Governor called referendum after president urged GOP-led states to redraw maps to protect House majority
Voters in Virginia on Tuesday approved new congressional maps intended to boost Democrats’ chances of retaking the House of Representatives, in the latest blow to Donald Trump’s effort to use mid-decade redistricting to preserve his control of Congress.
The tit-for-tat redistricting battle began last year after Trump pressed Texas’s Republican-controlled legislature to redraw that state’s congressional maps in a bid to oust as many as five Democratic House lawmakers in the November midterm elections.
California voters retaliated by approving new maps that could flip five Republican-held seats, and in Virginia, Abigail Spanberger, the newly elected Democratic governor, backed an effort to redraw her state’s maps following her January inauguration. Tuesday’s referendum could help Democrats win four additional House seats in November’s midterm elections.
Americans, your voting system is from deep inside the ass. Get your shit right, don’t intervene in the other countries affairs until that. I don’t want to see or hear any news from USA before that.
Just get proportional representation for fucks sake.
That wouldn’t be fair to republicans, who cannot win without cheating.
Everytime it’s brought up, Republicans shoot it down. The GOP made this bed, so now they gotta lie in it.
Proportional represention creates problems if you want to have representation tied to geographical areas, which the US system does.
But there are like a gajilion variants that tweak around the problem. Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of good, just pick any one, it’s going to be better than FPTP.
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Dems would not be redistricting if the MAGAs hasn’t tried it first, but that shows an improvement. In the past, Dems wouldn’t have tried redistricting, even if MAGA had succeeded in doing it, because it wouldn’t have been “fair.”
This time, they saw MAGA trying to grab an advantage, so the Dems did it too, except they did it right, so it passed by the courts, while the MAGA attempts didn’t.
We are finally seeing the Dems fighting back, and fighting back smart, which is something MAGA will NEVER be able to compete with. We need the Dems to play a lot more of that Hard Ball.
It feels like a pebble thrown against a mountain
I don’t see why you think this. congress is the one the constitution depends on to impeach presidents who violate the constitution.
Sometimes gerrymandering has the opposite effect. And of all the shit Republicans have done and gotten away with seems like a very small step. Still need to win and elect those who will hold Republicans accountable.
That is a lesson the Republicans in Texas are about to learn. More than a couple Texas seats that would have been safe red are vulnerable to a moderate-sized Blue Wave…especially if that wave includes rebounding and/or gains among Latinos.
Here is the thing nobody is considering though. Republicans right now are extremely unpopular so any district this coming election could be heavily skewed until the American populace does what it’s notorious for a few years later and that is forget.
I don’t think any data we get from this coming election will be reliable
republicans just need to go period. conservatives need to go back to what they were before nixon and be consistent regardless of if they are in charge or not. if the party is just we for us and against our enemies its just going to be garbage nutters.
And Dems did it legally in each case. Fuck off, Ken!
Bills have been brought up several times to make district mapping non-partisan, and/or by 3rd party independent agencies. Usually Dems bring them up and republicans vote them down or sabotage them in any way they can.
The process of approving such a process would be partisan, and agreeing on a notion of non-partisanship would be partisan. Anything that would budge the balance of power from where it is would be called partisan. We’re so far down the partisan hole.
HAHA SUCK MY NUTS KEN PAXTON
As a Texas, I’m all for Ken Paxton sucking everyone’s nuts, but why him, in particular? I feel like I might already know the answer, but I’m too overwhelmed by everything here to solve this puzzle.
Edit: reread the actual article title. Tit-for-tat with Texas. Got it. Yes, fuck us indeed.
It’s understandable. Your job as a fartographer has to be so time consuming. The sheer amount of data to pour through must be overwhelming.
to pour through
To pore through
The ones who pour through their data would be the diarrheographers, and I guarantee that you don’t wanna meet one of those.
The tit-for-tat redistricting battle began last year after Trump pressed Texas’s Republican-controlled legislature to redraw that state’s congressional maps in a bid to oust as many as five Democratic House lawmakers in the November midterm elections.
I guess that it looks like the the early gerrymandering effort may, when one includes the backlash, have wound up on the net reducing the number of seats that Republican legislators hold in the House relative to Democrats, then.
Probably would have been better for the Trump administration to have left well enough alone.
Assuming states like Texas even gerrymandered things safely. With the current approval ratings some of the districts they redrew are at a higher chance of being flipped.
I’d love to see that, but man imagine the chorus of “unfair they must have cheated!” that would erupt from the right.
I mean, they’re going to do that anyway, but still
There was gerrymandering on both sides, but definitely more in Red states. Kind of a stupid fight to start, because there was always more room to gerrymander on the blue side.
It was too fucking close, too. I’m glad it passed.
I’m also happy that almost all of Hampton Roads was very much on the YES side. Poquoson went very NO and York went somewhat NO, but even James City County and even Charles City County went YES, although James City County was the smallest margin in the entire state.
Newport News where I live was solidly YES. I’m a mod in the subreddit - the last thing I’m doing with reddit - and we got brigaded to hell from people outside the community in three threads about the vote. It was crazy.
Glad to hear that some voters have some common sense
Now if only NC could figure out how to unfuck the maps.
I found it really odd that the legislature are able to gerrymander in the first place. Why isn’t this process in control of an independent board? Some of the gerrymandered district maps are laughably corrupt.
Republicans generally vote against implementing those boards.
HAHAHA GET FUCKED MAGATS
This is a race to the bottom… Rather than trying to address the problem with legislation we’re now just cheering one side corrupting democracy over another.
This won’t end well.
That’s a whole lotta words just to say, “we take the high road!”
How’s that worked out for us so far?
Maintaining the moral high ground will not ensure you a victory over an entirely immoral enemy. One of the reasons Hitler was able to grab power is because his opponents refused to break the rules to stop him.
ABSOLUTELY!
Is it good that states are doing this? Of course not. Will red states stop/revert if blue states do the same? Of course not.
So what are our options?
- Continue taking the high ground, while the GOP actually gains seats in the House on the coattails of Trumps newly historically low approval rating (33% as of today)
- Actually fight back in ways that matter. Respond in kind to their fuckery. Do what they do every damn time they are in the minority.
I hate that it’s come to this. I like that VA’s new maps sunset, and revert to the bipartisan commission in 2030. Did any of the red states do that? Still, Trump is writing the rules. Dems & blue states are just playing by them.
Losing the moral high ground will make your victory Pyrrhic.
You can’t legislate from the moral high ground, dumbass.
You can only legislate if you WIN.
Losing period makes your fight a wasted effort.
Standing by while republicans have wantonly suppressed the vote, deleted voter rolls, and likely literally have stolen elections is what is causing all the fucking issues right now. Dems need to fight fire with fire, then if they win they can ban gerrymandering nationally.
You’re just telling me that your king will be better than their king.
Oh look, it’s that old chestnut “whataboutism”…
Swing and a miss
Democrats don’t have a king, bucko.
And yet here are the Democrats eroding the very concept of democracy by literally rigging the system to maximize votes for Democrats. How far down that road are you willing your gang to go?
Dems wanted to pass a national gerrymandering ban. trump, in his infinite wisdom, told Texas and other red states he wanted more seats and they, in an unprecedented move, redistricted their states mid-decade to placate a despot.
Democrats are countering the gerrymandering republicans started, and you are solely blaming the Democrats for wiping out an illbegotten gain by republicans.
Stop being so pathetic, man. It’s really sad to see someone bend over this far backwards for fucking Nazis.
Asking the voters to approve a voting system is now considered eroding democracy?
Do you not understand the words you’re using? Or are you just a “conservative” who is here to “just ask questions” because if you acted like this in the real world, someone would put you in a hospital while the rest of us denied seeing anything?
Tell that to the dead who kept their moral high grounds and were killed by fascists.
We’ve watched Dems ineffectually flail for 10 years. This is them actually getting something done for a change.
The Democrats introduced as their HR 1 a bill that would outlaw gerrymandering nationwide the last two cogresses where they picked the Speaker. They’ll almost certainly do so in January next year and two years later.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_the_People_Act
All Republicans have to do to end the gerrymandering in VA and CA and who knows where next year is get on board. They could even get a national voter ID rule if they really wanted.
Sadly, like Trump, the whole GOP is really bad at the jobs our tax dollars pay them for.
I have always supported a national voter id on the condition it’s paid for and people are automatically enrolled.
Republicans would never go for it.
Dems should actually run on this and then ask Republicans why they no longer support voter id
This is the correct approach. That bill is full of stuff that “everyone believes in” and should be what the Democrats hammer on every single day.
I don’t know about this effort but I believe the California bill has specific clauses to tie the California redistricting to unfair gerrymandering elsewhere.
Explicit, limited, linked retaliation, not just blind “we gotta win any way any how” is exactly how to win practically without compromising on principles.
California’s referendum-induced change returns to non-partisan redistricting in 2030. That is, it’s only set up to last for as long as Texas’s early gerrymander was.
It was presented as a counter, and Newsom said that he wouldn’t do it unless Texas went ahead with it, but technically isn’t attached to Texas’s early gerrymander. This became something of an issue when it became possible that Texas’s attempt might be overturned by courts, leaving the California counter-gerrymander intact.
Nothing has been ending well…
I’ll take some this type of response over the usual anyday.
