We lost the referendum. I covered that. The courts blocked certification. Covered that too. But in the last week something shifted, and I think most people…
The bottom line
We lost the referendum. I covered that. The courts blocked certification. Covered that too. But in the last week something shifted, and I think most people are sleeping on it. The odds of Spanberger’s gerrymandered maps actually going into effect in November are collapsing.
This article is based on analysis from Bearing Freedom. Watch the original video. This is commentary, not legal advice.
What the referendum actually did
The framing of this fight has been dishonest from day one, so I want to restate the math.
Virginia is a 52-48 state. Not blue, not a Democratic stronghold. A state Republicans won for governor two cycles in a row before Spanberger took the seat in 2025. The existing congressional maps, drawn by the bipartisan Virginia Redistricting Commission after the 2020 census, reflect that split: six Democrats, five Republicans. Proportionate to an evenly divided electorate.
The map Spanberger’s legislature passed would produce 10 Democrats and one Republican. Ten to one. In a 52-48 state.
The ballot question Virginians voted on in April called this “restoring fairness.” That framing was so misleading that Tazewell County Circuit Court Judge Jack Hurley called it “flagrantly misleading” before a single vote was cast. He was right. When 52 percent of the state votes for your party and you grab 91 percent of the congressional seats, you haven’t restored fairness. You’ve institutionalized a 40-point margin out of a 4-point popular vote edge. That’s a gerrymander by any honest definition.
The referendum passed 51.45 to 48.6 percent. After those results came in, prediction markets put the probability of the gerrymander going into effect at around 95 percent. Then the courts started working.
The Virginia Supreme Court holds the line
On April 22, a circuit court judge issued an injunction blocking certification of the results. On April 28, the Supreme Court of Virginia declined to lift that stay. The injunction holds while the court works through Scott v. McDougle.
The case runs Virginia House Speaker Don Scott (D, the defendant) against state Senator Ryan McDougle (R, the plaintiff). McDougle is joined by Delegate Terry Kilgore, Senator Bill Stanley, and a citizen member of the bipartisan redistricting commission. Their arguments are not procedural technicalities conjured up to obstruct. They’re grounded in the actual text of the Virginia Constitution.
The challengers have at least three independent grounds. Start with the special session: Spanberger’s legislature passed the amendment during a special session called for budget purposes, not constitutional amendments. Virginia’s constitution doesn’t let a special session wander outside the scope it was convened for, and nobody disputes that this one did. Then there’s the 90-day posting requirement. Proposed amendments must be publicly posted for 90 days before the general election preceding their submission to voters, and that window wasn’t met because early voting in fall 2025 opened before the measure was properly advanced through the legislature. On top of that, over a million Virginians had already cast ballots in the fall 2025 general election before the General Assembly even completed the amendment’s first legislative passage, which the Virginia Constitution requires as a prerequisite before any referendum can happen.
Win on any one of these and the new maps die. The court heard oral arguments April 27, hasn’t ruled yet, and candidate filing opens May 25. A decision is coming before those deadlines close.
Why Louisiana v. Callais matters here
On April 29, SCOTUS handed down Louisiana v. Callais in a 6-3 ruling along ideological lines. Justice Alito wrote the majority, which struck down Louisiana’s congressional map as a racial gerrymander under the Fifteenth Amendment. The ruling also narrowed Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, holding it “requires evidence giving rise to a strong inference of intentional discrimination” rather than the statistical disparity test courts had used before.
Most coverage has run with the VRA angle. That’s fine. But the piece that got underreported was what happened five days later.
On May 4, the Court issued a judgment forthwith, making Callais effective immediately instead of waiting the standard 25 to 32 days. Courts don’t rush judgments in redistricting cases by accident. It was an 8-1 vote on that motion. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was the lone dissent, arguing the Court should “stay on the sidelines” to “avoid the appearance of partiality.” Alito’s response in writing was unusually blunt: her dissent “levels charges that cannot go unanswered,” and he pointed out the constitutional question had been argued and conferenced nearly seven months prior. The 8-1 tally tells you how much traction Jackson’s argument got with the rest of the bench.
Callais doesn’t govern Scott v. McDougle directly. Virginia’s fight is a state constitutional question, not a VRA question. But two things connect.
First, in her main dissent in Callais, Jackson herself leaned on the same procedural timing logic the Virginia plaintiffs are using, arguing courts should be skeptical of election-eve map changes and that process matters as much as outcome. She was outvoted, obviously. But when even a liberal justice finds those procedural arguments serious enough to put her name on them, calling them a fringe Republican legal theory becomes a lot harder.
Second, the speed of the Callais judgment sends a signal about how the Court views redistricting chaos heading into a federal election. Courts that rush judgments forthwith are courts that want things resolved before votes are cast. That disposition lines up exactly with the Virginia Supreme Court stepping up and ruling before May 25.
What I expect
Courts are unpredictable, but here’s where I come out.
The Virginia Supreme Court already showed something by refusing to lift the stay. If the justices were ready to let the new maps go forward, pulling the injunction and letting certification proceed while they deliberated was the obvious path. They passed on that. The injunction is still in place, and that’s not nothing.
The strongest ground in Scott v. McDougle is probably the special session authority question. It’s structural. Either the Virginia Constitution permits a special session to pass a constitutional amendment outside the session’s stated scope or it doesn’t. That’s not a fact-intensive question requiring the court to guess at voter intent. Spanberger’s team used a budget special session to ram through a constitutional amendment. The text says that’s not allowed.
My expectation: the Virginia Supreme Court invalidates the amendment on at least one procedural ground. Certification never happens. The 2026 midterms run on the existing bipartisan commission maps. Six Democrats, five Republicans.
That’s the right outcome. Not because I want a Republican advantage, but because those maps are the product of a legitimate, constitutionally authorized process, and the alternative is giving one party 91 percent of the seats in a state where they get 52 percent of the votes.
The ballot question was a lie
I keep returning to this because it’s getting glossed over, and it shouldn’t be.
Virginians voted on language asking whether the state constitution should be amended to “temporarily adopt new congressional districts to restore fairness in the upcoming elections.” The word “fairness” was in that question. The actual change would produce a 10-1 Democratic map in a 52-48 state.
That’s not a charitable reading versus an uncharitable one. It’s the opposite of reality. Judge Hurley said “flagrantly misleading” before the vote happened. He was overruled on procedural grounds and the election went forward anyway, with that same dishonest ballot language intact. NPR interviewed voters at polling places and found widespread confusion about what they were actually approving.
Courts won’t void the amendment just because the ballot language was dishonest. Constitutional adjudication doesn’t work that way. But it does eat into the “voters approved it” argument Democrats have been running hard since April 21. The voters approved something. It’s genuinely unclear they approved a 10-1 gerrymander.
Where this stands
Prediction markets had the gerrymandered maps at roughly 95 percent probability right after the referendum. As of this writing they’re in the high 30s. That’s a 55-point collapse driven entirely by the Virginia Supreme Court’s stay decision and the Callais ruling. Prediction markets don’t move 55 points on vibes. People with real stakes and real information are pricing in what the courts are doing.
I live in Virginia. My congressional seat is part of what’s in play. I’ve followed this since Spanberger signed the first legislation in February, and at every turn Democrats moved fast and used every lever they could find. At every turn the courts pushed back.
The original maps are still in place. The Virginia Supreme Court will rule before candidates file on May 25. Seven justices, the text of the Virginia Constitution, and a documented set of procedural violations. I think we win.
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