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Progressives in Virginia are already strategizing how to overcome their state’s Supreme Court ruling that struck down their new redistricting map. The map would have given the progressives 4 more U.S. House seats.
Now, they are looking to force retirement by lowering the retirement age of the court so they can replace the new retirees with progressive lawyers.
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South Carolina is the latest state that has moved to cancel their primary election, even though people are already voting:
South Carolina Republicans took the first step Friday to cancel the state’s June primary election — to give more time to potentially pass a new gerrymandered congressional map — as absentee voting is already underway.
A South Carolina House subcommittee voted 3-2 along party lines to advance a bill that would move the state’s June 9 primary election to August 11, with the expectation that the legislature would redraw the state’s congressional map to dismantle its lone Democratic district, represented by longtime Rep. Jim Clyburn.
The vote came after the committee heard hours of public testimony urging lawmakers to reject pressure to delay the state’s primaries and draw new congressional maps. In all, 23 South Carolina residents testified against redistricting and moving the state’s primaries. No one spoke in support of either measure.
More than 6,000 absentee ballots have already been sent out to military and overseas voters for the June primary — more than 200 of those ballots have since been returned, according to the South Carolina Election Commission (SCEC). Should the legislature approve the measure to delay the state’s primary, those ballots will be disqualified.
The woman behind the Virginia special election to effectively eliminate 4 GOP U.S. House seats is now under FBI investigation. Virginia’s State Senator L. Louise Lucas saw her offices raided, along with other businesses connected to her.
So far, only anonymous sources are cited as claiming this is connected to a corruption investigation directly linked to her. She is considered the main driver of the Virginia gerrymander election plan that is currently under legal scrutiny.
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Just days after a recent Supreme Court ruling against unconstitutional race-based gerrymandering, the US Department of Justice (DOJ) has announced that it will enforce the decision nationwide.
Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division Harmeet Dhillon told Just the News, “This is the law of the land now, and eventually every jurisdiction in the United States is going to have to comply with race-free line-drawing.”
Last week, Supreme Court justices ruled 6–3 in Louisiana v. Callais that the state’s newly redrawn congressional map relied “too heavily on race” in creating a second majority-black district in the state.
That decision is expected to affect states with maps drawn to heavily favor Democrats, including California, New York, Colorado, Illinois, Connecticut, Maryland, Minnesota, Oregon, Washington, and Virginia.
Many of these states have enacted their own Voting Rights Acts, which explicitly use race as a predominant factor in determining districts.
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“We gonna have to resist with every fiber in our body. We gonna have to take this system on at every election.”
Democratic Mississippi Representative Bennie Thompson compared the ongoing redistricting efforts in Southern states to a “second Civil War” as his state considers congressional map changes that could potentially eliminate his district. This follows the Supreme Court’s ruling that creating congressional districts based on the racial composition of its resident is unconstitutional.
“This is equivalent to a second Civil War,” Thompson said during an appearance on Al Sharpton’s MS NOW “PoliticsNation.”
“We’re gonna have to get our act together,” he added. “We gonna have to resist with every fiber in our body. We gonna have to take this system on at every election.”
Thompson later shared a clip of his remarks on social media, writing, “I don’t care what they say; we are committed to fighting this redistricting no matter what. There are more at stake than meets the eye, and we’ve come too far to ever turn around!”
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Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was not pleased with the Louisiana v. Callais decision. She filed a dissenting judgment, which enforced the ruling with immediate effect because it relates to the upcoming elections. Ms. Jackson’s dissent was ripped apart by Justice Samuel Alito, who academically called her a moron—this is becoming a common occurrence. Even liberal justices have sought to steer clear of attaching their names to her opinions.
Alito called her dissent on the judgment utterly irresponsible. And now, after all that bellyaching from Ms. Jackson, she denied a motion to recall the Callais judgment. No justices dissented.
The Supreme Court has denied this motion. No justice noted a dissent. https://t.co/dlMLv4VHyh pic.twitter.com/ajQ6cDYgb2
— SCOTUS Wire (@scotus_wire) May 6, 2026
This case is settled. It involved Louisiana creating a majority-black congressional district after the initial map was invalidated under VRA. Now, this map was struck down as unconstitutional, with the court limiting its interpretation of Section II of the Voting Rights Act, which allows congressional apportionment based on racial quotas.
🚨 The Supreme Court has immediately issued its judgment striking down Louisiana’s congressional map as a racial gerrymander. pic.twitter.com/AQJjA5Sw2P
— SCOTUS Wire (@scotus_wire) May 4, 2026
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Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a sweeping new congressional map into law on May 4 that could increase Republicans’ advantage in Florida’s House delegation from 20-8 to 24-4.
Louisiana delayed its congressional primaries while lawmakers begin work on a new map. Tennessee Republicans have released a proposal that could eliminate the state’s only Democratic-held congressional district, while Alabama and other Southern states are weighing how far the Callais ruling allows them to go. But this is by no means just a red-state story.
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As Republicans destroy historic Black-majority House districts in the South, they are being compared with segregationists George Wallace and Bull Connor.
In the last speech of his life, delivered at the Mason Temple in Memphis on April 3, 1968, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke of the legacy of the student civil rights activists of the early 1960s: “I knew that as they were sitting in, they were really standing up for the best in the American dream, and taking the whole nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the Founding Fathers in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.”
The next day, King was assassinated just blocks away, on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel—hallowed ground which now serves as the home of the National Civil Rights Museum. Few cities are so closely associated with the civil rights movement of the 1960s as Memphis. And fewer still have so rich a history of struggle and success in making real the promise of representative democracy.
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Virginia Democrats are clearly panicking. Rachael Bade, co-host of The Huddle, elaborated on what former Democratic Party operative and fellow co-host Dan Turrentine mentioned this week about the fate of the Old Dominion’s new congressional map. It grants Democrats a 10-1 advantage, but the state Supreme Court refused to dismiss the challenge to the map, setting the stage for serious intra-party battles.
The legal warnings were reportedly repeated endlessly, but to no effect. Now, Democratic leaders at both the Virginia and national levels could face a heavy setback if the maps are invalidated. Bade outlined the criteria the court could use to strike down the maps. Sure, the map might get approved, but if the Virginia Supreme Court sides with just one of these points, the map is cooked:
AND THE KNIVES ARE OUT FOR SOME BIG NAMES. Per Dan’s reporting, Governor ABIGAIL SPANBERGER’s staff is quietly sniping at state Senate majority leader SCOTT SUROVELL and state Senate kingmaker LOUISE LUCAS — two lawmakers who pushed back hardest on the legal warnings last fall.
[…]
If this effort goes down, those quotes won’t age well. “People are lining up behind the scenes to go public, I think, very quickly if this does not go through,” Dan foreshadowed.
BUT HERE’S THE THING — Pointing fingers won’t let Spanberger off the hook, which we discussed at length on the show. Yes, she may have privately raised concerns about the effort early on. But she’s the one in the ads. She’s the face of this thing. As our other co-host SEAN SPICER put it bluntly: “She ate the political cookie on this one.”
The other name in the crosshairs if this goes down? House Minority Leader HAKEEM JEFFRIES. Dan is already hearing from some Virginia Dems who say the Democratic leader pushed too hard despite legal concerns. (Though, let’s be fair to Jeffries — he would have been slammed by the party if he hadn’t leaned in, and his team would likely wear such criticism as a badge of honor.)
Florida Republican Governor Ron DeSantis has signed a new U.S. House redistricting plan that will give the GOP 4 more seats. The law was immediately challenged in state courts.
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The redistricting war of 2026, which had appeared to conclude in a stalemate between Democrats and Republicans after Florida’s special session, is anyone’s to win.
In the wake of the Louisiana v. Callais ruling, Republicans in the South are on the move, ready to redraw maps the courts had previously blocked efforts to change.
The outcome of the renewed tit-for-tat redistricting war could determine which party controls the House of Representatives in 2026.
Republican Gov. Jeff Landry of Louisiana has already signed an executive order calling off the state’s May 16 House primaries to allow for redrawing the state’s map, declared a racial gerrymander by the high court.
Louisiana has two Democrat-held districts, held by Reps. Troy Carter and Cleo Fields.
Tennessee Republican Gov. Bill Lee has also called a special session to redistrict after the ruling. Rep. Steve Cohen, D-Tenn., is the only Democrat U.S. House member from the Volunteer State.
The U.S. Supreme Court upheld South Carolina’s current congressional map in 2024. In light of the Court’s most recent decision on the Voting Rights Act, it would be appropriate for the General Assembly to ensure that South Carolina’s congressional map still complies with all…
— Gov. Henry McMaster (@henrymcmaster) May 1, 2026
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Democrats hope gerrymandering Virginia will give them the edge they need to win back the House. But Tuesday’s special election is proving more competitive than they’d like.
Tight polling and concerns over voter turnout in an atypical April election have many Democratic party strategists and officials preparing for a close finish.
“I always thought this campaign would be close [and] 24 hours out, I believe that to be the case,” Democratic strategist Jared Leopold said on Monday, before the final day of voting.
“Anytime you’re on the ‘yes’ side of a referendum, you’ve got the burden of proof,” he added. “It doesn’t matter what the referendum is, but anytime you’re arguing for ‘yes,’ the other side is going to be arguing for the status quo.”
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Maryland’s Legislature is run by Democrats, yet it refuses to gerrymander the congressional districts in its state. Virginia Democrats could learn something from the Free State.
Like it or not, Virginia is constantly comparing herself to next-door Maryland. Out of the 47 seats in the Maryland Senate, 34 are held by Democrats.
Still, those senators chose to leave mid-decade redistricting in a committee drawer rather than comply with former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and his nationwide redistricting campaign.
To be fair, President Donald Trump did say it would be nice if Texas — when ordered by the courts to redraw a few districts because they failed the Voting Rights Act “majority-minority” litmus test — made a few more Republican-majority seats.
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A tough pressure campaign from high-profile Democrats has failed to persuade other members of their party in Maryland, where a new congressional map is now off the table.
Democrats enjoy a super-majority in both the Maryland House of Delegates and the Senate, and Democrat Wes Moore has been governor since 2023. Nevertheless, a redistricting proposal that would have threatened the lone Republican congressional seat died in the Maryland Senate when the legislative session ended Monday night.
‘At some point, I am going to have to have a conversation with him if he continues to stand in the way of an up or down vote.’
The Maryland House passed the map overwhelmingly in early February, 99-37.
Gov. Moore pressed hard to pass the map through the state Senate and onto his desk as a way to combat Republican redistricting efforts in Texas and North Carolina, spearheaded by President Donald Trump.
“I think Donald Trump is actively trying to manipulate and change the rules around the November election and beyond because he knows he cannot win on his policies,” Moore told the AP.
As Virginia voters take part in a closely contested redistricting referendum, Gov. Abigail Spanberger is heading toward the final tally with historically low approval numbers.
For the first time since the 1990s, a sitting Virginia governor is polling below historical norms.
According to Washington Post polling, Spanberger’s approval rating stands at 47%—13 points lower than the average approval rating for Virginia governors and below a majority.
The leftists who now control Virginia’s government desperately want you to believe that ripping up a bipartisan congressional map mid-decade for naked political advantage is fair. They insist as much in the language of the absurd referendum question before the commonwealth’s voters next month.
“Should the Constitution of Virginia be amended to allow the General Assembly to temporarily adopt new congressional districts to restore fairness in the upcoming elections, while ensuring Virginia’s standard redistricting process resumes for all future redistricting after the 2030 census?” the ballot asks.
Colorado’s congressional redistricting proposal could flip three Republican House seats | ANALYSIS Colorado Politics
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