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In Virginia Redistricting Win, Democrats Play Hardball to Thwart Trump
“We cannot bring a stick to a knife fight”: Democrats are increasingly open to extreme measures, including gerrymandering, when the stakes are high.
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Signs in support of the Virginia redistricting referendum at a polling location at Nottingham Elementary School in Arlington, Va., on Tuesday.
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Win McNamee/Getty Images
By
Kellen Browning
April 22, 2026,
5:00 a.m. ET
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Democrats’ success in pushing through one of the country’s most aggressively gerrymandered congressional maps on Tuesday in Virginia represented the latest example of the party’s willingness to take the gloves off as it seeks to win back control of Congress and thwart President Trump’s agenda.
It was a stark reversal for a party that has decried partisan gerrymandering for years. But Democrats said that the new map, which could flip as many as four Republican-held seats blue, was necessary to counter similar G.O.P. efforts in Texas and other states.
Their new mantra: It’s time to play hardball.
“While many expected Democrats to roll over and play dead, we did the opposite,” Hakeem Jeffries, the House Democratic leader from New York, said in a statement after The Associated Press called the race. “Democrats did not step back. We fought back. When they go low, we hit back hard.”
The party’s newly combative approach extends beyond redistricting as it has felt a new urgency to regain power in Washington. Despite their qualms over dark money,
Democrats are nowadays more reliant on it
than Republicans. And on Capitol Hill, they have adopted an uncompromising approach to spending negotiations, forcing a partial government shutdown earlier this year after they refused to fund immigration enforcement operations without new restrictions on federal agents’ tactics.
All of it amounts to a new openness among Democrats — spurred on by angry constituents demanding more forceful opposition to Mr. Trump — to reverse their opposition to political tactics they once considered bad governance. And none has been more head-spinning than the Virginia gerrymander, which transforms a nearly evenly divided 11-member congressional delegation into one with only one surefire Republican seat.
Proponents framed the initiative as a less than ideal but very necessary rebuttal to a gerrymandering war kicked off by Republicans. The measure allows for the “temporary” adoption of a new map, returning control of the process to an independent commission in 2031.
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