What the Virginia vote says about Democrats in 2026
The Democrats are practicing “maximum warfare, everywhere, all the time.” That could be especially important in the South.
In 2016, the former North Carolina state lawmaker David Lewis explained his logic for the state’s gerrymandered Congressional voting maps like this:
“I propose that we draw the maps to give a partisan advantage to 10 Republicans and three Democrats, because I do not believe it’s possible to draw a map with 11 Republicans and two Democrats.”
Lewis was ahead of the curve, it seems. A decade has passed and that spirit—let’s call it the spirit of blatancy—is thriving.
What point is there in calling out the corruption of the openly corrupt? We live in a new era of partisanship, where being crooked is a shield and a sword.
It was inevitable that Republicans would wind up on the wrong end of that sword.
On Tuesday, voters in Virginia, one of the few Southern states with a Democratic plurality, voted to approve their own gerrymandered map, which will likely give Democrats all but one of the state’s seats in Congress.
They are responding to Republican gerrymanders in Texas, North Carolina, and elsewhere.
Billy Ball
Call it revenge or call it a balancing of the scales. But whatever you do, you can’t call Democrats suckers for once.
Finally, Democrats seem to understand what time it is.
On Wednesday, the left-leaning voting rights attorney Marc Elias said the Virginia vote proves that Democrats “understand the failure of the Biden era's adherence to bipartisanship and antiquated norms. They refuse to play by a different set of rules from Republicans.”
Democratic Leader Hekeem Jeffries called it “maximum warfare, everywhere, all the time.”
I can’t tell you how the strategy will play out. But as The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer wrote Wednesday, “Republicans seem to have expected that Democrats would continue to follow rules they had long since enthusiastically abandoned.”
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