There’s no sugar-coating the dejection that half of Virginia feels after Tuesday’s wafer-thin loss. For voters in the Commonwealth, who endured around-the-clock lies and a political strategy dominated by Democratic dollars, the redistricting war was never a fair fight. By the end, only 88,900 ballots separated the “yes” and “no” camps — an ironic rebuke of the state’s new one-party rule. 

The land of Washington, Jefferson, Mason, Madison, and Monroe, men who fought to give rural voters the same democratic influence as their urban counterparts, would be rolling over in their graves at a referendum that slams the door on representation for roughly half of the state’s population. “Virginia,” NRO Editor Rich Lowry lamented, “is the new Illinois” — despite a statewide electorate that looks nothing like it. 

This “brazen hypocrisy,” his fellow editors vented, is beyond the pale. Democrats have pushed “a mid-decade, maximalist, partisan 10–1 congressional map in a 6–5 or at best 7–4 purple state — a map that allows voters inside the Beltway to govern much of red, rural Virginia — just six years after Democrats talked 60 percent of state voters into enacting a ‘nonpartisan’ redistricting process in order to prevent Republicans from drawing a map once Glenn Youngkin took office.”

Interestingly, Democrats had to spend a shocking amount — $65 million — for an outcome that was still uncomfortably close. In fact, the “no” camp, backed by half of that amount, was so energized that it outperformed Donald Trump’s Virginia results in 2024. If anything, National Republican Congressional Committee Chair Rep. Richard Hudson (R-N.C.) points out, that proves how evenly divided the Commonwealth is. “This close margin reinforces that Virginia is a purple state that shouldn’t be represented by a severe partisan gerrymander.”

The loss was a tough one for Virginians to stomach, FRC Action Director Matt Carpenter agreed. “Tuesday’s results essentially wipe out all of the gains made by Republicans in the current mid-decade redistricting fight in other states, and so now all eyes are on Florida and the Supreme Court.” But despite the uncertainty now surrounding the GOP in the Commonwealth, “one thing is certain,” he told The Washington Stand. “Virginia is not nearly as blue as a 10-to-1 Democratic congressional delegation would suggest. Forty-nine percent of Virginians opposed the extreme partisan gerrymander — that says it all.”

And yet, Tuesday’s result, which will almost certainly hand the Democrats four House seats, is the latest escalation in a redistricting war that has consumed state legislatures from Texas to California. In some, blue Maryland and red Indiana, leaders ignored the pressure, choosing to stand pat in a battle that could backfire in the months to come. For now, all eyes turn to Florida, where Governor Ron DeSantis is holding a special session next week to determine how the Sunshine State could redraw its congressional maps.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), who was gloating in Virginia’s overnight transformation from purple to deep-blue, warned the state’s Republicans that Democrats will only have more “pick-up opportunities,” adding, “We are prepared to take them all on, and we are prepared to win. … Maximum warfare, everywhere, all the time.”

But Virginia’s outcome is anything but certain, legal experts underscore. Voters “disenfranchised by today’s vote will have their day in court,” Virginians for Fair Maps vowed. Even without the photo finish, the state’s “no” camp already had a compelling case, the Commonwealth’s former attorney general, Ken Cuccinelli, outlined. 

By his count, four Virginia constitutional challenges are “now teed up,” including three to the amendment process itself:

1. “[The] first passage was invalid. The amendment was taken up during a special session convened in 2024 for budget purposes. The General Assembly’s own call to the Governor (under Art. IV, §6 and Art. V, §5) and its governing resolution (HJR 6001) limited the session’s scope. Expanding it to include a constitutional amendment on redistricting required a two-thirds vote that never occurred. A Tazewell County judge found this action ‘void, ab initio.’”
2. Article XII, §1 “requires that after first passage, a proposed amendment be ‘referred to the General Assembly at its first regular session held after the next general election of members of the House of Delegates.’ An election must intervene between first and second passage. Here, first passage occurred during an election cycle — not before an intervening one.”
3. Article XII, §1 “requires the amendment be submitted to voters ‘not sooner than ninety days after final passage by the General Assembly.’ The timeline from second passage to the April 21 vote did not satisfy this requirement.”

The fourth challenge, Cuccinelli details, is to the proposed map itself. Virginia’s Constitution, Article II, §6, “requires that ‘every electoral district shall be composed of contiguous and compact territory.’ The proposed congressional maps violate this contiguity requirement (rather badly).” And, he adds, “This is going to move FAST — not the usual ‘court speed,’” which is a great comfort to millions of dejected Virginians. “Look for another Tazewell ruling as early as this week and [a] briefing in the Va. Supreme Court this week.”

He wasn’t kidding. By Wednesday afternoon, he reported that “the Tazewell Circuit Court just ruled the referendum unconstitutional. The Judge entered an injunction blocking certification of the election & denied a motion to stay pending appeal. A final order will be entered once drafted, & it will be immediately appealed.”

Meanwhile, the political capital spent by Governor Abigail Spanberger (D) is no small thing. The governor, who’d campaigned on the promise that she wouldn’t redistrict the state, has been outed as an absolute fraud. Already on the public hot seat for her whiplash turn to the Left and facing the worst poll numbers for a governor since the 1990s, time will tell just how much this will cost the radical leftist in centrist clothing. 

As NRO’s editors cautioned, “This is the modus operandi that James Carville illustrated recently when discussing other radical steps Democrats might take. … ‘Don’t run on it, don’t talk about it, just do it’ once you have power, so it’s too late for voters to do anything about it.” But, as they note, “A great many Virginia voters didn’t appreciate the deception and the raw power politics. Spanberger won the state by 15 points,” and yet, her approval now hangs by a thread. 

And no wonder, The Washington Stand’s Mark Tapscott says on a recent edition of the “Outstanding” podcast. “I’ve been covering politics for a lot of years, and I don’t recall ever such a dramatic — literally within hours of taking the oath of office — outright [reversal of] her position and her actions from what she promised that she was going to do or told voters she was going to do during the campaign. The redistricting [about-face] got the most publicity, the most coverage, the most controversy, of course. … But there are a number of other issues where she’s done the same thing. It’s pretty remarkable.” 

It certainly raises the suspicion, Tapscott continued, “at least in some people’s minds [of whether] she knew she was going to reverse all of these promises that she had made during the campaign or, for whatever reason, she didn’t know. But something happened between Election Day and the swearing-in day. Political pressure from the Left, or whatever it may have been, that caused her to take the opposite course. And I think that that really raises a question in a lot of people’s minds. You know, this is the kind of classic political hypocrisy that most Americans, I think, frankly, are pretty sick and tired of.”