Whoops.
Friday was a bit of a bummer for the Democrats. The big one: The Virginia Supreme Court ruled on the state’s referendum to redraw its congressional districts to turn it from a 6-5 Democrat advantage into a 10-1 Democrat advantage, all by spreading the votes of a few major urban areas across a relatively large state.
It wasn’t the obviousness of the gerrymander that did it in. The issue, instead, was one that was quite predictable, too: The state Supreme Court ruled 4-3 that the state’s Democrats, in rushing a process to get the referendum on the ballot and on the governor’s desk, violated strict procedural guidelines in Virginia’s state Constitution.
“To pass an amendment, lawmakers must vote for it in two separate legislative sessions, with an intervening election in between,” The Hill noted.
“Virginia Democrats took the first vote on Oct. 31 of last year, arguing they could still act because Election Day wasn’t until the next week. But the state’s high court ruled it was too late, emphasizing early voting was open by that point, with 40 percent of ballots already cast.”
Virginia’s districting is ordinarily done by an independent redistricting commission, but the April referendum was supposed to temporarily suspend it. Not anymore, as the court’s decision effectively blocks the new maps from taking effect.
“This violation irreparably undermines the integrity of the resulting referendum vote and renders it null and void,” Justice Arthur Kelsey wrote in the decision, released Friday.
“While the Commonwealth is free by its lights to do the right thing for the right reason, the Rule of Law requires that it be done the right way.”
Virginia House Speaker Don Scott, a Democrat, said that “no decision can erase what Virginians made clear at the ballot box.” Which is actually untrue; it just did, because that decision was reached by improper means.
Other Democrats were more apocalyptic speaking to Axios anonymously.
“Damn, California and Virginia were supposed to be our bigger ones,” one House Democrat said.
“This means we gotta make sure we have a good wave to win the House … we have to make sure we win a lot of those toss-ups,” they added. “Democrats now have to pitch a perfect game.”
A second House Democrat was more succinct: “F*****ck!!”
This all raises a number of questions, one of which doesn’t necessarily come immediately to mind but probably should: Why did the Democratic National Committee and its associated entities spend so heavily on a gerrymandered referendum of dubious legality when it already has money problems?
According to The Hill, the Republican National Committee’s chair said that the Democrats put $66 million into the redistricting efforts. Axios puts this slightly lower at $62 million — most of which was from House Majority Forward, which is aligned with House Democrats.
Whatever the case, that’s over $60 million that the Democrats can ill afford right now.
As CNN noted in March, the RNC had a seven-to-one advantage in cash on hand over the DNC. In fact, the DNC had more debt than it did liquid resources:
An already massive gap between Republican National Committee and Democratic National Committee finances widened in February, according to new reports filed with the Federal Election Commission.
The RNC out-raised the DNC in February, $18.5 million to $10.3 million. And entering March, the RNC reported nearly seven times as much cash on hand, $109 million to $15.9 million.
The DNC has more outstanding debt, $17.4 million, than cash on hand, keyed to a $15 million loan the committee took out last October.
The idea apparently was that successes in off-year elections would lead to a windfall in cash. That didn’t come.
According to a Washington Post report last month, “DNC officials, including chairman Ken Martin, told party officials that victories that November would boost their beleaguered fundraising, especially from top donors.”
When big victories in New Jersey and Virginia, along with a California redistricting measures, rolled in, surely the cash did, right?
Nope. No checks from big spenders, according to the Post.
“The committee shelved some of its plans to invest in the South, a region where Martin says the party needs to expand its reach into growing areas dominated by Republicans, according to two people familiar with the plans who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal conversations,” the Post reported.
“They also discarded the idea of a midterm party convention to showcase candidates because they worried there wasn’t enough money for the proposal, the sources said.”
Hope sprang eternal, however: “With the momentum at the end of last year, there is still some lag from 2024, but it is improving,” said Maria Cardona, a DNC bigwig on its Rules & Bylaws Committee.
“The large dollar donors are, maybe not as quickly as one would want, coming back. They are rolling themselves out of the fetal position and they are coming back to us.”
Well, if that was the case, maybe not anymore — now that Virginia’s gerrymander has been invalidated and a provision of the Voting Rights Act has been struck. Predictions look a bit different as of Friday:
New 2026 House Ratings From Inside Elections
🔴 Republicans: 217
🔵 Democrats: 207
🟡 Tossup: 11 pic.twitter.com/0wvHb3MO8e— OSZ (@OpenSourceZone) May 8, 2026
Crystal Ball 2026 House Ratings After Virginia Redistricting got struck down
🔴 Republicans: 211 (+3)
🔵 Democrats: 208 (-4)
🟡 Tossup: 16 (+1) pic.twitter.com/6VyKf9RP3I— OSZ (@OpenSourceZone) May 8, 2026
And just before the ruling was issued, ABC News reported that “the Democratic Party is struggling to raise money and keep up with its GOP counterparts leading to frustrations among some donors with Democratic National Committee leadership and its chair Ken Martin.
“At the end of March, the Republican National Committee outraised the DNC $21.2 million to $11.4 million, according to new reports filed with the Federal Election Commission. The RNC reported having nearly eight times more cash on hand — $116 million to the DNC’s $13.8 million. In addition, the DNC is a little over $18 million in debt, according to FEC filings.”
What’s worse: “Multiple Democratic bundlers, strategists and donors told ABC News that they are still angry over how funds were allocated during the 2024 presidential election — and frustrated at Martin’s unwillingness to publicly release a DNC audit that examined what went wrong for Democrats in 2024.” As one would expect them to be.
And now, donors know that Democrat-aligned nonprofits spent at least $60 million in Virginia for … nothing. Don’t think that’s going to get any of those donors out of the fetal position.
It couldn’t have happened to better people.
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