling us everything we need to know about itself.
David Sypher Jr. is a freelance writer and commentator based in New Jersey.
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