On Monday, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 along atypical lines that Virginia Republicans lacked the ability to appeal a case that saw a lower court strike down their state House gerrymander for racial discrimination. That lower court had drawn its own nonpartisan districts instead (shown at the top of this post), and as a result, Virginia will enjoy fairer elections for the state House in this November's elections. The new maps are also more favorable to Democrats, who need to pick up just two seats this fall to win back the chamber for the first time in two decades.
With conservative Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch joining liberal Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the court's decision didn't resolve the case on the merits. However, by rejecting the GOP's right to appeal, the Supreme Court allowed the lower court’s ruling to stand.
This case centered on the GOP's use of hard-and-fast population thresholds to ensure black voters could elect their preferred candidates—that is to say, black Democrats—under the Voting Rights Act. The GOP admitted to using an arbitrary target that required every such district to have a black population of at least 55%.
However, that mark was considerably greater than what it actually takes in practice for black voters to elect their candidates of choice, because in Virginia, a sufficiently large minority of white voters will support those same candidates. But Republicans deliberately used this too-high threshold because it meant that they could pack more black voters into a smaller number of districts—and therefore reduce the black population in neighboring districts. That attempt to reduce black political power, the courts found, violated the Constitution.
After a federal district court initially upheld the map, the Supreme Court vacated that decision in 2017 and told the lower court to redecide that case under a different legal standard that was more favorable to the plaintiffs. The district court subsequently struck down 11 districts in June of 2018. After Republican legislators failed to pass a replacement map, that court implemented its own nonpartisan version that redrew 25 of the chamber’s 100 districts in central and southeastern Virginia. (To remedy the unconstitutional districts, some neighboring districts also had to be adjusted.)
Daily Kos Elections has calculated the results of the 2016 presidential election and the 2017 gubernatorial election for each district on the new map, and our data indicates the GOP's 51-49 majority is highly vulnerable heading into November. Under the old lines, Hillary Clinton won just 51 seats, but under the new map, she carried 56.
And as the map at the top of this post illustrates, 11 Republicans hold districts that voted for Democrat Ralph Northam for governor two years ago. Seven of those same seats also voted for Clinton in 2016. No Democrat holds a seat that went Republican in either race, meaning Democrats have a sizable number of targets they can flip in their quest for a majority and only have to play defense in a few districts.
Thanks to their illegal gerrymander, Republicans just barely eked out a House majority despite Democratic candidates winning more votes statewide in 2017. Under the new court-ordered districts, by contrast, black voters and the Democrats they typically support will have a much greater chance to translate their votes into a more equitable share of seats. That means black voters will have their rights fully realized, boosting the chances that Virginia will turn blue this fall.
