Virginia’s Redistricting Ruling Is Peak Darwin-Era Politics

Winning is everything when everything is existential.

Scruples are for sissies.

That’s the message that’s been blaring for ten years straight, like a fire alarm that will never turn off, no matter how many fire fighters rush into battle to extinguish the inferno. It rages on and on, and those of us nostalgic for a more innocent, honorable political age need to get over it.

(Ekin Kizilkaya/iStock)

The latest sign, if you’re looking for signs, is the Virginia Supreme Court throwing out the new House map voters approved last month to counter Republican gerrymanders in other states by adding four Democratic seats. The court reinstated congressional maps (favoring Democrats 6-5).

Still, the Virginia attorney general said right after the ruling that “we are evaluating every legal pathway forward to defend the will of the people and protect the integrity of Virginia’s elections.” Later on Friday, he and other leading Virginia Democrats said they intended to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Partisan and racial redistricting dictated by state legislatures is running rampant in Republican states, unobstructed by courts, after Texas lawmakers kicked it off at the request of President Donald Trump. Only blue states — California and Virginia — put the question before voters. Only Virginia has been thwarted by a state court. And only since January has Virginia had a Democratic attorney general.

That would be Jay Jones, one of two politicians I wrote about six months ago in an essay headlined “How much scandal is too much scandal?” I was uneasy about shocking texts Jones had sent a few years ago and about Maine Democrat Graham Platner’s Nazi-ish tattoo and offensive social media posts — also from years ago.

But Democrats in Virginia kept their eye on what mattered most. They elected a candidate who would defend their interests — and the national interest — instead of a Republican incumbent endorsed by Trump and allied with him on redistricting and much else. Democratic Gov. Abigail Spanberger won by 15 points in November; Jones’s margin was less than half that, but he did win.

Nor have Maine Democrats wavered on their choice for U.S. Senate nominee. Even after the Platner revelations, the Democratic establishment’s handpicked candidate — Gov. Janet Mills — could not get traction. The 78-year-old governor quit the race April 30, citing a lack of financial resources. Polls show she would have lost the June 9 Senate primary in a landslide. They also show Platner, 41, an oyster farmer and combat veteran, leading longtime GOP Sen. Susan Collins.

There are two main differences between this pair of Democrats and MAGA Republicans with dirty laundry. First of all, in many cases the GOP laundry is dirtier and there’s more of it. If Trump is Exhibit A, then Texas attorney general Ken Paxton is Exhibit B. I summarized his issues this way in March: “indicted for felony securities fraud, accused of bribery and abuse of office, investigated by the Texas Bar Association for claiming four states cheated in the 2020 election, impeached by the Texas House, acquitted by the state Senate in a trial that exposed an affair, and later accused of adultery by his wife (one of those state senators) in a divorce filing citing ‘biblical grounds.’ ”

Second, being MAGA apparently means never or hardly ever having to say you’re sorry — unless an apology is court-ordered. Trump’s most recent apology might have been for the Access Hollywood video right before the 2016 election. And Paxton, as part of a settlement with four whistleblowers fired after reporting him to the FBI, was required to “apologize” for calling them rogue employees.

Paxton has a narrow lead over Sen. John Cornyn, a fellow Republican trying to downplay his trad-GOP career and save his job, in a May 26 runoff. Trump had been expected to endorse Cornyn, but he hasn’t. No surprise. He is enamored of outlaw pols. They make the most loyal allies.

Back in Virginia, Jones said repeatedly that he was embarrassed and sorry about the violent texts he had sent to a Republican lawmaker about the state House speaker and his family and had reached out to them to apologize personally. Platner has said he was unaware of his tattoo’s similarity to a Nazi symbol and quickly covered it with dogs and a Celtic knot. He has also apologized and made amends to groups, including the LGBTQ community, that he had demeaned online.

A Platner victory over Collins would be huge — starting with the possibility that Republicans could lose their Senate majority and thus their ability to confirm countless additional Trump-picked judges to federal courts and maybe a couple of Supreme Court justices as well.

The Jones victory was also huge. He has joined with Democratic attorneys general nationwide who are fighting Trump policies. He will be protecting a reproductive freedom amendment to the state constitution that’s headed for the Virginia ballot this fall. And, as he said, he is now looking for legal options to restore the new U.S. House maps approved by voters.

I listed those points in my “too much scandal” column last fall as strategic reasons to vote for Jones. An acquaintance who knocked on doors for Democrats told me people were indeed finding it a tough decision, and my analysis helped her convey the stakes. The upshot suggests the stakes ultimately overwhelmed the qualms. Virginians assessed the larger threat and voted accordingly.

Some candidates will always be more “perfect” than others, in temperament or character or policy positions. The Jones and Platner cases have more to do with hurtful personal failings than policy positions on Iran, Israel, Gaza, immigration, the tax code, or Medicare for All.

But they do offer a template for looking at the bigger picture — the biggest one of all. That would be the fate of U.S. democracy, now in the hands of an oligarchic regime intent on staying in power, no matter what it takes. In this environment, there’s no place for weak knees and faint hearts. Scruples be damned.

Jill Lawrence is the author of The Art of the Political Deal: How Congress Beat the Odds and Broke Through Gridlock.

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