For most of American history, gerrymandering was a behind-the-scenes affair, taking place in the quintessential “smoke-filled rooms” where political heavyweights carved up the country to best suit their own fortunes. Voters remained largely in the dark.
That has changed in a remarkable way over the past year.
The bare-knuckle fight over redistricting between Democrats and Republicans, started last year by President Trump and the G.O.P. in Texas, has made gerrymandering a top national story that is set to play an important role in the midterm elections.
And in two states — California last year and Virginia tomorrow — voters have been given a rare opportunity to decide their own gerrymandered fate.
In each place, Democrats have been forced to hold a statewide referendum in order to push through a plan to redraw the state’s U.S. House map to give their party an extra edge. Those elections have pitted voters’ general distaste for anti-democratic map-drawing against their desire for an immediate political advantage in the never-give-an-inch Trump era.
In deep-blue California, the politics of redistricting in 2026 turned out to be quite simple: Democrats may dislike gerrymandering, but they despise Trump more.
Whether that is also true of voters in lighter-blue Virginia will be the big question on Tuesday night.
A Trump-driven change of thinking
Reliable polling on gerrymandering, a notoriously complicated subject, is hard to come by. But when the issue became a political football last summer, both Democrats and independents expressed their opposition.
Eighty-one percent of Democrats and 66 percent of independents said they opposed plans by political leaders to redraw voting districts to win more congressional seats, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll taken in August, well before the November referendum in California.
Just 36 percent of Republicans said the same, perhaps because of the news coverage of Texas’ redistricting plan at the time. But the party appeared hesitant on the issue: Only 38 percent of Republicans supported the redistricting push, and 25 percent were unsure. Broadly, 59 percent of all Americans were opposed.
Yet months later in California, an overwhelming majority of Democratic voters chose to significantly gerrymander their state. Sixty-four percent of the state’s voters cast a ballot in favor of eliminating five Republican-held seats. That was significantly more support than what Vice President Kamala Harris drew in California in the 2024 election.
Gov. Gavin Newsom of California framed the redistricting push as a response to Trump’s redistricting gambit in Texas, where the president asked state Republicans to draw a new map intended to give their party five extra seats. (The California measure is also temporary, expiring in 2030 with the new census — and, conveniently, after Trump leaves office.)
Liberal supporters of the California referendum ran ads arguing that the gerrymandering was necessary because of Trump. Each of the top five most-aired ads in California supporting the referendum centered on the president.
“You have the power to stand up to Donald Trump,” Newsom said in one ad, where he was joined by former President Barack Obama, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and other Democratic luminaries.
What’s next after Virginia
A similar playbook is on display in Virginia. As was the case in California, Democrats are dominating the airwaves, with a $30 million advantage over Republicans. National party leaders have again joined the effort.
“Republicans want to steal enough seats in Congress to rig the next election and wield unchecked power for two more years, but you can stop them by voting ‘Yes,’” Obama says in the most-aired ad in Virginia, as images of Trump flash across the screen.
Republicans, for their part, have cast the push for a new map as a Democratic power grab.
“Richmond liberals want to eliminate competitive elections in Virginia,” says an ad from Virginians for Fair Maps, the main Republican-aligned outside group in Virginia.
The outcome in Virginia is expected to be far closer than what it was in California, though Democrats feel cautiously optimistic that the measure will pass.
After Virginia, attention will turn to Florida, where Republicans may push for a new House map, and to the Supreme Court, which is expected to issue a major Voting Rights Act ruling that could set off a final rush to redraw state maps before the midterms.
Beyond that, the big question is how the politics of gerrymandering will evolve after this year’s elections. States including New York and Colorado are expected to try to draw new maps before the 2028 elections.
And it remains to be seen whether both parties will keep up their aggressive approach to gerrymandering after the 2030 census, when every state is constitutionally required to redraw its map to account for population shifts.
Ruth Igielnik and Taylor Robinson contributed reporting.
Nick Corasaniti is a Times reporter covering national politics, with a focus on voting and elections.
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