Voters heading to the polls in Virginia on Tuesday may determine the outcome of the November elections for the rest of the country.
They will decide whether the state should redraw its congressional districts to boost the number of Democrats in the House. The ballot measure is intended to counter Republican gerrymandering in other states, which was encouraged by Donald Trump to maintain GOP control of the House despite sagging polls.
Most of us learned in social studies class that gerrymandering is an inherently corrupt activity that robs voters of the opportunity of legitimate choices. Allowing politicians to draw their own district lines is like letting teenagers set their own curfews — an inherent conflict of interest that will almost always turn out badly.
So the challenge facing Virginia Democrats has been convincing the electorate that doing a bad thing to stop a worse thing is actually a good thing. That’s a tough message to sell, but Democrats only made their own job harder.
The measure’s backers seem to have resigned themselves to a hesitant and often ambivalent message. They readily admit that gerrymandering is an intentional subversion of the voters’ will, but tentatively argue that employing Trumpy methods to defeat Trump will lead to a less Trumpy outcome. They rend their garments in public, which leads to a less-than-convincing battle cry.
“Nobody wants to do this. I don’t want to do this,” said one Democratic legislator. “[But] we can’t sit back and wait.”
“I believe that people should choose their representatives. Representatives shouldn’t choose their people,” lamented another. “We’ve been pushed into a situation not of our own choosing.”
Neither of those quotes would work on a bumper sticker or campaign sign.
Neither of those quotes would work on a bumper sticker or campaign sign, much less as a call-and-response to be shouted enthusiastically at passing cars. Honk if you support the ballot measure but only because you were pushed into it by circumstances beyond your control …
This is not just a problem for the commonwealth, though. If Democrats want to push back against the excesses of the Trump era, they’re going to have to learn how to counterpunch more effectively.
Large majorities of Americans disapprove of Trump’s presidency. They also know that Democrats strongly disagree with the president. But “at least we’re not him” is an insufficient alternative. In addition to a repudiation, voters also require a strong and compelling path forward. The Virginia Democrats’ struggle to explain what they could accomplish with these extra House seats suggests a party that is still deciding not just how to communicate with voters, but what to say to them.
They could take some notes from California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who acted quickly to pass a statewide ballot measure that will likely create five additional Democratic seats in his state after Trump began his gerrymandering push. But as the GOP moved ahead with similar efforts in states they control, Democrats in Maryland, Illinois, Washington and elsewhere defeated, delayed or disregarded their own opportunities to redraw district lines in their favor.
That means the gerrymandering fight will be decided in Virginia. Republicans would likely lose control in November due to inflation, affordability and Iran, but they could win a few more seats during a looming redistricting in Florida. If Virginia votes yes, the two parties’ machinations will essentially cancel each other out. If it votes no, the GOP may have a more plausible path to maintaining control of the House.
The initiative is running very close in the polls. (A recent Washington Post-Schar School survey has it ahead by an insignificant and therefore nail-biting 5-point margin.) Unlike deep-blue California, where fervently anti-Trump voters easily passed an initiative presented as a referendum against the president, purplish Virginia is less susceptible to such an overtly partisan appeal.
The most assertive Democratic messengers of the moment on the national stage, Newsom, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker and perhaps Arizona Sen. Ruben Gallego, are most aggressive when they are attacking Trump himself. But progressives from the Bernie-AOC wing of the party like Graham Platner and Jasmine Crockett are usually the only other Democrats who are equally forceful on other matters.
While their messages are most effective with the progressive faithful, winning national elections and battleground state campaigns requires wooing swing voters — and sometimes that means making a forceful centrist argument too. You don’t win the middle with milquetoast arguments.
Virginia might pass this redistricting measure in spite of Democrats’ wan messaging, but the campaign for it should be a reminder for Democrats that diffidence is rarely a winning strategy. A party that doesn’t believe in its methods or its message is a party that does not believe in itself. And if you don’t believe in yourself, voters won’t either.
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Dan Schnur
Dan Schnur, a registered Independent, teaches political communications at UC-Berkeley and the University of Southern California.