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In the 2026 midterm elections, redistricting seems to be the name of the game. States across the nation both red and blue are working hard to effectively gerrymander the minority right out of their delegations in a tit-for-tat battle raging across legislatures and courts. But the Virginia Supreme Court just broke the cycle, ruling 4-3 against the newly minted congressional map that was projected to flip as many as four Republican-held seats blue in November.
The decision is bad enough for Democrats from a simple and practical mathematical perspective: Gaining four seats would have clearly been better for them than not doing so. But in a week of Republican redistricting wins across the nation, this decision by the Virginia Supreme Court had to have been a particularly devastating gut punch for Old Dominion Democrats.
Virginia Court Changes the Game
On Friday, May 8, the Virginia Supreme Court overturned the results of the recent redistricting referendum. On April 21, the public voted in a special election to answer the following ballot question:
“Question: Should the Constitution of Virginia be amended to allow the General Assembly to temporarily adopt new congressional districts to restore fairness in the upcoming elections, while ensuring Virginia’s standard redistricting process resumes for all future redistricting after the 2030 census?”
According to the Virginia Department of Elections, the result was 51.69% to 48.31% – a 3.38% margin in favor of the amendment. Just over 1.6 million Virginians wanted the new gerrymandered map “to restore fairness” as a special, one-off exception to the general redistricting rules compared to just under 1.5 million who opposed. And the motivation could not be more clearly political: It was a knee-jerk reaction to the “redistricting war” started by Texas.
The Lone Star State’s new map would add potentially five seats to the GOP, while Virginia’s response would have likely cost Republicans four. Virginia’s new map had been ruled unconstitutional by a lower court less than 24 hours after it was signed into law, but Friday’s ruling represents its real death.
Just a day earlier, on May 7, Tennessee Governor Bill Lee, a Republican, signed his state’s newly minted map into law, which seems likely to result in the Volunteer State’s only US House Democrat being replaced by a Republican. Also on Thursday, the South Carolina House voted to extend its legislative session to pass a new map that could do the same to Rep. James Clyburn’s (D-SC) district. The Fifth Circuit on the same day vacated its own ruling from early 2024, which affirmed that Louisiana’s 2022 map likely violated the Voting Rights Act by having only one majority-black district. It reversed that decision on May 7 and remanded it back to the district court in light of the US Supreme Court’s ruling just a week prior on April 29 that the racially gerrymandered districts were unconstitutional.
It was this quagmire of redistricting wins for Republicans in both state legislatures and federal courts that the Virginia Supreme Court waded into to deliver such a devastating blow to Democrats. State Democrats said they would appeal the decision to the US Supreme Court, but given the current court’s ideological makeup, that appeal seems a hopeless gesture.
Meet the Justices
Virginia Supreme Court justices are elected by the General Assembly to 12-year terms and are, on paper, “nonpartisan.” However, a look at how they rule quickly shows the pattern: There are four reliably conservative justices and three liberal, and whether the ruling has been unanimous or a 4-3 split, none of them have deviated from ruling alongside their ideological comrades so far this year.
Chief Justice Cleo Elaine Powell, first elected to the Virginia Supreme Court by a Republican majority legislature in 2011 then re-elected in 2023 by a Democrat majority, authored the dissent to this opinion. She was ranked as a “Mild Democrat” by Ballotpedia’s 2020 study on state supreme court justice political bias and often leads what can generally be considered this court’s liberal bloc.
She was joined in dissent by Justices Thomas P. Mann and Junius P. Fulton III. Mann was elected by a mixed majority General Assembly in 2022, and Fulton by a Democrat-controlled one in 2025. Neither were ranked by Ballotpedia in 2020, as they weren’t on the court at the time, and at least Fulton had a reputation before his election as a fair, mild, and moderate judge. So far in 2026, however, these three have all reliably voted together – and in every split decision they’re included on, Justices Mann and Fulton sided with the chief justice in dissent against the conservative majority.
And this brings us to the conservative side of the court. Justice D. Arthur Kelsey, elected in 2015 by a Republican-led House and Senate, authored the majority opinion in this case. He was ranked by Ballotpedia’s study as “Mild Republican.” He was joined by Justices Stephen R. McCullough – who was elected by the same General Assembly in 2016 and was labeled a “Strong Republican” by Ballotpedia; Teresa M. Chafin, who was elected in 2019 by a Democrat-led legislature and ranked “Mild Republican” by Ballotpedia; and Wesley G. Russell Jr., who was selected by Democrat majorities in 2023. The four of them have routinely ruled together so far in 2026. Given how reliably these seven justices have chosen their sides, the outcome in this case should have surprised no one.
This is the court that – however any individual justice may have felt about it – dealt Democrats a devastating blow not just in Virginia, but nationwide. Does losing a gerrymandered map that would almost certainly have shifted the 6-5 Democrat majority in the state’s US House delegation to a whopping 10-1 hurt the party both locally and nationally? Of course – it’s effectively being handed four extra seats in the House only to have them snatched away at almost the last minute. And that’s what really stings. It was a practical loss, but it was an emotional one as well – insult and injury, all wrapped into one ruling.
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