Last week, Virginia voters narrowly passed a state constitutional amendment allowing Democratic legislators to rewrite the congressional maps, which may flip as many as four U.S. House seats. After this highly consequential vote, there’s bipartisan agreement that the gerrymandering war Donald Trump launched last summer was a bad idea. Aside from all the money diverted into map wars and the intraparty tensions that arose from unsettling congressional incumbents, it’s now clear that Trump’s hope of dramatically shifting the national landscape to ensure that Republicans maintain control of the U.S. House has failed.

In a few Republican-controlled states (notably Indiana and South Carolina), local lawmakers bucked pressure from national GOP leaders to redraw their maps. In another, Utah, state courts decided a Republican-written map violated anti-gerrymandering laws and awarded Democrats a new seat. In still another, Ohio, Republican lawmakers fearful of exposing their own incumbents to greater competition pulled their punches a bit and made the effect of their gerrymander ambiguous. And most of all, Trump’s power grab gave Democrats an excuse to execute their own big-time gerrymanders in California (likely netting five House seats) and........

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