Virginia voters will head to the polls this week to decide whether to make their Commonwealth the laughingstock of the nation when it comes to clumsy partisan gerrymanders. The Old Dominion should loudly reject Democrats’ attempt to carve the face of the mother of presidents out of mere spite for the persistence of Donald Trump.
For months, Virginia voters have been subjected to a deluge of television ads and direct mail flak backed by national Democrats who hew to an established narrative: the gerrymander, while it may seem extreme, is a necessary, temporary response to Republican agitation across the country to hold the House of Representatives despite the will of the people. It casts the gerrymander as not an obviously unrepresentative scrawl of a map, turning a competitive purple state into a hard blue stone, but as a desperate move motivated by GOP extremism. In this story, they are the heroes defending Democracy.
It’s an audacious claim for a map that allows five members representing the bulk of Virginia’s population to live within easy driving distance of lunch at the Army Navy Country Club. But one trait of Democrats in the Trump era has been to adopt every argument while doing the polar opposite. You can only stop Trump’s disrespect of the Constitution by packing the Supreme Court; bureaucrats are justified in ignoring orders to block Trump’s anti-government policies; and it is Trump Republicans who have no respect for law and order, which is why we should identify and harass members of ICE and their families. By now, you know the drill.
One of the most recent mailers promoting the gerrymander — Virginians by now have received enough to fill the back of a Karen’s Subaru — emphasized that democracy can only be defended if you vote for the measure. The message that you can only defend democracy by wrecking it is an instant classic for today’s national Democrats, and one they are more than happy to embrace in the interests of partisan gain.
The map itself is notably not included in any of the mailers, nor in any of the television ads, nor is it even displayed in polling places at the behest of Virginia’s board of elections. That should be enough to indicate how much it resembles the scrawls of an irate toddler. It is even too extreme in the mind of the Commonwealth’s viciously partisan and historically unpopular governor, Abigail Spanberger, who thought a 9-2 map would at least allow a modicum of self-respect. She was overruled by Richmond Democrats, who insisted that only a 10-1 majority Democrat redraw would do, in a state which Kamala Harris won with less than 52% of the vote.
Perhaps the greatest lie advanced by Barack Obama, who has personally endorsed the move, and other Democratic influencers and fundraisers is that this new arrangement will be “temporary”. Should Virginia upend its current representation — which is still majority Democrat, mind you — it will do so thanks to the backing of well-moneyed national interests who seek a permanent advantage in the narrowly divided House, a cheat code for getting a leg up on their GOP opponents in future elections. No one on the Democratic side of the aisle will ever want to give that up. If Virginia voters decide to endorse this unrepresentative move under the false belief that it will be adjusted in the future, they just don’t know how politics works. These maps were drawn specifically to include the home addresses of aspiring Democratic candidates. There’s no bottom to this well.
There is another path. If Virginians reject this offensive gerrymander, even after a metric ton of flyers and ads backed by a shockingly large amount of out of state cash, they will send a very different message, one that respects order and rejects extreme partisanship — one that national Democrats will be forced, all too reluctantly, to learn from. The Virginia Way used to mean something. It can mean something again. Vote against this partisan Democrat gerrymander.
