Virginia voters approve pro-Democrat congressional map

What happened

Voters in Virginia on Tuesday backed a new congressional map that could flip as many as four Republican-held seats, giving Democrats a boost in November’s midterm elections. Democrats currently hold six of Virginia’s 11 House seats. The redistricting referendum, approved 51.5% to 48.5%, endorses a 10-1 map passed by the Democratic-led General Assembly that would remain in effect until 2030.

Who said what

The new Virginia map put Democrats “slightly ahead in the national mid-decade gerrymandering wars,” Politico said, an outcome “few thought possible when President Donald Trump picked the fight by pushing Texas Republicans to redraw their map last summer.” Virginia voters told pollsters “they generally opposed partisan gerrymandering,” The Washington Post said, but “many said they were willing to approve it for a limited time to send an extraordinary message to the White House.”

Trump sat out of the campaign until the end. “This is really a country election,” he told a tele-rally on Monday. Democrats did not “roll over and play dead” in the gerrymander fight, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) said in a statement. “When they go low, we hit back hard.”

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What next?

The Virginia Supreme Court is still considering GOP challenges that would “make the referendum results meaningless,” The Associated Press said. And Florida’s GOP-led Legislature is meeting next week to consider a new map “targeting as many as five” Democratic seats, CNN said, though that effort “faces several obstacles of its own.”