House

Jeffries vows ‘massive’ response following redistricting setback in Virginia

Comments:

by Mike Lillis - 05/11/26 12:58 PM ET

Comments:

Link copied

by Mike Lillis - 05/11/26 12:58 PM ET

Comments:

Link copied

NOW PLAYING

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) is vowing a “massive” response to last week’s Virginia Supreme Court decision on redistricting, which nullified a new map in the Old Dominion to the advantage of Republicans.

Jeffries said Democrats will be launching a multi-pronged “counteroffensive” featuring new redistricting efforts in blue states, new lawsuits against GOP-drawn maps in red states, and an all-hands messaging push designed to pin rising costs on President Trump and help flip the House to the Democrats’ side in November’s midterms.

“We remain undeterred,” Jeffries wrote Monday in a letter to fellow Democrats. “Our effort to forcefully push back against the Republican redistricting scheme will not slow down. We are just getting started.”

Jeffries said the House Democratic Caucus will huddle as a group on Thursday in the Capitol to chart a path “to advance the largest voter protection effort in modern American history.”

“We will ensure the people decide who controls the Congress,” he wrote, “not MAGA extremists desperate to rig the midterm elections.”

The options available to the Democrats, however, are limited.

While California has redrawn its map to create five new Democratic-leaning seats, there are virtually no other blue states available to help the party in the redistricting war in the short window left before the midterms. And while Virginia Democrats have appealed the state’s new ruling, the heavy conservative lean of the U.S. Supreme Court, where that appeal is headed, predicts the decision of the lower court will stand.

Jeffries seemed to acknowledge those dynamics in Monday’s letter, writing that many of the changes Democrats are considering will apply to the 2028 presidential cycle, not this year’s midterms.

“[I]n connection with the ongoing Republican effort to cheat in advance of the 2028 election, we will bury the GOP gerrymandering scheme with a massive Democratic redistricting counteroffensive,” Jeffries wrote.

Still, Jeffries is also pointing to more immediate Democratic efforts to counteract the effects of both the Virginia ruling, which eliminated four Democratic-leaning seats, and an earlier decision by the U.S. Supreme Court to void key parts of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which could wipe out several other Democratic seats across the South.

“Led by the Congressional Black Caucus and national civil rights groups, Democrats are battling Jim Crow-era racial gerrymandering throughout the Deep South,” Jeffries wrote. “Simultaneously, there is pending litigation in Virginia, Florida, Missouri and Wisconsin. States like New York, Maryland, Colorado, Washington and several others are taking steps to decisively respond to what the U.S. Supreme Court has unleashed.”

The back-to-back court cases, which arrived just over a week apart, delivered a sharp blow to the Democrats’ chances of flipping the House, providing Republicans with as many as seven new seats they would not have had otherwise, according to the analysts at the Cook Political Report.

Still, history predicts big losses for the president’s party in the midterms, and the Democrats remain in striking distance of seizing House control.

Jeffries is bullish about the Democrats’ chances in November. He pointed to Trump’s historic unpopularity, as well as the Democrats’ overperformance in virtually every election since Trump returned to office, as evidence that voters have soured on the Republicans — and reason that Democrats will flip the House next year.

“Given the highly unfavorable political environment confronting House Republicans, the extremists will not meaningfully benefit from their scandalous gerrymandering scheme,” Jeffries wrote in Monday’s letter. “Quite the opposite. Democratic enthusiasm and resolve have grown more intense.

“Even after being aided and abetted by blatantly undemocratic court decisions, the failed GOP majority will not be able to gerrymander themselves back into power.”

Add as preferred source on Google