Some conservatives seem to have forgotten that it wasn’t Democrats who mainstreamed cutthroat mid-decade redistricting. The president did that when he strong-armed reluctant Texas Republicans into redrawing their own state’s House map last year. (Unlike Virginians, Texans didn’t even get to vote on the matter. The state government acted unilaterally.) As ever, when given a choice between upholding a norm that makes politics a bit less ruthless and bulldozing it to maximize his own advantage, Donald Trump chose the latter.
That forced Democrats into a choice of their own: sit by and let red states game the midterm by redrawing blue districts into oblivion? Or to fight fire with fire in blue states by doing some hasty redistricting of their own? They too chose the latter: California voters passed a referendum authorizing their state legislature to produce a more Democrat-friendly House map, and now Virginians have followed suit.
Republicans whining today about last night’s result are no different from a man who starts throwing roundhouses and then, when his enemy rears back, puts on a pair of spectacles and says, “You wouldn’t hit a man with glasses, would you?” Rarely have we seen a more vivid example of the hypocrisy of the loathsome modern right, at once viciously and unabashedly ruthless yet consumed with its supposed victimization. That’s Trumpism through and through.
There are three lessons from Tuesday’s result.
‘Dominance as strategy’ fails again.
There’s a common thread between Trump’s fiasco in Iran and Republicans’ fiasco in Virginia.
Watching the returns come in last night, I thought of this Wall Street Journal story from March about advisers warning the president before the war that the enemy might close the Strait of Hormuz. “Trump acknowledged the risk,” the paper reported, but “told his team that Tehran would likely capitulate before closing the strait—and even if Iran tried, the U.S. military could handle it.”
He had no strategy to deal with a draconian yet entirely foreseeable response to his own aggression. His “strategy,” such as it was, was blind faith in his own dominance: The president plainly believes that any opponent will break if he bullies them ruthlessly enough.
Plainly and wrongly, as we’re seeing in the strait.
That was also his approach to Europe and it didn’t work in that case either. He slapped tariffs on European nations last year, tried to extort them into forfeiting Greenland to the United States, then seemed taken aback when they were unwilling to help him out with Iran. America is the world’s most powerful country and he’s the most powerful man in it, so when he wants something, he expects adversaries to comply without a fuss: That’s the extent of his “strategic” thinking.
When they don’t comply, he has no fallback plan. It’s as if he literally can’t imagine his attempts at intimidation failing, even though they fail all the time.
His approach to redistricting followed the same script. Why he thought the left would roll over and decline to retaliate after Texas went nuclear last year is unfathomable to me, even allowing for the fact that Washington Democrats are weenies, generally speaking. My guess is that Trump got the same sort of advice from political aides about redistricting that he got about the Strait of Hormuz—the enemy will escalate—and he responded in the usual way, waving it off.
Surely the enemy would cower and capitulate rather than take him on.
But Democrats didn’t, any more than the Europeans or Iranians did, and as usual Trump had no Plan B. He and other party leaders didn’t spend as much political capital as they could have to defeat the Virginia referendum, according to unhappy local Republicans. And the president overestimated his ability to compel GOP lawmakers in states like Indiana to set aside their qualms and move forward with redistricting to make him happy.
The result is an out-and-out debacle. By one estimate, Democrats momentarily stand to net more House seats from mid-decade redistricting than the GOP does. (That could change if Florida moves forward with its own redistricting scheme.) Even the supposedly red House districts that were created in Texas may not be as red in reality as the president expects, as they’re based on a dubious assumption that Hispanics who voted Republican in 2024 are still on the team.
There’s no strategic logic to any of this, just a reptilian postliberal instinct that greater ruthlessness is always the optimal choice when trying to get one’s way.
‘Dark woke’ is real.
L. Louise Lucas is the president pro tem of Virginia’s state Senate and was a key figure in getting her state’s redistricting referendum over the line. Last night, as the race was called, a tweet she sent in February went viral.
She was responding at the time to a post by Sen. Ted Cruz grousing about the supposed unfairness of Virginia’s attempt at gerrymandering. Nodding to the role Cruz’s home state of Texas had played in the process, Lucas wrote, “You all started it and we f—ing finished it.”
You can’t do better than that to summarize Democratic attitudes about the result.
After 15 months of Republican power grabs under Trump, the left is palpably delighted to have beaten the GOP at its own cutthroat game. Even the normally underwhelming Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, the House Democratic leader, sounded a Breitbart-ian yawp for partisan bloodsport in the aftermath. Vowing to aggressively contest any newly redrawn districts in Florida, he ended his victory message this way: “Maximum warfare, everywhere, all the time.”
That’s an almost lyrical synthesis of the spirit of “dark woke,” the idea that Democrats must behave more ruthlessly than they have in the past to counter a faction as corrupt and malevolent as Trump and his band of fascist chuds. Maximum warfare, everywhere, all the time.
Virginia liberals had special reason to embrace “dark woke,” in fact, beyond simply wishing to level the midterm playing field that had been tilted by Texas. The heavily Democratic northern part of the state is home to many federal employees—and former employees, as thousands have been axed since January 2025 thanks to Trump initiatives like DOGE. Revenge wasn’t just political last night; for some it was personal, as the margins in Northern Virginia attest.
“Dark woke” also helps explain why Spanberger changed course after claiming last year as a candidate that she had “no plans” to redistrict Virginia. She’s a potential national figure for her party but would have obvious liabilities in a Democratic primary, like a reputation for squishy centrism (and an eight-year stint in the CIA). Hopping aboard the revenge train on redistricting was an irresistible opportunity for her to build cred across the left-wing ideological spectrum. Democrats of all stripes desperately wanted to punch the presidential bully in the face, and she wasn’t about to block the blow.
The inescapable takeaway from the result and the left’s elation over it is that Democrats will come hard at Trump and Republicans once they regain some power in Washington—not just congressional power either, and not just next year. Right-wingers who worry that the president’s abuses of power are creating precedents that will be used against them by a Democratic executive down the line were vindicated last night, I think. Virginia is proof of concept that leftists will not take some de-escalatory high road toward Trump’s provocations when they return to the White House. They want payback.
That’s terrible for us civic-minded “both sides” Dispatch types, but if most Americans thought like Dispatch readers this country wouldn’t be the disaster it’s become. For years, right-wing populists have bayed for a “fight”—maximum political warfare, everywhere, all the time. Now they’re going to get one, according to the rules they themselves prefer.
This too might backfire.
Dispatch contributor Jessica Riedl lives in Virginia and offered a thoughtful reason for voting for the referendum. If you hate gerrymandering, you kind of had to support gerrymandering in this case, no?
“I consider this the best way to ultimately discourage mid-decade gerrymanders because it prevents the instigators from being rewarded with much more net House seats,” Riedl wrote. “And I believe this cross-state backlash will discourage this mid-decade gambit from being repeated in the future.”
That’s the logic of mutually assured destruction. By raising the cost of war to both sides, each will be deterred from initiating future hostilities. In theory.
In practice, having not one but two parties committed to maximum warfare, everywhere, all the time, makes me think further escalation is more likely than not.
Riedl’s plan could work, I suppose. Perhaps Republicans, chastened by how the Texas gambit has backfired, will reach out to Democrats at the national level to pass some sort of congressional ban on partisan redistricting. That’s the only way to solve the prisoner’s dilemma in continuing to leave the individual states to their own devices. Without a ban, eventually another solidly blue or red stronghold will succumb to the temptation to gerrymander and the country will instantly return to a Texas-versus-Virginia race to the bottom.
The problem with the Riedl scenario is that, except in extreme cases, America doesn’t do bipartisan good-government reforms anymore.
If we did, the presidential pardon power would be gone already or careering toward extinction via constitutional amendment. It isn’t. Trump abused that power during his first term but Democrats did nothing about it when they regained control of government in 2021. Joe Biden abused it before leaving office in 2025, and of course congressional Republicans have done nothing in response. Not with Trump now embarked on an unprecedented, wildly corrupt rampage of clemency for cronies.
Gerrymandering will follow the same course, almost certainly. When the smoke clears after the next Census is taken and it comes time to reapportion House delegations based on population shifts, whichever party stands to gain more from partisan redistricting will inevitably decide that a national ban on such things isn’t a good idea after all.
That party will probably be the Republicans. Red states are likely to pick up House seats from blue ones in the next reapportionment, sweetening the pot for the GOP to continue gerrymandering. And that’s not all: If Democrats win big in 2028, as seems increasingly likely, the right will be well positioned for a big backlash win of its own in the 2030 midterms. And that cycle is crucial, as state lawmakers elected that year will be the ones who draw the House maps for the next decade of congressional races.
Combine that with the disgruntlement that rural red-leaning Virginians are destined to feel toward Democrats for drawing them into blue districts under the state’s new map and we have the makings of a long-term backfire to the referendum that passed last night.
Ultimately, then, mutually assured destruction isn’t the best reason to have supported Virginia’s referendum. The best reason is much simpler: Given that the president and his party are already trying to game the next elections through gerrymandering, there’s no reason to think Democrats would have benefited in any way by defeating last night’s referendum. Taking the high road now would not have led an opponent that’s already traveling the low road to eschew such tactics going forward.
“We must act ruthlessly because the other party will surely do so when it has the chance!” is the sort of self-serving hypothetical you hear in arguments to eliminate the filibuster or pack the Supreme Court. But in the case of mid-decade gerrymandering, there’s nothing hypothetical about it. Democrats in Virginia didn’t nuke the other party’s House seats to preempt some potential future push by Republicans in Texas to do the same.
Republicans in Texas did it. They launched a first strike. And if they were willing to do that unprompted this time, no sense of propriety or “fair play” would have stopped Republicans from doing the same in 2030 even if last night’s referendum had failed.
All the result in Virginia did was give the GOP a small fig leaf to cynically hide behind when, not if, it presses its advantage in reapportionment at the start of the next decade. We wouldn’t need to be so ruthless, they’ll say, if Virginia Democrats hadn’t reacted so poorly to our earlier ruthlessness in Texas. The left hit a man with glasses. For that, it must pay.
