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Virginia voters just handed Democrats another win in the Great Redistricting Wars

Trump’s gerrymandering efforts are backfiring.

Voters have once again handed President Donald Trump a loss in one of the defining fights of his second administration: the national congressional redistricting race.

Tuesday night, Virginia approved a ballot measure to redraw the state’s 11 congressional districts to give Democrats a significant edge — salvaging Democratic hopes of flipping control of the House of Representatives in the fall.

In case you need a refresher, congressional redistricting — or the process by which states define the districts that House members represent — usually happens once per decade, after a new census.

That all changed over the summer when President Donald Trump urged Republicans in Texas to redraw their congressional maps early, to shore up the GOP’s tiny (currently one-seat) congressional majority and give the national party a boost during 2026 midterms. Texas Republicans created new maps in the summer, giving the GOP a new edge in five districts.

Democrats in some blue states also mobilized, kicking off a wave of mid-decade redistricting in both Democratic and Republican-controlled states that has undone some of the final remaining electoral norms of the Trump era. In November 2025, California voters approved a ballot measure that redrew maps to add up to five Democratic seats — neutralizing the Texas GOP gerrymander.

Virginia is not California, however. Though it has tended to vote for Democrats in presidential and gubernatorial elections since 2000, the state is swingy and had a Republican governor, Glenn Youngkin, until January. That made the Virginia redistricting campaign — a vote on a constitutional amendment to bypass the state’s normal mapping process until the next census — even more complicated and unpredictable.

Voters........

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