Virginia Democrats Take Gerrymandering to a New Extreme, Posting a Test of Wills for GOP

This year’s midterm elections aren’t just about who wins in November; they’re about who wins fights over gerrymandering taking place right now.Nowhere is the battle fiercer than in Virginia, a state where voters just six years ago approved a constitutional amendment to take partisanship out of congressional redistricting.Now Democrats want to make an exception to the rule Virginia voters approved by a nearly two-thirds majority in 2020:They want this year’s congressional map to be drawn up by their own state legislators, erasing the districts set up by the bipartisan board established by the amendment just a few years back.It’s no surprise when a state like Texas or California that leans overwhelmingly toward one party indulges in partisan gerrymandering.But Virginia is a purple state, and its congressional representation — six Democrats, five Republicans — currently reflects that.Yet, if Democrats get their way on April 21, they’ll be able to seize 10 of Virginia’s 11 congressional seats for themselves, in the most brazenly unjust reapportionment seen anywhere in decades.This isn’t about making a blue state bluer or a red state redder; this one’s an effort to manufacture a virtual monopoly for one party, depriving millions of the other party’s voters of their representation.One thing the sheer audacity of this move suggests is that Democrats nationwide aren’t quite as confident as they claim to be about winning the midterms fair and square.If they expect voters coast to coast to repudiate President Trump’s GOP in a landslide, why resort to such extreme measures in a place like Virginia?Either Democrats are more worried than they let on, or they want to do more than just win — they want to annihilate their competition.They’re proving far more ruthless than Republicans, who balked at the opportunity last year to redraw Indiana’s congressional map to a 9-seat GOP sweep from a 7-2 partisan split.What Democrats are attempting in Virginia is tantamount to legalized election theft, if voters are unwise enough to approve the amendment they’re pushing.There’s a political cost for this attack on small-d democracy: Governor Abigail Spanberger, for one, is paying a price in her polling.She was elected by a whopping 15-point margin last year and was soon touted as the Democrats’ new face of moderation, which is why she was the party’s choice to respond to Mr. Trump’s State of the Union address this year.Yet her approval ratings are already poor, with a Washington Post survey at the end of March finding 47 percent of those polled gave her a passing grade, while 46 percent disapproved of her performance in office so far.The numbers are similar to polling on the amendment to give Virginia’s Democrat-controlled legislature the power to draw the congressional districts for the midterms: 50 percent say they approve, 47 percent disapprove.The amendment can pass with a simple majority, but if the polls are right, Democrats have no margin to spare, and early voting reports so far indicate there’s particularly strong turnout in Republican areas of the state.The early vote is outpacing early voting in last year’s gubernatorial election, too.Arguably, the amendment shouldn’t be on the ballot at all: it’s faced several legal challenges, with the state’s supreme court ultimately deciding the April 21 election can proceed even while doubts about its legality remain to be settled later.The very wording of the amendment is illegal, Republicans contend, since state law specifies the text accompanying the measure “shall be limited to a neutral explanation,” while the amendment itself is tendentiously worded as an attempt to “restore fairness.”Who wouldn’t vote to restore fairness?The campaign for the amendment has been a master class in deceit and manipulation, with even news outlets in the deep-blue D.C. suburbs of Northern Virginia noting the copious use of “pink slime” techniques by the “Yes” side.Those techniques involve propaganda disguised to look impartial — like a made-to-purpose publication branded as The Virginia Independent, which the Arlington-based news site ARLNow.com describes as “a partisan newspaper advancing Democrats’ arguments.”That slime has been flooding into voters’ mailboxes, including mine.Maybe my blue suburb hasn’t been a target of whatever efforts the Republicans are making — though the other possibility is that the GOP just isn’t trying as hard.Texas kicked off the latest wave of redistricting ahead of the midterms, as Republicans there looked to widen their advantage over the Democrats.Yet as the divergent examples of Indiana and Virginia show, it’s the Democrats who are more hellbent on winning, even if they have to turn state constitutions into confetti to do it.Politics is a test of wills — and if Republicans fail this one, they’ll almost certainly fail in November, too.Creators.com

Virginia Democrats Take Gerrymandering to a New Extreme, Posting a Test of Wills for GOP

Virginia Democrats Take Gerrymandering to a New Extreme, Posting a Test of Wills for GOP

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