The Supreme Court on Friday tossed out an emergency request from Virginia officials to reinstate a congressional map that would have benefited Democrats in this year’s midterm election, a widely expected decision that represented the court’s latest foray into a nationwide redistricting war.
The decision thwarts Democratic plans to use the new map to pick up as many as four additional seats in the House of Representatives this year.
The 6-3 conservative court has recently sided with Republicans in Louisiana and Alabama – permitting those states to quickly redraw their maps. But the Virginia case dealt more squarely with questions of state law rather than federal questions, and many experts predicted that the appeal was, at best, a Hail Mary.
There were no noted dissents. and the court did not explain its reasoning in the one-sentence order.
Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger, a Democrat, signaled this week that the state was abandoning the effort anyway, telling reporters on Wednesday that the state would move forward with the old maps regardless of how the US Supreme Court decided the emergency appeal.
Democratic officials in Virginia raced up to the US Supreme Court on Monday urging the justices to block a 4-3 decision from the state’s highest court that effectively struck down their proposed map. The state court ruling was based on what it found was a timing error in how the legislature handled a referendum empowering lawmakers to redraw their maps as part of a highly unusual mid-decade redistricting war playing out across the nation.
The state court’s ruling, Democrats said, was “deeply mistaken” and had “profound practical importance to the nation.”
The fast-track appeal landed at the 6-3 conservative court at a moment when the justices are facing significant criticism, including from within their own ranks, for a series of map decisions that have by and large favored the Republican Party. In recent days, the court has cleared the way for both Louisiana and Alabama to use new maps that are far more friendly to Republicans – tipping the balance in the monthslong redistricting race toward the GOP.
That started with a blockbuster decision in late April that weakened the scope of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, providing political cover to Republican state lawmakers eager to heed President Donald Trump’s call to redraw maps between census releases to try to retain control of the House. Several southern states have moved to redraw or have already recrafted their maps, in some cases pushing back their primary elections.
But while the political motivations in Virginia are the same as those other states, the legal issues were quite different. The challenge to Virginia’s Democratic-friendly map dealt not with racial considerations but rather with how the state sequenced an amendment to its constitution to allow the redistricting in the first place. The state’s highest court ruled that lawmakers violated the state’s constitution with that process by not holding the first vote on an amendment before a general election. Virginia lawmakers first voted to approve the measure in late October 2025, before Election Day but while early voting was already well underway.
The challenge for Democrats is that the US Supreme Court generally defers to state courts when it comes to interpreting state law.
Recognizing that challenge, Virginia Democrats engineered an argument that the state courts misinterpreted the definition of “election” in federal law, which they said clearly means only Election Day. And they resurrected an argument that has been more frequently raised by Republicans that state courts should have deferred to the state legislature on election matters under a clause of the US Constitution that requires “the legislature” of each state to set the rules for federal elections.
The redistricting in Virginia would have given Democrats the chance to win as many as four more seats, potentially reducing the state’s GOP representation to a single district.
The Virginia appeal arrived as the justices have openly debated the court’s impact on this year’s midterm election. Following the Voting Rights Act decision last month, liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson traded barbs with conservative Justice Samuel Alito over how quickly Louisiana could redraw its map. Jackson accused the court of rolling over its “principles” in pursuit of influencing the election. Alito fired back, calling that “insulting” and saying that Jackson’s dissent raised “trivial” and “baseless” arguments.
This story is has been updated with additional details.