How Democrats Pivoted on Redistricting

BY TARINI PARTI AND ELIZA COLLINS

Backstage at a rally in the final days before Abigail Spanberger’s election to be governor of Virginia, Barack Obama approached Don Scott, the speaker of the state’s House of Delegates, and said he would back another political fight: Virginia’s redrawing of its congressional maps to help boost Democrats’ chances in the midterm elections.

The encouragement was part of Obama’s evolution on redistricting. The former president, who had long been critical of gerrymandering for partisan gain, hasn’t just shifted his stance to accommodate redrawing maps temporarily, but has gone all in on the effort. While campaigning for Spanberger in November, Obama was also lending his support to a redistricting effort in California, which would lead to new maps seeking to eliminate up to five GOP congressional seats.

“He implied to me he’s going to be there. That’s all I needed, it’s done,” Scott said in an interview following an election this past week in which Virginia voters narrowly approved a measure to redraw the state’s congressional map ahead of the midterms. “He put the battery in my back, let’s go.”

The new map seeks to change the state’s congressional delegation from six House Democrats and five Republicans, to 10 Democrats and one Republican. It comes as both parties try to redraw congressional maps in their favor ahead of the 2026 midterm elections. President Trump kicked off the effort last year by urging Texas lawmakers to redraw their maps, but some Republicans now worry it has backfired as Democrats in other states have shown a willingness to counter.

“What they did last Tuesday is take Virginia from the least gerrymandered state to the most severely gerrymandered state in the nation,” said Jeff Ryer, chairman of the Virginia Republican Party. “The former president was against gerrymandering before he was for it. We were more than happy to point out his against position which he relinquished.”

From redistricting to more hardball negotiations on Capitol Hill that forced two government shutdowns and a continuing lapse in funding for the Department of Homeland Security, Democrats are letting go of taking the moral high ground against Trump in favor of engaging in brass-knuckle politics.

“Democrats finally are standing up to defend ourselves,” Scott said. Republicans “thought we would do what we always do and have these sanctimonious, self-righteous con versations, virtue signal and not do anything and we didn’t do that this time. These are a new type of Democrats.”

First in California, then in Virginia, Obama, those close to him say, has tried to balance using his voice judiciously with an increasing need to use his platform to push back against Trump. The former president views Trump’s demands on GOP state legislatures to pursue unusual mid-decade redistricting as an attack on democracy. (Democrats and Republicans have for years engaged in gerrymandering after the decennial census.) Obama views the Democratic response as appropriate in an emergency—as long as it is approved by voters and is temporary.

He became comfortable with the approach before last year’s Prop 50 redistricting effort in California, which Democrats won handily. California Gov. Gavin Newsom knew he could be successful if he could get Obama on board.

In conversations with the former president and his team, the California governor and his advisers stressed the new map would be temporary and decided on by voters in a ballot initiative, people familiar with the discussions said. Obama became convinced that while independent redistricting remained his long-term goal, extraordinary measures were needed in extraordinary circumstances, those people said.

Polling conducted by Newsom’s advisers showed that Obama wasn’t only overwhelmingly popular among Democrats in the state, but also independents, advisers said. They went all in, putting $16 million behind ads featuring Obama’s endorsement of the ballot measure in the closing days. The measure passed overwhelmingly, giving the liberal state five more seats to offset redistricting efforts launched by Trump in red states.

“We had to have a more robust response than an op-ed and doing some interviews and bemoaning what Republicans did in Texas,” said Eric Holder, a former attorney general under Obama who founded an organization that pushes for fair congressional maps and helped get Obama engaged in the elections. “The reality is we have to save our democracy now if we want to ultimately heal it.

Democrats ended up winning in Virginia by just three percentage points. Republicans said the margin was a good sign for them given the state had just voted for a Democratic governor in November by more than 15 percentage points.

Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, the Democrats’ House leader, spent much of the past year organizing for the effort including meeting with state lawmakers and rallying voters all over the country. Groups aligned with Jeffries invested more than $38 million into the Virginia effort.

After Democrats won the measure, Jeffries declared: “Maximum warfare, everywhere, all the time.”

Former President Barack Obama with Abigail Spanberger, then the Democratic gubernatorial candidate for Virginia, last fall.

STEFANI REYNOLDS/ BLOOMBERG NEWS