Virginia voters’ decision Tuesday to redraw the state’s congressional map is a crucial victory for Democrats — one that puts them ahead, for now at least, in the national redistricting battle that President Donald Trump started last year.
Here’s what the vote means for the midterm elections that will decide who controls the House.
Democrats have the edge, for now
Since last year, 10 congressional districts have been drawn around the country in Democrats’ favor. That’s one more than the nine drawn to Republicans’ advantage.
Ordinarily, states draw new congressional lines once every 10 years, at the start of the decade when they receive new data from the U.S. Census Bureau. Last year, Trump pressed Republican-led states to break with that tradition and gerrymander their districts to help his party maintain its narrow control of the House.
The push resulted in better lines for the GOP in five districts in Texas, two in Ohio and one each in Missouri and North Carolina. Democrats responded by persuading voters to approve new maps that would give Democrats the edge in five seats in California and four in Virginia. In addition, a court approved a new map in Utah that could give Democrats one district.
Neither side is guaranteed to win all the districts that now favor them. Latino support for Trump is slipping, which could hurt Republicans in some of the rearranged districts in Texas along the border with Mexico. And Democrats could face challenges in their attempt to beat Rep. David G. Valadao (R-California), whose district remains closely divided.
The passage of the Virginia ballot measure is a major victory for Democrats, who appeared to be in a grave situation at the start of the national redistricting fight. And it’s a significant setback for Trump, who said on the eve of the election that approval of a new map in Virginia would be a “disaster” for Republicans.
Republicans could pull ahead in Florida
Attention now shifts to Florida, where Republicans are considering drawing new lines that would give them a leg up in two or more additional districts. That would put them ahead of Democrats in the national fight over gerrymandering.
Still, it would be hard to cast even that as a big win for Trump and his party, given the money, political capital and arm-twisting they expended on what would essentially be a draw.
Trump’s allies envisioned the redistricting fight as one that would give them a substantial advantage this fall, rather than one that would net them just one or two additional seats.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) has set a special legislative session for next week to consider new congressional lines, but has not yet made a new map public. He has not touted sweeping changes lately, telling reporters last week that “it’s possible you could do a little tweak, but you can’t really push it very far.”
Republicans hold a 217-213 majority in the House, with one independent and four vacancies. Because the margin is so tiny, even a handful of elections this fall could decide control.
History and Trump’s low approval ratings are so far favoring Democrats to win control of the House, barring a major shift.
Supreme Court could scramble the map
The Supreme Court is slated in the coming weeks to deliver a Voting Rights Act decision that could allow Republicans to draw new lines for a swath of additional seats.
Such a ruling would be a boon to Republicans, but it may come too late to have much effect on this year’s midterm elections. Some states have already held their primaries, and others will do so soon, which will prevent them from establishing new districts for this fall. But they could take advantage of the expected decision for the 2028 elections.
The specifics of the ruling will determine whether Republicans can draw more districts in their favor and, if so, how many. If the Supreme Court strikes down a key provision of the Voting Rights Act, Republicans could redraw a dozen or more seats in their favor.
An analysis by the liberal groups Fair Fight Action and Black Voters Matter put the number of districts that could be redrawn as high as 19.
Redistricting created challenges for Spanberger
The redistricting win was a triumph for Democrats in Virginia’s legislature, but less of one for Gov. Abigail Spanberger, who took office a little more than three months ago and offered only measured support for the referendum. Spanberger initially argued that the party could pick up seats in Virginia’s congressional delegation without redrawing the districts, noting that she carried two of the Republican-held districts. But fellow Democrats, spurred on by House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-New York), wanted the more aggressive step of gerrymandering.
Once that was set in motion, a loss would have been devastating for Spanberger’s political reputation; it would have taken the wind out of her 15-point landslide victory last fall and undercut her burgeoning reputation as a national Democratic star.
Even with the victory, Spanberger’s reluctant embrace of redistricting deprives her of the opportunity to take full credit. After the referendum passed, Spanberger said the new maps would serve “as a check on this president” but also emphasized her support for returning to a bipartisan process for establishing districts after the 2030 census.
Republicans don’t have much sympathy. They are labeling her as a hypocrite, calling her claims of centrism a farce.
Virginia voters found the flood of ads confusing
In the weeks leading to the referendum in Virginia, the redistricting campaigns spent millions of dollars to feed voters an assortment of redistricting ads — some of which were perplexing, voters said at the polls on Tuesday.
One Republican-aligned group used Civil Rights-era imagery to suggest, misleadingly, that redrawing maps would disenfranchise Virginia’s Black voters. Another group campaigning for voters to reject the measure used a clip of former president Barack Obama condemning gerrymandering, even though he publicly supported the state’s redistricting effort.
Democrats and their allies sought to combat this messaging, seeing it as a disinformation campaign intended to confuse left-leaning voters. But Republicans pointed out, correctly, that many prominent Democrats had switched their position in the face of Trump.
Many voters interviewed Tuesday said they researched the referendum after seeing the ads.
Jasmine Cummings, 25, said she voted yes to counteract the maps that Republicans drew in Texas and other states. She rolled her eyes when she saw the ads that claimed new maps would discriminate against Black voters.
“Sometimes Republicans will use tactics like that — ‘Oh, look at what Democrats are doing!’” said Cummings, who is Black. “But they don’t care either.”
Counties with large Black populations backed redistricting
Although some ads had invoked the Ku Klux Klan to urge Black Virginians to vote against the redistricting question, counties that were at least 25 percent Black supported the measure by a 14-point margin, after backing Spanberger last November by 24 points.
High-income counties and urban counties also voted heavily in favor of the measure, while voters in Virginia’s rural counties opposed it by a more than 2-to-1 margin, according to a Washington Post analysis of election results as of 9:40 p.m. Eastern time, with 94 percent of the vote in.
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