When the GOP does it, it's "gerrymandering to destroy Democracy": When Democrats do it, it's "redistricting to save Democracy." But however positively the media tried to frame Democratic Party machinations in Virginia, it didn't work.

There is a lot of noise around the Virginia Supreme Court’s ruling on the state’s attempted congressional redistricting do-over, but the basic story is not hard to understand.

This was a Democratic gerrymander, passed by referendum, killed on state constitutional process grounds.

The voters said yes. The court said the legislature had no lawful right to ask the question that way.

It’s easy to lose sight of that distinction because Democrats are already framing this as a court “silencing” voters. Virginia Attorney General Jay Jones said the decision “silences the voices of the millions of Virginians who cast their ballots in every corner of the Commonwealth.” 

Conveniently, that argument, however emotion, skips completely over the central legal issue.

The question before the court was not whether Virginians voted for the new map. They did.

The question was whether the General Assembly followed the Virginia Constitution before putting that proposed constitutional amendment on the ballot. According to the state’s highest court, it did not.

And the court was not shy about what this was. 

In the ruling issued this week, the opening sentence described the proposed amendment as one that “authorizes partisan gerrymandering of congressional districts in the Commonwealth.” So no, this was not some neutral reform. It was not democracy in its purest form. 

It was a partisan attempt to redraw Virginia’s congressional map in time for the 2026 midterms.

And it failed.

Virginia currently has an 11-seat congressional delegation split six Democrats to five Republicans. The proposed new map could have turned that into something closer to ten Democrats and one Republican. In a state where Donald Trump still won roughly 46 percent of the vote, that is not representation. That is a open and revolting attempt to disenfranchise scores of conservative Virginia voters.

Republicans do this too, of course. Texas started a fresh round of mid-decade redistricting last year. California responded. Other states started looking for their own angles. This is now part of the national House majority fight. Both parties understand that a handful of seats can decide who controls Congress.

But “the other side did it first” is not a constitutional argument. It is a political one. A partisan arguement.

Virginia has a specific process for changing its Constitution. It is supposed to be slow. That is the point. The General Assembly has to pass a proposed amendment once, then there must be an intervening House of Delegates election, then the newly elected legislature has to pass it again. Only after that do voters get the final referendum.

This gives voters two chances to weigh in. First, they can vote for or against delegates after seeing where those politicians stand on the amendment. Then they can vote directly on the amendment itself.

Democrats tried to compress that process, probably in an attempt to shift the odds of a Congressional blue wave in November.

The first legislative vote happened on October 31, 2025. But early voting in the House of Delegates election had already started on September 19. By the time the General Assembly took that first vote, more than 1.3 million Virginians had already cast ballots — about 40 percent of the total vote.

Democrats argued that this was fine because Election Day itself was November 4. In other words, they wanted the court to treat the election as if it had not really happened yet, even though more than a million people had already voted.

It was logic as twisted as a pretzel. The court did not buy it.

The majority said the constitutional requirement of an intervening election cannot mean “four days after the first legislative vote, even though 40 percent of voters have already cast their ballots.” If voters are supposed to have a meaningful opportunity to respond to a proposed amendment, they cannot do that before the amendment exists.

This is the part Democrats will want to describe as technical. It is not technical. It goes directly to the purpose of the amendment process.

A legislature should not be able to drop a constitutional amendment into the middle of an election that is already underway and then pretend voters had a full chance to react. That is especially true when the proposed amendment would change the rules for congressional elections just months before the midterms.

Justice D. Arthur Kelsey put it neatly: “While the Commonwealth is free by its lights to do the right thing for the right reason, the Rule of Law requires that it be done the right way.”

That is the whole case.

The dissent had a real argument. Chief Justice Cleo Powell argued that “election” should mean Election Day, not the entire early-voting period. That is the cleaner formal argument, and it is easy to see why Democrats prefer it.

But in the real world, early voting is voting. Those ballots count. Those voters do not get a second chance because the legislature acted late. If the Constitution requires an election between the first and second legislative votes, then the election cannot already be almost halfway finished before the first vote happens.

The referendum cannot cure that defect. Voters can approve a lawful constitutional amendment. They cannot magically make an unlawful process lawful after the fact.

That is why the court killed the map.

Politically, this is a major win for Republicans. No way to spin that. Democrats were hoping Virginia would help offset Republican gains from redistricting elsewhere. Now the old 6–5 map stays in place for 2026, and Democrats lose one of their best opportunities to manufacture several new House seats.

The larger lesson is simple: if Democrats want to call themselves defenders of democracy, they cannot keep trying to bend the machinery of elections whenever the math looks bad. Voters matter. So does the Constitution.

Virginia Democrats got their referendum. They may have won their battle in the court of public opinion.

But the war was lost when they did not get to keep the gerrymander.

(Contributing writer, Brooke Bell)