It’s a ridiculous idea: temporarily revert to hyper-partisan reapportionment just six years after Virginia voters, weary of its abuses, put an independent bipartisan commission in charge of drawing fairer, more sensible lines.

Virginia voters are being asked to backtrack on a noble choice they made in 2020. Under a bizarre new map proposed by Democratic majorities that rule the General Assembly, Republicans could shrink from five of Virginia’s 11 U.S. House seats to just one.

To enable that, Virginians would have to ratify a state constitutional amendment in a referendum next month that momentarily suspends the independent Virginia Redistricting Commission that took decades of work to bring to life. In its place would be a brutally partisan reapportionment that makes the most notorious gerrymandering of yore seem quaint.

It’s madness — a highly contagious and virulent strain of madness engineered last summer in the laboratory of MAGA chicanery that is Texas, and released upon the body politic at the urging of MAGA’s leader, Donald Trump.

With Trump’s popularity cratering, the president exhorted GOP-ruled states to redraw their congressional districts to purge nearly all Democratic-held seats halfway through the decade of the 2020s rather than await the 2030 census.

This had nothing to do with population shifts or proportional representation. It’s a cynical hedge against an increasingly likely Democratic sweep of Congress this fall and the certainty that a Democratic House and Senate will launch one damning investigation after another into scams, scandals and coverups in Trump’s second White House term.

Lone Star Republicans eagerly raised their hands and said, “I’m your huckleberry!”

A redistricting designed to give five Democratic-held Texas U.S. House seats to the GOP cleared the Texas House on a party-line 88-52 vote. Then the state Senate did the same, also on partisan lines. On Aug. 29, the nation’s second most-populous state was carved into a new map with geopolitical distortions resembling a Rorshach test when Gov. Greg Abbott, an unfailing Trump footman, signed it into law.

Thus commenced America’s race to the bottom. The nation’s most populous state, deep blue California, responded with a map designed to flip five GOP-held seats.

Republican states are painting their districts red; Democratic ones like Virginia are painting theirs blue. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio and Utah have joined California and Texas in enacting new, partisan districts. Virginia is among four where legislation to do the same is pending. Indiana and Florida are considering it, both quite late to the game. Alabama, Louisiana, North Dakota and Wisconsin await court rulings or are in litigation that could force mid-cycle remapping.

For a huge swath of the electorate, this raises many questions with no good answers.

Voters, already exhausted, confused and disenchanted, didn’t want yet another rip in the fabric of American civic life. The latest polling shows most voters here prefer our current redistricting process, not the chaotic proposed remapping that’s being pitched to them now.

Tens of millions now must reorient themselves to unfamiliar elected officials and candidates in strange, misshapen new districts in which communities separated by several hours’ drive share little in common economically, historically or culturally.

Is all this really necessary?

In Virginia, where Trump is winless as a candidate and has been an albatross for Republicans in every state election when he’s been in office or on the ballot, Democrats might be able to achieve their goals under the existing congressional lines, said Mark J. Rozell, a political science professor at George Mason University and dean of its Schar School of Policy and Government.

“With the typical midterm reaction against the party in the White House and the fast-declining public approval of this president, Democrats are well-positioned to pick up seats without going through a redistricting process that will just set in motion other such efforts when they are not in power,” he said. “They might even come close to what they’re aiming to get by redistricting.”

Also, a short-term fix may have adverse long-term consequences, Rozell noted. In politics, as in physics, every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Something this drastic sets a precedent that invites in-kind retaliation later, when Republicans might control state government wall-to-wall.

Such a tit-for-tat escalation could doom independent redistricting, which Democrats once overwhelmingly embraced.

“I get it that this has become somewhat analogous to an arms race and that the Democrats don’t want to disarm,” he said. “On the other hand, there’s no denying that what the Democrats are proposing to do flies in the face of the position most of them took five years ago, which was very principled.”

Like a broad swath of Virginians, I find the GOP provocation and the Democrats’ response dispiriting.

I understand the Democrats’ argument. In the rabid partisanship ahead of November’s desperate, win-at-all-costs midterm election, expecting them not to respond to Texas Republicans’ naked power grab would be akin to expecting Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to greet Vladimir Putin and his invading Russian army at the gates of Kyiv with the key to the city.

The guardrails of civic and individual decency that once bounded acceptable political conduct are gone. Witness Trump’s seething, unhinged, ego-glutting litany of insults and grievances last Tuesday night that, at 107 minutes, was history’s longest State of the Union speech. (Virginia’s Democratic governor, Abigail Spanberger, delivered a scathing rebuttal that countered much of Trump’s vitriol.)

If Trump’s purpose was to further segregate Americans into hostile tribes and destabilize national cohesiveness, he succeeded.

I don’t know how this all ends. Nobody does. The Virginia Supreme Court has yet to take up Democratic appeals of two rulings by a Tazewell County judge in lawsuits Republicans filed to stop the referendum.

Nor do I know how — or even whether — I will vote in this referendum. I suspect I’m not alone.

I know without question that this fight has produced a malicious strain of politics in a state once known for respectful public discourse — or at least the veneer of it. I know I miss who we used to be.

This is primary season and candidates have to double down on what the truest of your party’s true believers truly believe.

Primary season begins as early voting kicks off Friday and Virginians start shaping the 2025 ballot

The common logic is that you steer as far as you can to the right (for Republicans) or left (among Democrats) to rouse their base voters until they’re ready to chew barbed wire and spit out roofing nails.

Then, after the preseason scrimmage is over, it’s time to tack back toward the center — where the dispositive mass of Virginia’s electorate has repeatedly proved it resides — and, if you still can, appear less the wild-eyed zealot and more the measured, moderate and sane candidate of November.

But something weird is happening this year: folks with no primary opponent seem locked in primary mode, especially within the GOP, where the statewide nominations are already settled.

On the Democratic side, the only statewide candidate without a primary fight is former U.S. Rep. Abigail Spanberger, who has a bye into the November governor’s election. She and Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears, who is unopposed for the Republican nomination, will contend for history’s distinction as the first woman governor in Virginia’s more than 400 years.

There are a half-dozen Democrats — state Sens. Aaron Rouse of Virginia Beach and Ghazala Hashmi of Chesterfield County, former Richmond Mayor Levar Stoney, Prince William County School Board member Babur Lateef, lawyer and labor leader Alex Bastani and career federal prosecutor Victor Salgado — vying for lieutenant governor. None are known statewide and it’s anyone’s guess where that roulette ball lands. The victor will take on Republican John Reid, Virginia’s first openly gay statewide nominee who survived a homophobic attempt to blackmail him off the ticket that backfired spectacularly on the top echelon of Virginia’s GOP.

The GOP’s disgraceful bid to sandbag its openly gay lieutenant governor nominee

In the Democrats’ attorney general sweepstakes, Jay Jones, a former assistant attorney general in the District of Columbia and former House of Delegates member from Norfolk, is battling Henrico County Commonwealth’s Attorney Shannon Taylor. The winner will oppose Republican Jason Miyares, who is running for reelection.

The GOP nominees have the luxury of sniping at these down-ticket Democrats as they go after one another hammer and tongs until the June 17 primary. But the Democrats share a unifying theme. Each promises to shield Virginia from the varied predations of the Trump White House, whether it be reproductive or LGBTQ rights, mass layoffs of Virginia’s large federal workforce or protecting Medicaid, the federal-state program that provides health care for the poor.

Va. GOP congressman’s scrutiny on federal cuts, job losses needs company from other Republicans

That messaging is unlikely to change much after the primary, with good reason: Trump is historically toxic in Virginia. Every time he has either been in office or on the ballot, Republicans have paid the price in Virginia elections.

Trump himself is 0-3 in the commonwealth, losing to Hillary Clinton by 5 percentage points in 2016, Joe Biden by 10 in 2020, and Kamala Harris last November by 6.

Beginning in 2015 — when he descended the golden escalator into the lobby of his eponymous Manhattan skyscraper to announce his first presidential bid — and for the next five years, Virginia Republicans lost. They lost majorities in the state’s U.S. House delegation. They lost every election for statewide office. They lost control of the House of Delegates and the Virginia Senate.

By 2020, Democrats owned every statewide lever of elective political power in Virginia for the first time since 1968.

As soon as Trump was gone, GOP fortunes improved. In 2021, Republicans swept all three statewide executive offices and retook the House of Delegates majority. The ticket was led by Glenn Youngkin, a wealthy former hedge fund executive running for governor in the first election of his life as a fresh-faced, kinder, gentler Republican who judiciously distanced himself from Trump but is now a reliable Trump lieutenant.

Now, Trump is back, and if you thought the first term gave Virginia Democrats plenty to chew on, version 2.0 — supercharged by modern-day Croesus and chainsaw-wielding grim reaper of livelihoods Elon Musk — serves up a banquet.

And that puts this year’s GOP slate in a pickle.

Sure, they’re free to make Democrats account for years of out-of-control federal spending, and a border and immigration policy that the party couldn’t or wouldn’t address when it had the chance. Yes, the GOP is advancing the attack — as it has done for years, and with considerable success last year — that violent crime is on the rise (it’s not) and that “illegals” are driving it (they’re certainly not).

But what they’ve been unwilling to do so far, even though there are no nomination battles to wage, is put distance between themselves and Trump.

Republican candidates who were once stalwart globalist free-traders now sit either in meek acquiescence or voice throaty support for daunting tariffs the president has imposed unilaterally without the concurrence of Congress.

Not one has registered a notable protest over Trump unleashing Musk to eviscerate the federal workforce and curb federal government contracts, even though Northern Virginia has the richest concentration of them in the world with the possible exception of its nextdoor neighbor, the District of Columbia.

These candidates sit mute as the president openly defies the 14th Amendment to the Constitution which guarantees citizenship to all persons born on U.S. soil. They turn blind eyes when masked, unbadged federal agents, without warrants, arrest foreigners — both those here legally and illegally — and try to hustle them outside our borders, often without the due process of law.

Those aren’t conservative vs. liberal issues. Those have been foundational principles of our republic for nearly 250 years! They’re as elemental as our right to face our accusers in court, the right to be free from unwarranted government intrusion into our homes, the right to free speech and religion and the right to keep and bear arms.

But they dare not dispute their president who holds a death grip on what was once the Republican Party and now presumes a measure of almost imperial authority, unbounded by the courts, the Constitution, Congress — and certainly not centuries-old norms of decency and civility. They need look no farther into history than former Rep. Bob Good, R-Va., for a sobering lesson on the consequences of displeasing Trump.

Good, however, was felled in last year’s 5th Congressional District primary by Trump acolyte John McGuire. As Reid convincingly proved, the 2025 GOP statewide ticket is locked in, there are no primaries, and it’s time to move on.

Knowing that, let’s see if Republicans Earle-Sears, Reid and Miyares can reconnect with their party’s longtime creed and muster the character it takes to speak frankly about what Virginia voters — including persuadable moderates and more than a few Republicans — already recognize as the Trump administration’s gross abuses.

That would be so refreshing. It’s also the only hope the GOP has for avoiding a Virginia wipeout this November.

Virginia Mercury is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Virginia Mercury maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Samantha Willis for questions: info@virginiamercury.com.