By Joseph Ax
May 8 (Reuters) – Virginia’s top court on Friday threw out a new electoral map that was crafted to flip four Republican-held U.S. congressional seats to Democrats, handing President Donald Trump’s party a major legal victory ahead of the November midterm elections.
In a 4-3 decision, the Virginia Supreme Court rejected a Democratic-backed ballot measure approved by voters in April that reconfigured the state’s U.S. House of Representatives districts for partisan advantage.
Ruling in favor of a Republican challenge, the court’s majority found that Democratic lawmakers had not followed proper procedure last year when they rushed to approve the referendum in time to reach the ballot ahead of this fall’s election.
The ruling bolsters Republican hopes of keeping their majority in the U.S. House in the midterms. Democrats pursued the Virginia measure as part of a nationwide battle involving the redrawing of the boundaries of U.S. districts that the Republican president initiated last year.
Republicans now hold a clear advantage in the national redistricting fight that began last year, when Trump pushed Texas Republicans to rip up their electoral map and draw new district lines targeting five Democratic U.S. House incumbents.
After Texas did so, California Democrats reconfigured their state’s districts, targeting five Republican incumbents. Other states followed suit, including Virginia.
The redistricting battle gained a new front last week when the U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative majority eviscerated a key provision of the Voting Rights Act, opening the door for Republican-led Southern states to dismantle Democratic-held majority-Black and majority-Latino districts. Black and Latino voters tend to support Democratic candidates.
Already, Republican-controlled states such as Louisiana, Alabama, Tennessee and South Carolina have taken steps toward drawing new maps in time for the November elections, with some even postponing party primary elections to give lawmakers time.
With Virginia’s map now invalidated, Republicans could eventually end up with an advantage in as many as 10 House seats nationwide, pending the outcome of the efforts in those Southern states.
Republicans can afford to lose only two net seats in November’s elections to maintain control of the U.S. House.
Virginia voters had approved the Democratic-backed map in an April 21 special election by a 51.7% to 48.3% margin, according to an Associated Press tally. The referendum was the final step in a complicated legislative maneuver to sidestep a constitutional amendment, passed by voters in 2020, that had put redistricting in the hands of a bipartisan commission.
Under Virginia state law, two consecutive legislatures – with a state election in between – must approve a proposed constitutional amendment before it can be put to a vote.
The Democratic legislative majority approved the amendment in October, days before the November state election. Democrats, who gained additional legislative seats in that vote, then passed the amendment for a second time in January and scheduled the referendum for April.
Republicans filed multiple lawsuits, claiming in part that there was no intervening election since early voting had already started when the amendment was first passed.
In Friday’s decision, the Virginia Supreme Court agreed.
“The General Assembly voted for the first time to propose the constitutional amendment to the electorate on October 31, 2025,” the majority wrote. “By that date, over 1.3 million votes had been cast in the general election, which was approximately 40% of the total vote for that election cycle.”
In dissent, Chief Justice Cleo Powell, joined by two other justices, wrote that the court had improperly stretched the meaning of the word “election” to include weeks of early voting.
“This is in direct conflict with how both Virginia and federal law define an election,” Powell said.
The process of redrawing maps, known as redistricting, generally occurs once per decade to reflect population changes as measured by the national census conducted every 10 years. The ongoing and recently completed redistricting efforts by Republican- and Democratic-held state legislatures, on the other hand, have been motivated solely by a desire for partisan advantage.
(Reporting by Joseph Ax; Editing by Will Dunham and Alistair Bell)
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