REPUBLICANS WANT TO MAKE AMERICA NORTH CAROLINA

The referendum giveth and the courts taketh away:

The Virginia Supreme Court on Friday struck down a measure allowing state Democrats to redraw congressional districts, dealing a significant blow to the party’s efforts to keep pace with Republicans in a nationwide redistricting battle.

The ruling wipes out four Democratic-leaning U.S. House seats in Virginia....

Republicans threw a lot of arguments at the courts, and this is the one that stuck:

One of the most critical questions concerned the sequence of events in Virginia’s complex amendment process. Before voters weigh in on an amendment to the State Constitution, the General Assembly must approve it twice, with an election for the state House of Delegates taking place between the two votes. The first vote for this amendment was on Oct. 31, just days before the state election. With hundreds of thousands of Virginians having already voted, Republicans argued that the legislative action had come too late.

The court sided with that argument.

Of course, it's much easier to gerrymander in red states, because the power tends to be in the hands of pre-gerrymandered state legislatures:

The defeat at the court also reveals the limits of years of reforms pushed by Democrats in the current hyperpartisan era. While some Democratic-controlled states like Virginia installed independent commissions to oversee their map-drawing process in an effort to insulate it from politics, Republicans kept the power in state legislatures, allowing states like Texas, Florida, North Carolina and Missouri to enact partisan maps with few logistical hurdles.

And now, of course, the Supreme Court has made it possible for every red state to gerrymander its way to an all-white, all-Republican congressional delegation.

I think Democrats will win the House this year despite all this -- President Trump is widely reviled and there's a massive enthusiasm gap between fired-up Democratic voters and not-at-all-fired-up Republican voters. I expect many 2024 Trump voters, especially young men, to simply stay home in November.

But 2026 or 2028 will probably be a high-water mark for Democrats in Congress. Long term, I think it's possible that America could have a near-permanent GOP Congress, regardless of how popular Republicans are in the future.

In that scenario, America will be North Carolina.

Democrats have won the last three gubernatorial races in North Carolina. They've won every attorney general election since 1974. They appear on the verge of electing a man who's held both offices, Roy Cooper, to the U.S. Senate. And while Republicans have won the state in the last four presidential elections, Democrats have cleared 48% each time. North Carolina, in short, is a purple state.

But its legislature is deep red. It's been in the hands of Republicans since the 2010 election. Currently, Republicans have a 30-20 majority in the state Senate and a 71-47 majority in the state House of Representatives (there are also two ex-Democrats in the House who recently switched to "unaffiliated" after voting with Republicans to override vetoes by Democratic governor Josh Stein).

And the state's congressional delegation is 10-4 GOP, also because of gerrymandering. Republicans are trying to change that to 11-3.

This is what Republicans want for the entire country: a permanent GOP congressional majority no matter how popular or unpopular the party is in this effectively 50-50 country. I think they might get their wish by 2030, because Democrats in states like California and New York are unlikely ever to be as ruthless as Republicans in red America. Democrats' current successes (or, in the case of Virginia, near-successes) have been largely in response to the awfulness of Donald Trump, but Republicans hate all Democrats as much as Democrats hate Trump, so I don't expect them to lose focus on the goal of permanent party control. We may eventually see Congress as locked-in Republican, the way we've seen the Supreme Court for decades.

Democratic voters, including less politically involved voters, need to develop a basic understanding of gerrymandering and need to recognize the necessity of curbing the GOP's power, even after Trump leaves office. But Republicans will sell a status quo with a GOP lean as natural and democratic, and will portray any Democratic efforts to fight back as anti-democratic chicanery. It would be nice if the public understood that we got where we are because of Republican chicanery. Can Democrats sell that idea? I hope so, because democracy in America might depend on it.