Democrats celebrated on Wednesday Winning the election in Virginia This could put them slightly ahead in the national redistricting competition President Donald Trump raised In an attempt to maintain his party’s majority in the House of Representatives in this year’s midterm elections, but it will not be the final round.
The Virginia Supreme Court will now decide whether Democratic lawmakers violated procedural rules when they referred a constitutional amendment to the ballot authorizing the creation of new U.S. House districts that could help Democrats win up to four additional seats in the state. If so, that could invalidate the map that voters narrowly approved on Tuesday.
What happens next in Florida will also be important.
The Republican-controlled state Legislature is scheduled to meet in a special session next week called by GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis in part to draw a new map to expand the party’s congressional majority there. The US Supreme Court is scheduled to issue its opinion by the end of June in the Louisiana case that could lead to this Repeal a key provision of the Voting Rights Act It is leading to a redrawing of political maps across the South, although almost all of that will not happen until 2028.
After voters passed the Virginia amendment, Democrats can tentatively claim they gained 10 seats nationally from mid-decade redistricting, compared with the nine claimed by Republicans. Even if things swing back in the GOP’s favor, the net result for Trump’s campaign will at best be an incremental increase in the number of GOP-leaning House seats at a time when his approval ratings are falling and Republicans are increasingly concerned about losing control of Congress in November.
“We have succeeded in thwarting Trump’s attempt to hijack the entire midterm election,” said John Bisognano, Chairman of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee.
Many Republicans agreed.
“The GOP will now lose net seats across the country. If you want to pick a fight, at least win it,” Ari Fleischer, a spokesman for President George W. Bush, posted on social media site X after the vote in Virginia. “This was all foreseeable and avoidable. We should not have started this fight.”
Adam Kincaid, executive director of the National Republican Redistricting Fund, said it was too early to declare one party victorious.
“It is an ongoing process with many legal challenges pending, and it is too early to make comprehensive statements about the final outcome,” he said.
Trump on Wednesday tried to undermine the Virginia result by leveling baseless accusations of fraud similar to the ones he made next Losing the 2020 presidential election. He called Virginia’s vote “rigged” and “crooked” in a post on his social media site and added: “Let’s see if the courts fix this travesty of justice.”
Redistricting typically occurs every 10 years after each census, unless ordered by a court. But last summer, Trump pushed to redraw statehood in Texas, urging the state’s Republican-controlled legislature to add more support. Five winnable seats in the House of Representatives For his party. Trump then began pressuring other Republican-run states to follow suit. Since then, Missouri, North Carolina and Ohio have created more GOP-leaning seats in addition to Texas.
Democrats began to respond, though they were more restrained because many Democratic-controlled states had maps drawn by independent commissions rather than by lawmakers and governors.
To counter Texas, California’s Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom pushed the Democratic-controlled Legislature to put a redistricting initiative on the ballot last fall. After the voters It was approved overwhelminglyThis measure will replace the map approved by the committee with a map that could win Democrats five seats.
Democrats regained legislative power and the governor’s office in November in Virginia and moved quickly to replicate California’s move with a more aggressive redistricting plan. It replaces the congressional map imposed by the court after the last census that resulted in a 6-5 Democratic lead with a map that could allow Democrats to win up to 10 seats.
“We will not allow anyone to tilt the system without a response,” state Senate President L. Luiz Lucas said at a news conference Wednesday.
In Washington, the leader of Democrats in the US House of Representatives, Hakeem Jeffries, of New York, warned Republicans in Florida, who have openly expressed concern about the redrawing of their district boundaries and the possibility that their primary voters will be distributed too thinly before an election that appears to be tilted against them.
“Our message to Republicans in Florida now is: Go and find out,” Jeffries said.
House Majority Forward, the nonprofit arm of a super PAC aligned with House Democrats, has spent nearly $60 million to fend off Republican redistricting efforts. About $40 million of that was allocated to the Virginia campaign.
Another hurdle in Florida is an anti-gerrymandering constitutional amendment that state voters approved in 2010. Any new Florida map would likely spark major lawsuits, even though six of the state’s seven Supreme Court justices were appointed by Republicans.
Virginia’s move comes with its own legal issues. Republicans challenged the process Democrats used to put the measure on the ballot, and the state Supreme Court chose to wait for the vote before even scheduling arguments in the case. It is unclear when a ruling could be issued.
“The ballot box was not the final word here,” Terry Kilgore, Virginia House Republican leader, said in a statement after Tuesday’s vote. “Serious legal questions remain about the wording of this referendum and the process used to present it to voters.”
The largest legal wild card held by the United States Supreme Court. A conservative majority could ignore a requirement under the Voting Rights Act that mapmakers in districts with large minority populations draw districts most favorable to electing minority candidates.
This requirement created many majority and minority seats in Congress, especially in the South. Without this, Republicans in conservative states may be able to further reduce the number of US House seats that Democrats can win.
But it is unlikely that any state other than Louisiana, which filed the suit that will be decided by the Supreme Court, will be able to amend the lines of Congress in time for November even if the court strikes down that provision, known as Section II. That’s because the November elections are already officially underway in most states, and the deadlines for filing candidates — and in some cases, primaries — have already passed.
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AP Congressional Correspondent Lisa Mascaro and AP Writer Leah Askarinam in Washington contributed to this report.