MAGA scores remap wins in Virginia, Tennessee, Florida

Rep. Justin Jones, D-Nashville, left, protests outside the House chamber with Rep. Gabby Salinas, D-Memphis, front right, and Gloria Johnson, D-Knoxville, behind, during a special session of the state legislature to redraw U.S. Congressional voting maps May 7, 2026, in Nashville, Tenn. | George Walker IV / AP

RICHMOND, Va. and NASHVILLE, Tenn.—If what the courts did to thwart the will of the people in Virginia last week holds up, Republicans could end up controlling the House in November despite large voter swings toward the Democrats. Republican President Donald Trump and his white supremacist MAGA movement scored major wins on consecutive days in the nation’s ongoing remap wars on May 7 in Tennessee and May 8 in Virginia, respectively.

The net results left Trump cheering and progressives, including labor led by people like Teachers/AFT President Randi Weingarten, dismayed. The moves by the courts do much more than hurt Democrats. They sweep Black lawmakers out of office and, in so doing, hurt the entire working-class agenda opposed by Trump and the billionaires.

“The people of this country should be allowed to decide who represents them, not a mid-decade gerrymander started by a president afraid that his policies are so unpopular he would lose a congressional majority” Weingarten said.

She explained: “When Republican-led state legislatures change the rules mid-election, even suspending elections or ignoring tornado warnings to disenfranchise Black voters, that’s allowed. This is a signal that something is wrong in America,” said the union leader, a civics teacher who holds a law degree.

Virginia victory for Trump

The bigger win for Trump was in Virginia where the State Supreme Court ruled 4-3 to restore the current congressional map and its 6-5 Democratic tilt—as opposed to a 8-1 Democratic map, with two other leaning-Democratic districts, which state voters approved 52%-48% on April 21.

The Trump-controlled Republican National Committee sued to overturn the will of Virginia voters. Writing for the majority, Justice Arthur Kelsey said the 45% of Virginians who voted Republican in last year’s off-year general election would have only 9% of the state’s U.S. representatives.

Kelsey’s decision relied on a technicality argument to throw out the voters’ decision, saying the legislature didn’t follow the Virginia constitution when it allowed the referendum to take place. He explained that referenda can only take effect if lawmakers approve the balloting in two legislative sessions separated by an election—and the first legislative approval, last year, came before the 2025 Election Day but after mail-in voting had already started.

Leading the three dissenters, Chief Justice Cleo Elaine Powell, who is African-American, said the court majority distorted the constitutional meaning of Election Day by stretching it.

“The majority has broadened the meaning of the word ‘election,’ as used in the Virginia Constitution, to include the early voting period. This is in direct conflict with how both Virginia and federal law define an election,” the Chief Justice wrote.

Silencing Tennessee’s Black voters

In Nashville, the heavily GOP-gerrymandered Tennessee legislature destroyed the congressional district dominated by majority-Black Memphis by splitting the city into thirds, with two districts extending far into white and heavily Republican rural areas. The third, compact, district includes majority-white sections of Memphis and its suburbs.

The Tennessee result would leave the state delegation 9-0 Republican.

Tennessee has long been a civil rights battleground, stretching back to the lunch counter sit-ins and the assassination of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. The latest remapping struggle fits into that tradition. Democratic State Rep. Justin Jones said the current moment must be called what it is.

“Whether they do it with crosses and violence or with the sophistication of suits and decorum” yields the same result in the end, Jones warned. He said white supremacy is still being used to try to split the working class and dilute opposition to the right-wing reactionary agenda in the state. They have “turned back the clock of history,” he said, urging the movements opposing gerrymandering to “err on the side of action.”

White progressive Rep. Steve Cohen (D), who now represents all of Memphis, lobbied against the remap. So did African-American pastors and constituents who jammed the visitors’ galleries. Jeers and taunts broke out during the vote, and several people were arrested and the galleries cleared.

The new all-Republican congressional delegation would have no non-whites and no non-Christians. Cohen, who is Jewish, promptly vowed to sue the against the map as an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. The state NAACP has already filed a court challenge to the map.

“72% of the white population is put into one district. 75% of the Black population is carved into two,” said State Sen. Jeff Yarbro, D-Nashville, during the debate. “We are being asked to believe that it’s just the luck of the draw, just happenstance.” The Tennessee Senate approved the map on party lines, 25-5.

This remap makes Memphis the second Tennessee city carved up to dilute votes by Democrats and people of color. The other, in the regular redistricting four years ago, was Nashville itself.

Defying the polls, Republicans could hold the House

In Florida, just days before the Virginia ruling, the GOP-dominated and gerrymandered legislature adopted MAGA Gov. Ron DeSantis’s map, increasing the state’s U.S. House tilt from 20-8 GOP to 24-4.  The losers would be two African-American Democrats and two Jewish Democrats. The state NAACP is challenging that map in court, too.

If the new maps hold up in those three states combined, even with a nationwide Democratic swing this fall, the current GOP U.S. House majority of 217-212 with one pro-GOP independent would likely expand. There are five vacant seats, three of them previously Democratic-held.

“The Virginia Supreme Court’s decision puts politics over the will of the people. A vote cast by millions across the Commonwealth should supersede other redistricting efforts by state legislators. But here, when the voters decide to redistrict, they are told they can’t by the very same court that allowed the issue to move forward,” said the AFT’s Weingarten.

“If Republicans rig the system to stay in power, they will continue to rubber-stamp President Trump’s dangerous agenda, further strip us of our freedoms, restrict access to affordable effective health care, and even advance a back-door abortion ban,” Planned Parenthood’s political arm said.

Trump started the redistricting war by ordering Texas to carve out five more GOP districts, which lawmakers dutifully did last year. In the process, they endangered the seat of Rep. Greg Casar (D), a longtime union organizer, among others.

Californians, by referendum, neutralized that move by approving a new map probably increasing the Democrats’ numbers by five, to 47 out of 52 total. And the Utah Supreme Court followed the voters’ prior will there and unified leaning-blue Salt Lake City into one district. It had been carved up between four GOP seats.

Elsewhere, Republicans picked up single seats in Missouri and North Carolina and possibly two in Ohio. One of the endangered Ohioans is African-American, as are the Missourian and Carolinian. The other endangered Ohioan is strongly pro-worker Rep. Marcy Kaptur, Congress’s longest-tenured woman.

Michael Waldman, executive director of the Brennan Center for Law and Justice at New York University, said the whole mess reinforces the argument for a nationwide law covering redistricting, banning gerrymanders of all types—racial and partisan alike.

In a column even before the results, he reminded readers the U.S. Supreme Court allowed all three pro-GOP results by gutting what remained of the Voting Rights Act in a case from Louisiana. He cited scholar Rick Hasen, who’s warned the decision “will bleach the halls of Congress, state legislatures, and city councils.”

Waldman said, “We may see the fastest rollback in representation since the end of Reconstruction after the Civil War.”

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CONTRIBUTOR

Mark Gruenberg

Award-winning journalist Mark Gruenberg is head of the Washington, D.C., bureau of People's World. He is also the editor of the union news service Press Associates Inc. (PAI). Known for his reporting skills, sharp wit, and voluminous knowledge of history, Mark is a compassionate interviewer but tough when going after big corporations and their billionaire owners.