Virginia Republicans Are Suddenly Very Concerned About Gerrymandering

After decades of using laser-guided gerrymandering to wrench electoral maps into the shape of white supremacy, Republicans are telling Virginia voters that Martin Luther King, Jr. would most definitely not want them to support a gerrymander of their state. 

Trust us, Republicans say. Dr. King would want you to vote against any redistricting effort. Especially this one.

Virginia Republicans, after getting their teeth kicked all the way in during last year’s gubernatorial and legislative elections, are deploying the most rancid kind of bad faith in their flailing attempt to stop a redistricting of the state’s congressional districts. The move to create new Virginia districts, in case you missed it, was launched in response to mid-decade Republican redistricting in Texas and elsewhere at the request of our mad king, who thinks (wrongly) that he can stop the electoral wave that has been building since the first moment he re-entered the White House.

Virginians over the past few weeks have seen TV ads and billboards and flyers telling them that Black 20th Century civil rights icons and Barack Obama stand in fierce and principled opposition to the Democrats rearranging congressional districts for the 2026 and 2028 elections. This is, of course, not true. Obama, for one, has advocated for blue state redistricting for nearly a year. It’s a move that freaked me the fuck out – Mr. Good Faith himself giving the OK to gerrymandering – and illustrates the urgency of this moment. 

"This amendment gives you the power to level the playing field in the midterms this fall," Obama said in a TV ad supporting Virginia redistricting, emphasizing that Democrats' plan is a temporary measure. "This is the responsible thing to do."

For a lot of Americans – even those who don't pay much attention to daily political machinations – Obama is a calming force, someone who is supposed to tell us everything will be OK if we simply voter harder. To hear him speak urgently of opposing "unchecked" power wielded by the country's first tyrant was a deeply uncomfortable wake-up call for many.

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Bad Faith TimesDenny Carter

Led by a few grizzled electoral warriors from Republican gerrymanders past, Virginia Democrats are going about their redistricting in the most democratic way possible: By asking the people they represent if they are cool with mid-decade redistricting – one that would give Democrats a 10-1 congressional majority in Virginia – as a counter measure to Republican cheating in other states.

"You all started it," Virginia State Senator Louise Lucas told a whining, coping Ted Cruz back in February, "and we fucking finished it."

On April 21 Virginians will decide whether they’re OK with fighting fire with fire as a temporary measure to rebalance federal power and slow – maybe even halt – the regime’s anti-constitutional assault on the country. Democrats’ reasonable request includes an eventual return to so-called fair electoral maps. 

It's a fair and modest proposal to end the asymmetrical electoral warfare that has raged for two decades, green lighted by bad-faith Supreme Court justices who base their gerrymandering decisions on an unreality in which racism no longer exists in the United States. Conservative SCOTUS justices have demanded that Republican gerrymanders, no matter how outwardly racist and power-hoarding, be treated as good-faith governing tactics. They have struck down Democratic gerrymanders for some reason. It's hard to say why.

The emergency circumstances that prompted Virginia’s redistricting and the temporary nature of the measure, I think, should disabuse Americans of the notion that all gerrymanders are the same. They are not. Some are designed to drain political power from communities or color. Some are designed to push back against a fully-radicalized political party that has absolutely no place in a functioning representative democracy. And in what could very well be an unprecedented midterm environment, Virginia Democrats seem to understand now is the time to press their advantage and to maximize Republicans' pain.

I feel pretty good about the redistricting plan's chances of passing. Democratic primary voters have dominated early voting, which started in early March. Democrats lead 59 to 41 percent when you count ballots cast only by voters registered with one of the two major parties. It's good stuff.

Republicans clearly smell blood though. Polling shows a decent-but-not-overwhelming advantage for approval of Democrats' redistricting plans. That whiff of blood is behind the right wing's efforts to trick reliably Democratic voters into saying no to the state's redistricting plan by using anti-gerrymander quotes from Black leaders in bad faith. Conservative organizations and the Virginia GOP want voters in the Virginia suburbs to believe the civil rights heroes they adore would have them strike down a reasonable effort to counteract a nakedly fascist power grab.

The whole thing is so dishonest it's hard to believe it's legal. We should maybe look into having some laws around how campaigns can be run in the United States. Those would be nice, I think.

A bunch of my Bluesky buddies who live in Virginia recently shared images of the flyers with which they've been inundated over the past few weeks, almost all of them deceitful in nature, clumsily trying to trick Democratic voters into voting against a measure that could lock in a Democratic House majority in 2027.

You get the idea (and if you don't, consider right-wing organizations are invoking the Ku Klux Klan to frighten Black Virginia voters to side against the redistricting, a truly desperate move). In mailers and TV and radio and YouTube ads, right-wing groups in Virginia (and elsewhere) desperately need voters to believe the redistricting ballot measure is universally opposed by liberal politicians and civil rights advocates and everyone else who has traditionally stood against the nationwide Republican effort to dilute the political power of Black and brown Americans.

This sort of ratfucking campaign requires money, and wouldn't you know one of our big, beautiful Silicon Valley tech-fascists got involved in this underhanded attempt to defeat a ballot measure that would hurt Republicans. A group connected to antichrist-curious Peter Thiel threw $2.5 million into the bad-faith opposition to Virginia Democrats' redistricting plan.

This, I guess, doesn't come as a shock considering Thiel – along with almost every other tech titan – has dedicated his life and vast fortunes to dismantling democracy across the western world. “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible," Thiel wrote in an unhinged 2009 essay, adding, quite haughtily, that democracy is always led by "the unthinking demos."

Apparently some pro-redistricting groups in Virginia have dabbled in similarly deceitful tactics ahead of April 21. The idea, it seems, it to get rural Virginia voters – who sided with Trump in enormous numbers three years after he tried to overthrow the U.S. government – to back the redistricting proposal because Big Boy said so.

Does your fourth favorite Bad Faith Times blogger endorse this sort of thing? I mean, kinda. Does it make your fourth favorite BFT blogger feel a little gross? Well, yes it does. I guess that's the earnest millennial in me.

But maybe we've reached the ends-justify-the-means portion of these bad faith times, this extraconstitutional emergency situation that has prompted breathless questions from democracy scholars about what Americans are willing to do to preserve whatever is left of the republic. Maybe it's time to engage in the right wing's slimy tactics if it means securing a little power and working the levers of power against an authoritarian regime that recognizes no limits on its power.

In no way do I see this misleading billboard as morally equivalent to the billboards and flyers and media advertisements used by the right wing in the run up to Virginia's election. Strategically it is the same: The idea is to fool Trump worshippers into voting for a measure he has raved against for months. Trump is not MLK and he is not Barack Obama. He is a stain on the country, an amoral blackhole, and a living national trauma. Using his fans' idolatry against them, I think, is OK if it leads to what we need: A Democratic congressional majority with an influx of fighters that can and should lock Trump into lame duck status the moment they are sworn in.

Follow Denny Carter on BlueSky at @dennycarter.bsky.social.