Virginia – This is all-time poetic justice. Liberal groups, many of whom previously claimed one of their top priorities was PASSING nonpartisan redistricting commissions, suddenly did a complete 180 and attempted to steal four Congressional seats in Virginia by spending more than $60,000,000 on a YES vote to throw out the commissions they had campaigned for five years earlier, losing all credibility in the gerrymandering fight.

In response, Congressman Ben Cline had me launch Stop the Gerrymander to run a $21,500 grassroots effort to help drive a NO vote. California had just gone through the same fight, where the YES side won by roughly 30% to steal four seats there, so the same hypocritical groups poured big money into Virginia hoping for the same result. We appreciated political guru Larry Sabato publicly praising my hiring for the effort.

I do admit I ran about $6,000 over budget, so I am personally responsible for spending almost $30,000 on Congressman Cline’s Stop the Gerrymander campaign — or about 0.05% as much as the hypocritical liberal left spent.

The thinking on the left was that, with President Donald Trump’s favorable ratings in Virginia almost as low as in California — due largely to Virginia having by far the nation’s largest federal workforce reacting to DOGE-related cuts — Virginia would follow California’s lead. The expectation was that voters would again support dismantling nonpartisan redistricting by roughly the same 64% to 36% margin in order to help Democrats gain four additional Congressional seats.

While we realized our roughly $30,000 campaign against their $60 million campaign was a long shot, the silent strategy was this: if YES won by 64% to 36%, then the Supreme Court of Virginia would likely treat that result as the overwhelming will of the people and be reluctant to strike it down, despite the serious constitutional concerns surrounding the measure.

However, if we could keep the vote close — something like 51% to 49% — then the justices would not feel they were overturning a clear mandate from voters. A narrow 51% majority would instead reflect essentially the same partisan split seen in Virginia’s 2024 Congressional races, where Democrats won roughly 51% of the vote but were seeking to engineer 91% of the Congressional seats — 10 out of 11 — instead of the current 6 out of 11. That would clearly expose the effort as a pure power grab.

Luckily, as detailed in this election-night post — Despite Late Surge, $65M Gerrymandering Barely Survives 51-49 — we did manage to hold the YES vote to 51%, and apparently that narrow margin was enough for the Supreme Court to recognize the effort for what it was and throw the case out.

So while I freely admit liberal operatives are much better than me at raising money for these efforts, their donors are now being told they spent more than $60 million to STEAL ZERO seats. In fact, the backlash has triggered retaliation from red states now seeking to reclaim seats of their own, meaning the left may actually have LOST seats overall because of this effort. They also lost the moral high ground, burned through $60 million that could have been spent on actual Congressional races, and reignited conservatives who now feel cheated by the process less than a year after coming close to quitting after losing a Governor’s race by 15 points.

The excuse left-wing donors gave for their about-face was that Republicans had supposedly rigged redistricting to gain more Congressional seats than they deserved. For many years, it is true that Republicans often held slightly more seats than they would have under a pure national popular-vote system. Part of that is because liberals are clustered much more densely in urban areas, while conservatives are spread out across suburbs and rural communities. Any political number cruncher can tell you that if you simply drew population-balanced districts randomly, Democrats would tend to win a smaller number of urban seats by overwhelming margins like 80% to 20%, while Republicans would win a larger number of geographically spread-out seats by margins such as 60% to 40%.

The other factor creating an unfair advantage for liberals if the vote were purely a national-percentage effort is their huge advantage due to weaker voting-integrity laws, such as refusing to require Voter ID.

The liberal flip-flop is not just hypocritical, it is based on a statistical LIE. During the last four cycles, it is the DEMOCRATS who have received more seats than they should have through more aggressive gerrymandering of their own, which is why some of the Indiana legislators who stopped redistricting also deserved to lose their seats.

That is why the claim that Democrats are merely “correcting” Republican gerrymandering is simply false. Since 2018, Republicans have actually been the party receiving fewer Congressional seats than their share of the national vote would suggest. Across the last four Congressional elections, Democrats averaged about a 1.6% advantage in the national House vote — driven heavily by their 8.6% margin in 2018 — which would normally translate into roughly a seven-seat edge. Instead, Democrats averaged about a nine-seat edge in the House.

While the difference is not enormous, it demonstrates that aggressive Democratic gerrymandering in Northeastern states — where Republicans are often nearly wiped out despite receiving substantial vote shares — has allowed Democrats to outperform their expected seat totals. Republicans, meanwhile, won the nationwide House vote in both 2022 and 2024 by nearly 3%, meaning that under a completely neutral redistricting system they likely would have held even larger House majorities than they do today.