Commentary: The Sheer Waste of Virginia’s Redistricting Referendum Staggers the Conscience

Friday’s unprecedented Virginia Supreme Court decision that nullified a Democratic-led statewide referendum for an extraordinary, brazenly partisan, mid-decade reapportionment should surprise no one.

Supreme Court of Virginia strikes down redistricting amendment, keeps current maps in place

The initiative was conceived and executed in haste, and the procedural errors arising from cutting corners were lethal, said the court’s 4-3 ruling.

In fairness, the timetable for Democrats to act was drastically compressed after thoroughly Republican Texas heeded President Donald Trump’s fatwa that Republican-run states bleach their congressional delegations of every Democratic-held seat possible.

In late August, Texas enacted new maps designed to eliminate five Democratic seats in this fall’s congressional midterm elections, a staggering blow to norms that relegated reapportionment to once a decade in years immediately after the national census.

That set off a chain reaction in which Virginia and California tried to minimize the number of GOP-held U.S. House seats. Republican states like North Carolina and Missouri responded in kind.

Virginia and California were the only states to give voters a voice in statewide plebiscites, something no Republican state has yet done. Virginia’s cumbersome process for amending its constitution requires exacting, time-critical legislative steps to even put the question before voters for ratification. It’s where General Assembly Democrats erred.

At what point does one pause to recognize the extreme difficulty and inherent frailty of rushing something this intricate into being before betting the family farm on it? Did anyone do the risk-versus-reward computations necessary to weigh this hurried scheme against more conventional alternatives?

The costs — reflecting the desperately high stakes for partisan control of Congress in November’s federal midterm elections — are insane.

There is a steep cost in political capital for Democrats central to the effort, particularly Gov. Abigail Spanberger and Senate President Pro Tempore L. Louise Lucas of Portsmouth, its guiding materfamilias.

This defeat bruises political momentum and public confidence for Democrats who must quickly regroup and refocus on defending and perhaps expanding their 6-5 edge in Virginia’s 11 congressional districts.

There was a significant cost to the already fractured relationship between Virginia’s Republican-voting rural areas and the Democratic-leaning urban and suburban areas. The referendum’s result is a vivid geographic study in red and blue where 34 localities comprising 54% of Virginia’s populace outvoted the other 99.

The most breathtaking cost, however, is the obscene sum — $83 million as of April 10, according to the Virginia Public Access Project — spent mostly by opaque dark-money groups electioneering for and against the ballot initiative.

That’s more than quadruple the $21.4 million spent on 13 previous ballot initiatives held across Virginia since 2016. It includes the $2.54 million spent in the 2020 statewide referendum that ratified Virginia’s independent redistricting commission into the state Constitution — the same constitutional amendment the referendum would have suspended for the balance of this decade.

Adding to the sense of waste, $62 million — about three-fourths — of referendum spending supported the ballot issue that Friday’s ruling voided. This fall’s congressional races will be held in the districts as they were drawn in 2021 — by this Supreme Court! — and not the configurations engineered to pare GOP-held districts from five to one.

Republicans are joyful over the ruling. It spares them potential obliteration and further increases their chances of blunting a midterm voter backlash this fall that threatens their tenuous U.S. House majority.

Despair prevails for Democrats. Many of them and allied independents put aside their reservations about suspending the principled, evenhanded approach to redistricting they had overwhelmingly supported 5½ years earlier and supported the ballot issue. I’m one of those independents.

A lesser threat: Redistricting referendum’s passage is nothing to celebrate

So was the potential gain worth the considerable risk? A lot of smart people doubted it before the referendum, and they look even smarter now.

Trump has never carried Virginia, and statewide GOP candidates have suffered every time he was either president or a candidate. Opposition to him powered the referendum’s narrow victory. That’s why the Democrats’ redistricting gambit was largely unnecessary, reasons Mark Rozell, dean of the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University.

“From the outset, it should have been clear that the referendum was risky and that it was unnecessary. Risky because it was procedurally flawed and open to challenge, as well as inflaming and activating rural Republicans. Unnecessary because in a typical midterm wave election it is likely the Democrats would have picked up as many as three extra seats without a redistricting,” Rozell said.

Now, he added, Virginia’s effort has backfired. Since Virginia’s referendum, Republican Florida did its own controversial redistricting, stripping away four of its Democratic congressional seats.

“But then Virginia gets overturned, so now the GOP has the advantage in the redistricting wars,” Rozell said.

It’s likely to get worse. A new wave of red-tainted redistricting is underway in GOP-ruled states within the footprint of the Confederacy after the U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative majority gutted the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

That 6-3 decision ends the law’s decades-old prohibition against diluting minority voting strength and allows Democrat-friendly majority-minority districts to be eliminated with impunity. Tennessee’s Republican legislature last week adopted a new map that eliminates that state’s lone Democratic congressional district in the Memphis metro area, which is 63% Black.

Democrats are teeing up an emergency appeal to the nation’s highest court to salvage their initiative. I’m no lawyer, but Virginia’s Supreme Court ruling seems pretty straightforward on the impermissible shortcuts that doomed the referendum.

Besides, who really expects a U.S. Supreme Court majority that just resurrected Jim Crow to bail Virginia Democrats out of a debacle of their own creation?

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