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Now That Democrats Have Won Virginia’s Redistricting Vote, the Real Fight Begins

The party needs to pursue major reforms to defeat the structural demographic inequities threatening democracy.

A yard sign urges passage of Virginia’s redistricting referendum.

When Republicans looked like they would engineer a massive midterm advantage by stealing House seats via mid-decade redistricting, Democrats didn’t wring their hands and whine about the unfairness of it all. They strapped on boxing gloves and punched back, winning retaliatory gerrymanders in California and Virginia to even the score.

Now “fuck around and find out” memes abound on Bluesky. The New Republic declared that Virginia is where Donald Trump’s mid-decade redistricting scheme “came to die.” Even minority leader Hakeem Jeffries, the very portrait of rule-following, institutionalist Realpolitesse, proclaimed an era of “Maximum warfare, everywhere, all the time.”

It’s undeniably heartening to see leading Democrats accepting the need for procedural hardball, but nothing actually died in Virginia. The mid-decade redistricting wars were not fought to a truce. They are just getting started, at the Supreme Court and in red states nationwide. And the strategy that worked in the early innings—picking off red seats in California and Virginia to compensate for Texas, Ohio, North Carolina, and Missouri—won’t be enough from here.

Aside from their rhetorical Patton impersonation, it’s not clear that Jeffries and his colleagues have zeroed in on the right enemy or grasp the limited window for meaningful action before them. Retaliatory gerrymanders that level the playing field for 2026 won’t last. Democrats cannot win one election and then preside over a placid return to normalcy; the Biden years should have made that lesson clear.

The Virginia and California gerrymanders have been framed around beating Trump and checking his authoritarian impulses. He’s a playground bully. You fight back by punching him in the nose. (The Iranians have absorbed this lesson quickly, even if countless American universities, broadcasters, law firms and corporations haven’t.) Yet Trump will soon depart, unpopular and weak. When he is gone, Republicans will still command half the Senate, enjoy new Electoral College and US House advantages after the 2030 Census, and control the Supreme Court into at least the 2050s—unless Democrats both win and act.

The problem is larger than Trump, and goes deeper than winning the 2026 midterms. It is the entire GOP authoritarian project, which has hijacked representative democracy through gerrymanders, geographic skews, and deep structural inequities. And this assault on equal ballot access has been enforced by a right-wing supermajority on the Supreme Court won after years of relentless focus and Leonard Leo and Mitch McConnell’s unapologetic constitutional hardball.

If Democrats are serious about responding in kind, they need to tether their new fighting spirit to a reform agenda that takes on the interconnected threats to democracy. The plan has to begin with them winning trifecta power in 2028, using it to remake institutions hijacked by the right—and using this power to weather the shifts in political demography ahead. A baseline set of reforms would include a House based on proportional representation, either packing or limiting the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court, and a serious look at US Senate malapportionment. None of this will be possible without ending the Senate filibuster—something that even these radicalized Republicans, goaded relentlessly by their senescent mad king, have refused to do.

After all, the current redistricting Armageddon didn’t start when Trump demanded Texas hand the GOP five additional........

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