Governor called referendum after president urged GOP-led states to redraw maps to protect House majority
Voters in Virginia on Tuesday approved new congressional maps intended to boost Democrats’ chances of retaking the House of Representatives, in the latest blow to Donald Trump’s effort to use mid-decade redistricting to preserve his control of Congress.
The tit-for-tat redistricting battle began last year after Trump pressed Texas’s Republican-controlled legislature to redraw that state’s congressional maps in a bid to oust as many as five Democratic House lawmakers in the November midterm elections.
California voters retaliated by approving new maps that could flip five Republican-held seats, and in Virginia, Abigail Spanberger, the newly elected Democratic governor, backed an effort to redraw her state’s maps following her January inauguration. Tuesday’s referendum could help Democrats win four additional House seats in November’s midterm elections.
This is a race to the bottom… Rather than trying to address the problem with legislation we’re now just cheering one side corrupting democracy over another.
This won’t end well.
That’s a whole lotta words just to say, “we take the high road!”
How’s that worked out for us so far?
Maintaining the moral high ground will not ensure you a victory over an entirely immoral enemy. One of the reasons Hitler was able to grab power is because his opponents refused to break the rules to stop him.
ABSOLUTELY!
Is it good that states are doing this? Of course not. Will red states stop/revert if blue states do the same? Of course not.
So what are our options?
I hate that it’s come to this. I like that VA’s new maps sunset, and revert to the bipartisan commission in 2030. Did any of the red states do that? Still, Trump is writing the rules. Dems & blue states are just playing by them.
Losing the moral high ground will make your victory Pyrrhic.
Losing period makes your fight a wasted effort.
Standing by while republicans have wantonly suppressed the vote, deleted voter rolls, and likely literally have stolen elections is what is causing all the fucking issues right now. Dems need to fight fire with fire, then if they win they can ban gerrymandering nationally.
You’re just telling me that your king will be better than their king.
Oh look, it’s that old chestnut “whataboutism”…
Swing and a miss
Democrats don’t have a king, bucko.
And yet here are the Democrats eroding the very concept of democracy by literally rigging the system to maximize votes for Democrats. How far down that road are you willing your gang to go?
Dems wanted to pass a national gerrymandering ban. trump, in his infinite wisdom, told Texas and other red states he wanted more seats and they, in an unprecedented move, redistricted their states mid-decade to placate a despot.
Democrats are countering the gerrymandering republicans started, and you are solely blaming the Democrats for wiping out an illbegotten gain by republicans.
Stop being so pathetic, man. It’s really sad to see someone bend over this far backwards for fucking Nazis.
You’d made a reasonable argument right up until the end. Sad you had to attack me to make yourself feel better.
Asking the voters to approve a voting system is now considered eroding democracy?
Do you not understand the words you’re using? Or are you just a “conservative” who is here to “just ask questions” because if you acted like this in the real world, someone would put you in a hospital while the rest of us denied seeing anything?
I choose to believe you’re not that stupid.
Like, you realize people can vote for a thing that would itself be undemocratic… Right?
You can’t legislate from the moral high ground, dumbass.
You can only legislate if you WIN.
Tell that to the dead who kept their moral high grounds and were killed by fascists.
The Democrats introduced as their HR 1 a bill that would outlaw gerrymandering nationwide the last two cogresses where they picked the Speaker. They’ll almost certainly do so in January next year and two years later.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_the_People_Act
All Republicans have to do to end the gerrymandering in VA and CA and who knows where next year is get on board. They could even get a national voter ID rule if they really wanted.
Sadly, like Trump, the whole GOP is really bad at the jobs our tax dollars pay them for.
I have always supported a national voter id on the condition it’s paid for and people are automatically enrolled.
Republicans would never go for it.
Dems should actually run on this and then ask Republicans why they no longer support voter id
This is the correct approach. That bill is full of stuff that “everyone believes in” and should be what the Democrats hammer on every single day.
We’ve watched Dems ineffectually flail for 10 years. This is them actually getting something done for a change.
I don’t know about this effort but I believe the California bill has specific clauses to tie the California redistricting to unfair gerrymandering elsewhere.
Explicit, limited, linked retaliation, not just blind “we gotta win any way any how” is exactly how to win practically without compromising on principles.
California’s referendum-induced change returns to non-partisan redistricting in 2030. That is, it’s only set up to last for as long as Texas’s early gerrymander was.
It was presented as a counter, and Newsom said that he wouldn’t do it unless Texas went ahead with it, but technically isn’t attached to Texas’s early gerrymander. This became something of an issue when it became possible that Texas’s attempt might be overturned by courts, leaving the California counter-gerrymander intact.
Nothing has been ending well…
I’ll take some this type of response over the usual anyday.