U.S. President Donald Trump checks his hair before sitting down for a podcast interview at the Varsity restaurant, in Rome, Georgia, U.S., February 19, 2026. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque
Dispatch writer Michael Warren says Republicans in Virginia are sounding the alarm about an upcoming vote that could redraw the state’s congressional districts before the November midterm and erase four of five Republican seats in the House.
Former Republican state attorney general Jason Miyares recently warned his fellow Republicans at a group meeting to fight Democrats’ “egregious gerrymander.”
“They're splitting into four districts the Shenandoah Valley,” said Miyares, who just recently watched Republicans in his state suffer big losses last November. “… [If] this map passes, you're going to have five members of Congress from Virginia all living within a 20-mile radius of each other — all in Northern Virginia.”
But Warren said Miyares is “conspicuously” leaving a certain somebody out of the conversation.
“It was [President Donald] Trump who began the push last year for Republican-majority state legislatures to draw new congressional districts to give the GOP a boost in the midterms,” said Warren. “Texas led the way, passing a new map in August 2025 designed to give the state five more Republican House seats, surviving legal challenges all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.”
And Republican majorities in Missouri and North Carolina hopped aboard the Texas bandwagon by also redrawing more favorable mid-decade House maps.
“But all this spawned a predictable response from Democratic-run states,” said Warren. “California led the counterattack, with Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom backing a ballot referendum to redraw the state’s map to offset the gains Republicans would get in Texas. An overwhelming majority of voters passed that referendum in November. Virginia is simply the next battleground for a redistricting war started by Trump”
“Wrong,” said Miyares, when Warren reminded him that Texas started the whole shebang. “The first state to do mid-decade redistricting was New York, and it is a frustration of mine that the legacy media has never mentioned that in their reporting of this.”
“That’s technically true, but it’s also a convenient sidestep to the big Trump-shaped question,” said Warren. “New York’s redistricting was the end of a years-long battle dating back to the regular post-2020-Census redistricting in New York.”
In truth, New York’s independent redistricting commission merely missed a deadline to deliver maps and the legislature drew its own after the state supreme court ordered it. While opportunistic, Warren said New York Democrats have "a different provenance than this current exercise in tit-for-tat gerrymandering.”
Worse, Warren said the five new districts meant to pad Republican numbers in Texas may not even end up all going for the GOP, while California’s gerrymander could deliver a net positive for Democrats. And Trump’s effort to bully the Republican Indiana state Senate into embracing mid-decade redistricting failed.
So, even though Miyares isn’t directly involved in the massive gerrymandering blowback, Warren said “thanks to Trump’s miscalculation of power politics, the commonwealth’s GOP voters may be stuck with the consequences.”
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