New from me: All 40 of Trump's judicial nominees who have taken Qs from the Senate Judiciary Committee have refused to say Trump lost the 2020 election. Now his high-level executive nominees are dodging the Q, too. www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-...

North Carolina Dems no longer have the votes to uphold Gov. Stein’s vetoes on their own—though Cunningham & a few others had often enabled the GOP to override vetoes already. Gerrymandering made GOP 3/5 supermajorities possible, but Dems have a good chance to gain enough seats in 2026 to block them

If the Supreme Court guts the Voting Rights Act, Mississippi Republicans could gerrymander to gain a congressional seat, secure legislative supermajorities, and make every state Supreme Court district heavily white and Republican. A new congressional map might have to wait until 2028, though

Florida mid-decade redistricting update:

If the Supreme Court guts the Voting Rights Act, Mississippi Republicans could gerrymander to gain a congressional seat, secure legislative supermajorities, and make every state Supreme Court district heavily white and Republican. A new congressional map might have to wait until 2028, though

Here are the key estimates of Yes for Virginia's redistricting amendment and voter registration turnout by race and Hispanic ethnicity

When DOGE arrived at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the operatives had no real background in nuclear issues. They boxed out experienced hands, forcing resignations and massive exodus of talent. Over 400 people have since left or been forced out. Our full story: https://propub.li/3OBQMwk

I analyzed turnout by race and Hispanic ethnicity in Virginia's redistricting amendment vote michaelmcdonald.substack.com/p/how-did-vi...

The NYT fails to note that candidates are entitled to the lowest broadcast TV ad rate—Super PACs often pay several times as much. Example: Senate Ds far outraised Rs in Q1. By $ millions: AK: 8.6 - 1.7 GA: 13.8 - 2.1 IA: 2.2 - 2.4 ME: 6.6 - 3 MI: 7.2 - 2.2 NC: 8.4 - 3.2 OH: 10 - 2.9 TX: 29.5 - 4.3

on the cutting room floor of our Virginia precincts analysis: a *map* of the referendum results & 2024 prez results along proposed district lines we contextualize these results in the article 🎁 link: nyti.ms/4sLUktJ

Rep. Rich McCormick is only in Congress because Georgia Republicans gerrymandered a seat for him by targeting a Black Democratic woman www.cnn.com/2021/11/22/p...

A former Prince William County school board chair made this over on Facebook and I wanted to drop it here because the voters in Fairfax matter just as much as the voters in Wise -- there are just a lot more of them, and more votes is how you win elections

This could be super useful for journalists and local civics nerds — in one place, neighborhood-level shapefiles and 2020 demographic data for 206 US cities that have "city-defined neighborhoods" paper: www.nature.com/articles/s41... data: dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtm...

This is insane, tinpot authoritarian shit. www.nytimes.com/2026/04/22/u...

Nothing to worry about, just the Heritage Foundation publishing an article on how the Republican Congress can refuse to seat Democrats www.heritage.org/election-int...

The DOJ was created to increase the capacity for federal prosecutions during Reconstruction esp. those to be brought under the newly enacted KuKlux Klan Act. Now the DOJ is being used to prosecute a storied civil rights organization whose central mission has been to expose & dismantle the Klan.

Virginia could massively expand voting rights in 5 months, don't sleep on it.

[also whispers] in fact this is why the redistricting wars began

Even this wildly overstates New York. Dems had a chance to aggressively redraw the map…but didn’t. The changes were so minor that NY’s 𝘎𝘖𝘗 chairman said it was “not materially different” from the court-drawn map. North Carolina’s GOP replaced a 7-7 map with a 10-4 gerrymander that nearly went 11-3

Here's the definitive answer to the debate over "who started it": Republicans. Before Trump pushed TX to gerrymander last year, the GOP had drawn 42% of all districts, versus just 14% for Dems (the rest were by neutral parties). The maps below from @stephenwolf.bsky.social make this explicit.

Support for impeaching Trump is at 55%, according to a new Strength In Numbers/ @Verasight.io poll, with 37% of adults opposed. Crucially 1 in 5 of Trump’s own voters support impeachment. Read and share: www.gelliottmorris.com/p/2026-04-22...

Proportional representation is the best solution, or, barring that, a national gerrymandering ban like Democrats tried to pass in 2021. Passing either one requires Dems to redraw House maps in response to GOP gerrymanders in the near term so that electing a pro-reform majority remains possible

Now that Virginia's new congressional map has been approved, numerous Democrats across the state have new districts to run for. Many like former Rep. Tom Perriello have been campaigning for months, while Del. Elizabeth Guzman announced Wednesday morning that she'd seek another seat.

Is social media dying? How much did Twitter change as it became X? Which party now dominates the conversation? Using nationally representative ANES data from 2020 & 2024, I map how the U.S. social media landscape has changed Here are the key take-aways 🧵 Full paper out now in in JQD:DM!

The midterm gerrymandering war and the Iran war alike show Trump's inability to imagine that the people he's picking fights with have any agency, any ability to respond. He loves his "you don't have the cards" metaphor but he's amazingly terrible at actually thinking about whether they do.

Ok last post Good reminder that Black, Asian, and Hispanic voters big part of Virginia Dem coalition Another election showing a shift from 2024 Also reason why Yes won Also mailers invoking Jim Crow for No didn’t work and probably backfired

Republicans in Congress & on SCOTUS blocked Dems from ending gerrymandering nationwide multiple times since 2019. Dems redrawing maps in response to GOP gerrymanders is the only way to make a pro-reform House majority possible or convince the GOP that gerrymandering no longer serves their interests

Trump sparked a mid-decade redistricting frenzy after urging Republicans to re-gerrymander congressional maps nationwide—but they didn't expect Dems to respond. The GOP targeted 9 Dems in 4 states—in response, Dems targeted 9 Reps in 2 states. A court also replaced Utah's GOP map with a fairer map

Breaking (🧵): Virginia has PASSED a referendum that would let Dems redraw the congressional map for 2026 in response to new GOP gerrymanders in other states (pending VA Supreme Court review). It targets 4 Rs to elect a 10-1 Dem majority. Interactive map+data: davesredistricting.org/maps#viewmap...

Seven states have now drawn new congressional maps this cycle. That’s tied for the most in a non-Census cycle in over 50 years.

Virginia’s state Senate president pro tem led the charge for passing a 10-1 map and not settling for something more modest. Lucas is also 82 years old and has been trashing Republicans like this on social media for months 🫢

The GOP drew 3 times more congressional seats than Dems did for 2024—but that disparity would be far smaller for 2026 with new Dem maps in CA & VA. This cartogram shows the partisan intent behind each state’s map, though it doesn't measure the effect of more extreme new GOP maps in MO, NC, OH, & TX

Breaking (🧵): Virginia has PASSED a referendum that would let Dems redraw the congressional map for 2026 in response to new GOP gerrymanders in other states (pending VA Supreme Court review). It targets 4 Rs to elect a 10-1 Dem majority. Interactive map+data: davesredistricting.org/maps#viewmap...

We finally have what you've all been waiting for: the final result of Loudoun County. (Anyone who followed the 2024 count remembers Loudoun.) The YES won by 21%, with 144K ballots counted. A very strong result (as we're seeing throughout NoVa): Spanberger won here by 29%, and Jones by only 19%.

one of the ways the mid to late 20th century political world has distorted the historical memories of even sophisticated observers is in the idea that you can achieve major transformations of american political life through something like bipartisan consensus

Republicans ran ads against the referendum in other parts of the state about how the new map would further empower Northern Virginia at their expense, and well, here we are

The Virginia redistricting referendum looks likely to prevail by a modest margin. "No" leads by 4 points with what's counted so far, but major blue areas are reporting more slowly. The "yes" side is exceeding its benchmarks across the state according to the NYT map www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Why the current "no" lead in Virginia's redistricting referendum is likely a mirage.

One thing I’ll add here: for all the issues of the Democratic Party I think people should realize how far we’ve come over the past 20 years on this stuff. The idea of democrats retaliating against the 2003 Texas redistricting was unfathomable.

They can gripe about the ballot wording but that's not going to make any difference. Everyone knows what this is about, which is why the Yes campaign is proudly hammering that message and the No campaign has to pretend this just came out of nowhere because Democrats are being mean.

Aside from who started it, states like CA and VA putting a counter-gerrymander up to a referendum, where people are told and can make a decision on the context for why it's being done, has vastly more democratic legitimacy than state legislators rushing it through because they got bullied by POTUS.

Polls close in Virginia in just under two hours at 7pm eastern. You can see the results as they roll in via this NYT link, and we will be live-posting at @the-downballot.com

"The other option … is you can play hardball too. You can escalate … and in doing so you can show your opponent that their hardball does not pay dividends [and] may end up being counterproductive. Your escalation … can bring the other side to the table to find a truly mutually beneficial solution."

The top-two primary needs to be abolished. Every election cycle it leads to races where one party risks getting shut out of a general election it would likely win. It forces parties to pick favorites in primaries just to avoid shutouts. It fails to do what its proponents intended—often the opposite

Stupid goo goo nonsense. The only way to get fair districting is to pinch republicans in the mouth enough until they agree to fairness. Doing this with Callais days away from ripping up the VRA is so stupid I don’t know where to begin.

Former North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper is arguably Democrats’ best chance for flipping a Senate seat in 2026. So of course, Republicans have launched a politically motivated investigation that mirrors his Republican opponent’s attacks

A sowing/reaping for the ages

Virginia votes TODAY on a referendum that would enable Democrats to redraw the congressional map for 2026 in response to new Republican gerrymanders in other states. The map targets 4 of 5 Republicans & aims to elect a 10-1 Dem majority. Interactive map+data: davesredistricting.org/maps#viewmap...

This is a snapshot of the failure of MSM and the concomitant ignorance within the American electorate about what is happening in and to their country.

Is the NC Supreme Court erasing its history? I just searched for the 2022 gerrymandering & voter ID rulings. They're not on the website. These were landmark rulings by the Democratic majority. Republicans overturned them in 2023 in an unprecedented power grab. #ncpol www.nccourts.gov/documents/ap...