The Supreme Court rejected Virginia Democrats’ emergency appeal to revive their gerrymandered Virginia congressional map on Friday, delivering a final, fatal blow to their efforts in the state. The justices issued a brief order with no explanation. Still, the outcome was hardly surprising — the federal courts don’t typically wade into rulings made by state courts on state constitutional matters, and that’s exactly what happened here.
Virginia Democrats had passed new congressional maps through the General Assembly and pushed through a ballot referendum to lock those maps in. Voters narrowly approved it in April. But the Virginia Supreme Court ruled that Democrats violated the state constitution’s process for referring amendments to voters, specifically an “intervening-election requirement” that the General Assembly simply ignored. The result? Null and void.
“This violation irreparably undermines the integrity of the resulting referendum vote and renders it null and void,” Justice D. Arthur Kelsey wrote in the majority opinion.
🚨 IT’S OFFICIAL, WE WIN!
“The US Supreme Court moments ago has ruled AGAINST Virginia Democrats when it comes to reviving their pro-Democrat redistricting map ahead of the 2026 midterms.”
WOULD’VE BEEN: 10D-1R
MAP WILL REMAIN AS: 6D-5RAnother Dem embarrassment.
🔥🔥🔥 pic.twitter.com/sfWWvumcnJ
— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) May 15, 2026
Had the maps survived, they would have been a huge boon for the Democrats in the redistricting wars, giving the party a potential net gain of 4 seats. Democrats lost because they couldn’t be bothered to follow the rules they wrote.
The attempt to appeal to the United States Supreme Court was a desperate Hail Mary bound to fail, and even Gov. Abigail Spanberger saw the writing on the wall and revealed she was no longer pushing to gerrymander the state.
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None of this happened in a vacuum. Democrats spent years redrawing maps in blue states, systematically eliminating Republican-held districts wherever they could. For a long time, Republicans largely played defense. That changed last year when Texas made its move, redistricting mid-decade and sparking the current national battle. California Gov. Gavin Newsom, auditioning for the 2028 Democratic presidential primaries, decided to respond by getting California to pass its own new map. Democrats tried to do the same in Virginia, but they cut constitutional corners and paid for it.
Overall, the redistricting wars have not gone well for the Democrats, and making matters worse for them, last month, the high court ruled that racial gerrymandering was unconstitutional, clearing the way for red states in the South to eliminate majority-minority districts that had long served as reliable Democratic strongholds. Democrats have now lost on multiple fronts simultaneously, and they’ve spent — I mean, wasted — millions of dollars in the process.
Republicans are now expected to net roughly a dozen congressional seats from redistricting alone ahead of the 2026 midterms, with Tennessee and Florida among the states contributing to those gains.
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