“Eff around and find out”: That taunt from Hakeem Jeffries celebrating Virginia’s gerrymander did not age well.
On Friday, the House minority leader found out that Virginia’s Supreme Court was not quite as gleeful as he about Democrats’ attempt to virtually eliminate Republican representation in the purple state.
The court just cooked the party’s infamous lobster, a district over 100 miles long that was designed to help devour the GOP’s slender majority in the House of Representatives.
It also cooked the ambitions of Gov. Abigail Spanberger and the Democratic establishment, which tossed aside any pretense of principle in a raw political gambit.
The resulting faceplant is nothing short of legendary: Spanberger’s Democrats have succeeded in alienating half of the state.
For the governor, the court’s decision was particularly embarrassing.
Before assuming power, Spanberger denounced gerrymandering as “detrimental to our democracy and weakens the individual voices that form our electorates.”
She ran as a moderate, but Spanberger immediately turned sharply left once in office and called for the most extreme gerrymander in the nation.
The court found that effort was not only unconstitutional, but “wholly unprecedented in Virginia’s history.”
It characterized the state’s position as “a story of the tail wagging the dog that has no tail.”
While some of us had previously expressed skepticism over the rushed effort to circumvent the state constitution, the media almost exclusively relied on liberal experts who predicted the new districts would be upheld.
It was a calculated risk for Democrats, who have now burned their bridges with Virginia conservative and Republican voters.
As Winston Churchill said, “Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result.”
Exhilarating and unforgettable: In a purple state where politicians often require crossover votes to prevail, the redistricting push was not just partisan but personal for voters.
National Democrats will soon “find out” whether Jeffries was right to prematurely celebrate a victory that seemed to secure his anticipated elevation to Speaker of the House.
The party is facing a potentially catastrophic reversal of fortune.
Hellbound and Down 