The Virginia ballot measure to amend the state constitution to override the independent state redistricting commission and nuke four of the five Republican-held congressional districts is projected to pass on Tuesday but not by an overwhelming margin one might have expected given the patterns of Dem overperformance in special/off-year elections, probably about 52 to 48 percent.
According to the New York Times the turnout in Fairfax County, the state’s most populous, dropped off by as much as 25 percent versus last year’s commanding gubernatorial election win for Abigail Spanberger. Still, a win is a win – provided there’s also a win at the state Supreme Court, which allowed the vote to proceed while the ruling is still pending – and as such a righteous fuck you to convicted felon President Trump’s now clearly ineffective attempt to gerrymander away a loss of the House GOP majority. From the perspective of last June, when the fat fuck first commanded Texas Republicans to steal five seats for him – he literally told that Joe Kernen dickbag on one of his rambling calls into CNBC that, since he “got the highest vote in the history of Texas” he’s “entitled to five more seats” – and from a national political media that maybe wasn’t wrong to expect Democrats to just take getting pissed on lying down, yeah. It really could have been determinative.
Had Trump just muddied along at a 46 percent approval rating and avoided the long trail of self-inflicted fuckups since then – stealing those seats plus a few more elsewhere just for the lib-pwning fun of it – would have been enough to keep the GOP majority intact… assuming the thermostatic midterm baseline. In this timeline however the thermostatic baseline left town a while ago, one of the clearest signs being the low-energy, almost-an-afterthought vibe to this referendum – especially in comparison to the April 2025 Wisconsin Supreme Court election. Recall when a certain ketamine abuser wore a cheesehead hat and warned that a loss in the redistricting-by-proxy contest would be the “end of Western Civilization” given the understanding it would doom two House Republicans.
Now four Republicans are doomed to defeat and the most another drug-addled megalomaniac could muster up this morning was an anodyne “VIRGINIA, VOTE ‘NO’ TO SAVE YOUR COUNTRY!” and then he dropped the matter. Twice as many GOP-held seats as in Wisconsin (which are extremely unlikely to be redrawn before November) on the line and the stakes have been reduced from the entirety of Western Civilization down to just “your country.” That should tell you more than anything else about the sense of futility sinking in with the fat fuck and his fascist criminal gang.
Again it’s not over in Virginia but hard to imagine the state Supreme Court are going to allow the referendum, watch it pass, and then reject the will of the voters over some legal technicality the Texas Republicans never had to worry about when they just obeyed their Orange Allah and rubber stamped it legislatively – and their Floridian brethren are expected to as well, maybe three seats there. Then there’s the expected gutting of the Voting Rights Act’s ban on racial gerrymandering that may or may not actually come in time to net what the MAGA Reich hopes will be 12 seats.
Utah’s still up in the air on the one seat but Republicans probably shouldn’t count on being able to overturn a ruling because the judge used to eff some dude on the plaintiffs’ team, at least not in time to reverse the ruling before primary day. The doomsday clock ticks inexorably toward midnight.
Republicans still will ultimately come out slightly ahead if most likely only by a small single digit number of seats that were drawn to the 2024 baseline expecting 2024 levels of support for Trump and his party. Before he took his mandate and set it on fire, sliding toward what an increasing number of the “Dems in Disarray” chickendicks are starting to hint just might not be a Red Wave.
At all.