This week at Democracy Docket: Flooding the zone on Virginia

There isn’t much doubt about the biggest democracy story of the week: Virginia voters’ approval Tuesday of a Democratic-backed constitutional amendment to redraw the state’s congressional lines. 

And Democracy Docket’s reporting team had you covered on every angle.

Jen Rice, who has made the redistricting beat her own, kicked off the week by warning about a last-minute Republican scheme to restrict voting, via a lawsuit over voter ID rules, in Virginia’s most important Democratic stronghold.

I told you about Steve Bannon trying to mobilize Republican voters by calling Democrats “demonic,” and warning that, if the redraw succeeds in helping them win the House, they’ll impeach President Donald Trump. 

Speaking of Trump, Jen picked up on the rich irony of him calling the Democratic redistricting effort — organized to counter the GOP’s own Trump-driven gerrymanders — “unjust.”

On Tuesday, we were out at the polls hearing from voters.

“I want to make sure that we have free and fair elections,” one woman told Democracy  Docket Social Media Producer John Evans after casting her ballot in Pentagon City. “We’re doing our best to combat all of the unfair redistricting that’s happening in other states.”

That night, Jen brought you the results within minutes of the race being called, as well as responses from some key figures. “Thanks for showing us what it looks like to stand up for our democracy and fight back,” President Barack Obama told Virginia voters.

Wednesday gave me a chance to contrast our coverage with that of much of the legacy media. In its latest hilarious hot take, The Washington Post called the redistricting effort — undertaken, remember, to counter similar GOP moves elsewhere — a “Democratic power grab,” and fretted that the vote “plunges America deeper into the gerrymandering abyss.” Others weren’t much better. 

Meanwhile, Matt Cohen couldn’t ignore the troubling, though perhaps unsurprising, response to the vote from Trump and his allies on the far right: immediate and false claims that the election was rigged. In the Trump era, it seems these lies are just standard procedure for any contest that Democrats win. 

Jen also took a step back to focus on the big picture. The Virginia result — combined with a similar Democratic win in California and the failure of several GOP efforts in other states —  means that, for now at least, Dems have fought Trump’s gerrymandering war, which last year threatened to radically tilt the midterms towards his party, at least to a draw. That’s a huge victory for democracy. 

Of course, Republicans don’t tend to care much about election results — they’re still trying to block the vote in court. So Jim Saksa filled you in on the key question: Where do things stand with those GOP lawsuits against the redraw, which had been paused during the election?

We’re staying on top of those cases. Later Wednesday, Yunior Rivas reported, a Virginia court sided with the GOP in blocking the vote — effectively nullifying the will of voters after the fact. 

By the next day, Jen wrote, Virginia had appealed the ruling, calling it “an erosion of the most basic premise of self-government.”

Ultimately, the state Supreme Court will likely have the last word. In fact, on Monday, the high court will hear arguments in one of those GOP challenges — and our team will bring you live updates in real time.

Because no one’s following events in Virginia more closely than Democracy Docket.