Redistricting struck down by Virginia Supreme Court: A full breakdown on The Political Recap (Transcript)

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Supreme Court: A full breakdown on The Political Recap

Redistricting struck down by Virginia Supreme Court: A full breakdown on The Political Recap

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Good morning and welcome to the political recap on this all of a sudden very exciting Friday. Just minutes ago, we got the redistricting ruling from the Virginia Supreme Court that effectively struck down Virginia’s 10-1 congressional map because Virginia’s redistricting referendum, the process by which Democrats got that referendum, that constitutional amendment to allow for redistricting to the voters was unconstitutional and illegal. We’ll jump right into it. Rich Maher was sitting

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right next to me, Randolph Min, political science professor, and I was just like, “Oh, we have a ruling.” Got a text, got an email. We read through the ruling as quickly as we possibly could. Rich, >> what’s your takeaway? >> Yeah, it’s like uh I was a student who came to class and didn’t do the homework, but I didn’t even know I had the homework. Uh and yeah, we did some rapid reading. >> It is I I’m surprised. Uh it was definitely a narrow decision. It’s a 4-3

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decision. So, a divided court. Uh, and a pretty substantive and strongly worded disscent from Justice Powell on it as well. So, it’s not like there was a consensus on the court here about what was they wanted to do. But the it’s clear that the majority felt like this election, this redistricting vote did not happen according to the rule of law, to the letter of the of the law, the procedure that was laid out. And so they’ve struck it down. And so now those 101 maps, the new maps that the

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Democrats wanted to put in place, uh have been uh erased by the courts and we revert back to the existing maps that were redrawn by not the redistricting commission but the special masters that the court themselves had issued uh you know had asked to draw the maps. So we’re sort of back to square one to where we were before all this redistricting happened. >> That’s the big takeaway. 101 map, a congressional map that includes 10 seats that favor Democrats, one that favors a Republican, won’t go into effect as of

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right now with this Supreme Court ruling. We’ll go back to the map that was currently still in place that only has six seats that favor Democrats, five that favor Republicans. We’ll talk about the fallout from Virginia, the national implications, who are the big winners and losers. I think Jen Kiggins, Rob Whitman, Republican members of Congress, Mike Johnson, maybe even President Trump are jumping up and down right now. >> Absolutely. Uh, you know, there was some concern that some of the Republicans

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might be drawn into the same districts and might be facing themselves in primaries. So, this at least gives a path for folks like Morgan Griffiths and and and Ben Klein to stay in Congress. Um, folks like Jen Kiggins and Rob Whitman still would have a tough re-election battle ahead of them, but that’s different from the the stacking of voters that was going to happen against them. So, Republicans for sure in Virginia are happy. V Republicans nationally are happy. Uh, Democrats have to be upset about this. particularly

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Louise Lucas, as we were talking about before we got on here, she’s had a particularly bad week, what with an FBI raid of her uh uh offices and and and businesses, as well as now this defeat of her 10-1 maps. And it really was kind of her project. It wasn’t necessarily she was the only one, but she was one of the really strongest voices in Virginia leading this redistricting battle. And so this has to feel like a real blow to her. and um you know her political power. >> I want to talk about a little bit more

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the national implications in just a minute, but walk the viewers and the listeners through just how big a deal it is for a court to overturn the results of an election. It’s something that is very rarely done. It’s something that I can’t remember in my 26 years on the planet. I don’t know about you, in your maybe, you know, 30 or so years on the planet, but >> few more. Yeah. How big a deal is it for the Supreme Court to overturn the will of the voters? I imagine that’s going to

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be the argument from Don Scott and Louise Lucas that the court may have, you know, overturned the will of the voters, which is something you rarely see. Yeah. And this is part of the problem of of having courts in general, right? You want to have experts who can make uh very important legal decisions and it gives them a lot of power. Uh and normally courts are supposed to exercise that power very restrained way. But uh elections are a case where you clearly have democratic majorities saying like

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this is what we want. And it normally takes a lot for a court to say uh you know we think that that that democratically you know majority opinion doesn’t count and to throw it out. Uh it takes a lot and I think one thing it shows is just the unprecedented nature of this election, the way it was sort of fasttracked, the amendment thrown onto uh you know the ballot. Uh you know it it certainly wasn’t um you know whether or not you thought it was legal or fit the letter of the law, the spirit of the

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law was certainly violated in the sense that that’s not usually how these amendments happen. Uh and so the fact that it was thrown before voters, there was just this kind of unprecedented April election where everyone, you know, we had all these mailers, uh you know, Obama and Spanberger on both sides arguing for and against it. It seemed like it was just a a kind of unprecedented swirl of politics, both national and state, happening at this one time. So I I I wonder if the courts, the Supreme Court here, these four

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justices who decided to strike it down, felt like this is not an election like any other. This is not your standard November choose between two candidates. And that they might have applied a kind of uh different kind of scrutiny to this particular election than they would to a disputed election between two candidates in November. >> Let’s dig into the ruling a little bit. I want to give our viewers a cautionary tale. We had about 10 minutes before we started to read through 46 pages. >> The big issue seemed to be this idea of

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an intervening election. Just to kind of catch our viewers up on the process for the Constitution of Virginia to be amended, an amendment has to pass the General Assembly twice in between an election of the House of Delegates, before the referendum even starts, before you head to the ballot and make your opinion known. The argument that Democrats used here is that happened because we passed the constitutional amendment prior to the 2025 House of Delegates elections in late October. Republicans have long argued there was

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no intervening election because early voting already started some 30 days before that. The court seemed to side with Republicans here. It’s a fascinating idea of when is the election? Is early voting part of the election? What do you make of the Supreme Court’s decision here to side with Republicans on what actually defines an election? And this probably has a lot of, you know, a lot of, you know, legal portions in it, but it’s fascinating nonetheless. >> Yeah, it is. It really did come down to,

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you know, just on our initial read of this uh decision, it really came down to differing ideas of what is an election? Uh, you know, and and so the the majority argued that the election is this period where we’re collecting votes. And that was what the Republicans argued that when the Democrats kind of rammed through the first vote on this referendum and then said, well then there’s election, we do the second vote that actually the that that election had already started. So they they couldn’t

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because we had early voting, you know, there were were ballots already being submitted. Uh and so certainly the spirit of what the constitution kind of implied in its language was that you know you have a refer you you pass this constitutional amendment, the general assembly does, right? the first pass at it. And then there’s an election to let voters weigh in. And if the voters uh presumably don’t like what the general assembly is doing, they might have some say. They might vote people out and that

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might send a message to the general assembly. It was a little harder to do that because the election had already started this time when they had passed that first ballot initiative referendum, you know, amendment uh legislation. And as a result, uh, I mean, I think the court is kind of looking at it like voters didn’t get a chance to weigh in and so we’re going to define an election as the the overall period and so it had already started. Some people didn’t get to weigh in and so we’re striking down

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these maps. The problem with that though, and you know, then we’re going to get into the legal wrangling, and this was in the descent by Justice Powell, is that if you define an election as all of that period, including in the early voting, you run into a lot of problems in the law elsewhere where there’s all this language that says election day is election day. That’s the election. Early voting is sort of like collecting votes ahead of time, but the real election is only that 24-hour period. And there’s

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all sorts of implications if Virginia now decides to define an election as whenever voting starts. Now we get this 45day period where maybe you can’t have trials. Maybe the courts can’t do anything during that period because there’s laws about not having court cases on election day. Um there are other implications for federal law. there’s uh implications and and and the real interesting thing is what Justice Pal said in his descent is that that’s not what the actual language of the

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constitution says. The language of the constitution makes it pretty clear the election day is the election. And so he argued that the court the majority decision was sort of ignoring what the constitution says. So it seems to me like there’s a lot of wiggle room here in this interpretation of election. There may be some complicated uh impacts down the road in whole other areas. And I’m wondering there might be a chance to appeal this to the Supreme Court. >> We’ll get to that appeal in just a

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minute. I want to talk about how Hakee Jeff is feeling right now. He came to Virginia perhaps behind the scenes and then on the campaign trail. He touted this and Democrats touted this as standing up for democracy, standing up to Donald Trump. This was seen as one of Democrats best hopes perhaps besides California to try and even out the playing field according to them. Now this week you’ve lost four seats in Virginia. Now you may win two seats. We’ll get to that in a minute. You’ve

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lost a couple of seats in Florida. You had the Voting Rights Act not necessarily struck down but significantly weakened. Something that may help Republicans. What’s the state of this redistricting war nationwide and what’s the state of the House of Representatives and who will control that? Because just within the last couple of weeks and the last couple of minutes, Democrats have lost some ground. >> Yeah, for sure. And and I I think the way to look at it is that there’s a greater war for the House of

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Representatives and there’s a couple of different battlefronts, right? There is the battlefront for public opinion and that public opinion has really soured on the Trump administration and that includes some Republicans. There’s been a lot of erosion of support for Trump and the Trump administration and for Republicans in general. Republican brand is really damaged right now. We’ve seen it in Virginia with the blue wave we had last year and some other special elections. Uh Donald Trump’s just not

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popular. And so that’s bad news for the Republicans in this fall’s election. So they’re already operating from a position of weakness, but that’s why they’ve engaged in this redistricting battlefront. And on that battlefront, they seem to be winning. Right there we have the bad news from the US Supreme Court on the Clay Civil Rights Act decision. There we have this decision here in in Virginia. And there we have some other states with Republican majority legislators starting to ramp up

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their own redistricting efforts. So the real concern for Hakeem Jeff and for the Democrats nationally is is the battle over public opinion so strongly against the Republicans that all this numbers game that the Republicans are doing with redistricting doesn’t matter. But when you keep losing in this one battle, it’s hard to be confident about how far ahead you are in the other battle. Now, we do have a statement from Attorney General Jay Jones, which, you know, he was obviously, you know, very instrumental in this. So,

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I’m reading this. This is the first time I’m reading this. Quote, “Today, the Supreme Court of Virginia has chosen to put politics over the rule of law by issuing a ruling that overturns the April 21st special election on redistricting. The decision si this decision silences the voices of the millions of Virginiaians who cast their ballot in every corner of the Commonwealth and it fuels the growing fears across the nation about the state of our democracy. I am not going to read the entire that’s only part of the

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statement. It ends with my team is carefully reviewing this unprecedented order and we’re evaluating every legal pathway forward to defend the will of the people and protect the integrity of Virginia’s elections. Just wanted to put that out there. You know, you mentioned an appeal to the Supreme Court. >> We don’t know. I think it’s fair to say right now, it’s fair to say that Virginia’s 101 map will not go into effect. Could there be other legal appeals? For now, that’s the main

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takeaway, >> right? That is where we are now. We’re back where we were before this amendment passed. And those what we might call 65 maps, right? Because that’s the existing congressional delegation. six Democrats, five Republicans. That 65 map is now back in place. The 10-1 map is no more like it never existed. Now, that doesn’t mean that there couldn’t be a legal appeal. That can’t go anywhere else in Virginia because the Virginia Supreme Court is the final word on any court

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decision here in Virginia and they’re not likely to revisit this in any way. So, the only next and last destination is the US Supreme Court. Now, the US Supreme Court doesn’t seem terribly interested in interfering in this whole redistricting battle, but this question, right, the the way that this was decided was not a a decision about redistricting. What this court case has become is a decision about the definition of an election. And I wonder given the sort of odd behavior and and and sort of makeup of the current US

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Supreme Court if these justices would be interested in weighing in on the definition of an election. My guess is that if they did, they wouldn’t do it in a speedy fashion. They might be willing to hear something about this in the future, but that would be after this fall’s elections because these maps, whatever maps we end up with, they really have to be in place by the end of this month because that’s our candidate filing deadline. And it just creates a lot of headaches for electoral boards

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and ballot printing if we don’t settle who is running and where they are running in the next couple weeks. I I want to talk about the seemingly dozen candidates who have announced they’re running in Virginia’s new seventh congressional district that the Supreme Court just said doesn’t exist. I want to talk about the first congressional district, the second congressional district. When we say 65 map, that’s the current makeup. But it’s important to point out that the first congressional

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district, which is currently represented by Republican Rob Whitman, the second congressional district, which is currently represented by Republican Congresswoman Jen Kiggins, Governor Abigail Spamberger won those districts last November. And Democrats are certainly going to try and pick up those seats regardless of whatever the map is. Obviously, it’s much harder now. They’re much more competitive districts. But if you’re Shannon Taylor, Henriiko Commonwealth’s attorney, she’s still running in the

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first congressional district. Ela Lura, a former congresswoman who’s seeking a return to Congress in the second congressional district. It’s not like, okay, 65 is 65, there’s nothing else to do. We’ll see you, you know, years from now. >> Yeah. That that’s again that other battlefront, this kind of public opinion about the Trump administration and Republicans. And in those very purplish districts where Kiggins and Whitman would have a tough re-election fight no matter what, they’re back to the status

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quo, which is still a tough re-election fight. And I would say I think the ratings even before the redistricting for a lot of the sort of national rating agencies, you know, organizations said that those districts, both of them were at least tossups, if not leaning Democrat. Uh so they’re definitely still going to have uh a tough road ahead. And I don’t want to say the likely outcome is that they would lose and be replaced by Democrats, but it certainly doesn’t look good for them in the current

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political environment. Now, this change in the maps and how Republicans have been energized, you know, that a number of them turned out to vote against the redistricting effort and whether they might be somehow more energized in this fall’s congressional elections is hard to say. I think one of the the fallout of this redistricting decision and the battle here is that it’s it’s destabilized the electorate a little bit. We’re not sure how everybody is feeling about the maps, about the

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elections, or, you know, how they’re going to feel about everything returning back to quote unquote normal on these older maps, uh, when they were expecting to vote for somebody else. It’s it’s just a really kind of chaotic environment right now. >> I apologize for looking down at my phone. Just trying to get as many statements to you guys as possible. Uh, House Speaker Don Scott just released a statement. He was obviously a big proponent of redistricting. He said, quote, “We respect the decision of the

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Supreme Court of Virginia. I’m proud that Virginiaians came out in historic numbers, made their voices heard, and sent a message, not just here at home, but across the country to Donald Trump and his administration.” The statement goes on, I’m not going to read it all. We’ll have it on.com. It’ll be in our shows and all of our NextStar Capital shows across the state tonight. I want to talk about kind of the political repercussions throughout the redistricting effort. Rural Virginiaians and members of the

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general assembly who represented rural populations said it felt like Democrats may have been turning their back on them or silencing their voice. The referendum still passed, but is there any long-term implication on Republicans or excuse me, Democrats trying to win Republican votes in those rural areas? Is that shot for a generation? Is are battle lines even further drawn in the partisan divide to the point where there might be fewer independent voters and those moderate Republicans, moderate Democrats may not

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be flipping quite as much now? Yeah, it’s a it’s a great point, Tyler, because it whatever had happened with these maps, this battle was a bitter one, and I think it really did harden the partisan divide in Virginia, which because of the nature of our Commonwealth and and sort of where voters live and and how we’ve been structured, it this partisan divide is a geographic divide, right? Republicans are concentrated uh I wouldn’t even say concentrated, right? are scattered sort of across rural areas while Democrats

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are concentrated in urban areas, a sort of urban corridor that runs from Northern Virginia out through Richmond and and out to the Tidewater area. Not that there aren’t, you know, Democrats in rural areas and and Republicans and cities. It’s just that’s where the concentration of people are. And because there are more people in those cities than in the rural areas, the Democrats have a a a growing majority, I would say, in in the state. and we’ve seen that reflected in in statewide elections

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for the last decade or so. But this redistricting battle really did harden those lines. Um it felt like the Democrats and and their voters and supporters felt justified in playing hard ball tactics because of things happening outside the Commonwealth, right? Because of the Trump administration. and they sort of took that out on rural Republican voters who then feel like they are shut out of the process. And whatever you feel about their policy positions or or or how they might want to see the world or or who

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they might choose as their candidates, it’s just not a great thing for democracy to have a sizable minority of the population feel like they’re shut out of the process. And so now they’re back in in some sense, but that hurt feeling, and I don’t want to even dismiss it as hurt feeling, right? This is a a a real political battle going on that doesn’t go away just because the maps have been struck down. So I I really do think there will be far-reaching effects for this, which we

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will see in future elections and campaigns and and our politics in general. Was it a mistake for Democrats to go forward with this redistricting process? And I don’t mean in the sense that, oh, it’s been struck down. It was obviously a mistake. I mean in the sense that Democrats had some time. Why did they start this so late in October 2025 while early voting was already underway? Obviously, things were fastm moving in the redistricting war, but did Democrats not make their mind up soon enough? Was

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the process too rushed? Were there mistakes made here or were they just trying to fit this into a really compressed timeline? >> Yeah, I I don’t think I would hold it against the Democrats in terms of in Virginia here of their kind of being late to the party. It really was uh a battle that was heating up over the summer and into the fall last year. And this was an unprecedented effort. Uh, one that many people didn’t even think was possible. So, I actually would look at it, whatever you think of the sort of

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moral value of the redistricting effort, I think it was a pretty um impressive political accomplishment to rally Democrats in the general assembly to even pass the resolution in the first place, right? the first one to make the case that this was actually a legitimate thing to do to then have it sail through the second and then get the referendum passed. I mean, I I think in light of the compressed timeline everything, it it was a rather impressive effort by Democrats who uh I I’ve pointed out in

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the past uh you know, maybe even on this show are are not always the best at politics, right? just sort of Democrats constitutionally tend to be more cautious and timid and slow and a little ironically conservative in their approach to politics. So the fact that they sort of push forward and made a case to their voters that they were fighting back against the Trump administration, I I I think they deserve some kind of credit for that uh for trying to serve. Whether or not you think it was a good idea or that the

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whole thing was misguided, uh, I actually think politically it was uh impressive and and sort of out of character for Democrats to do here in Virginia and and and nationally. Um, so I I don’t I don’t want to say that therefore that means it was a good thing to do or or that it was the right thing to do, but just from a political perspective, I thought it was an impressive effort that they were able to even get it all done at all. Where do we go from here? Basically, where we’re at right now is the

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constitutional amendment has passed the general assembly once. It would still need to pass after an House of Delegates election, which would be 2027. Do you expect Democrats to try and pass this amendment again, have another referendum in an effort to redraw the map for 2028? Is that is that even on the I mean, who knows? But is that even on the table? >> It’s I suppose anything’s possible. It does seem like this redistricting issue has come to a head this year. Uh we can wait and see the outcome of this fall’s

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election. I think if Democrats take back the House this year might be less of a concern. Still though, you know, these redrawn maps in the Republican states that are are being kind of put in place right now. They’ll still be there for future elections and there won’t always be a Donald Trump in office kind of driving animous towards the Republican party. So it could be from a little bit of longer term perspective the Democrats might say, “Well, let’s let’s keep going with this.” But I I think their argument

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this year was it has to be this year because that’s the battle right now. It’s a little harder to make the case to the public two years from now when who knows what is happening. So I I do think this was an all or nothing year for this redistricting effort, but again, we’ll just have to see kind of how it all shakes out, particularly in this fall’s elections. >> Last question. We’ve got two minutes. We’ll make it quick. If you’re Hakeem Jeff right now, it’s May 8th. A lot of

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states have filing deadlines. Virginia is one of them. Even if there is an appeal made to the Supreme Court, filing ends on May 25th, it seems unlikely that the Supreme Court would make any sort of ruling to effect this election. Is there anything Democrats can do now that they’ve lost their best hope, according to them, at evening out the playing field? >> Uh, not on the maps front. Again, I think they have to switch to the political front, right? The public opinion front. And we’re already hearing

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it with some of the statements that you read, right? And it’s portraying this decision by the Virginia Supreme Court as just another salvo, another shot fired in this political battle between Democrats and Republicans. Republicans, the way the Democrats are telling the story, Republicans are the bad guy. and they got their court uh you know a friendly court to strike down an important change in the maps on a legal technicality and they’re just playing politics and now we have to fight even

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harder to beat back all the cheating that Republicans are doing in other states. I mean, I think that’s the case they’re going to make, both national Democrats and again because we have uh, you know, I think gotten all this attention, I think there’s going to be national eyes on what happens here in Virginia and and Democrats are going to want to get Jen Kiggins and Rob Whitman out of office to salvage something from this effort, I think. So, I really do think there’s going to be a lot of focus

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on this as Virginia now as a political battleground, a chance to use the elections, not the maps, to fight back against Donald Trump. >> We had a whole rundown for this show 10 minutes before we basically you sound you hear is me crumpling up paper of our rundown. >> I’m glad we have a ruling. It was a blast to break it down in real time. Rich, thanks for being so flexible and having fun with us. >> Sure, it is fun. Um, and not for everybody and not for the Democrats in Virginia, that’s for sure. But glad to

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be here with you, Tyler. >> We’ll see you next week on the political recap.