BREAKINGMay 9, 2026

Week in Politics: Redistricting fight in Tennessee and Virginia; latest poll on Trump

In the same week, Virginia's Supreme Court struck down a voter-approved redistricting amendment on procedural grounds—a ruling Republicans celebrated—while Tennessee's Republican-led legislature passed a new congressional map that splits Memphis into three districts, effectively diluting the only majority-Black, Democratic-held seat in the state. These moves follow a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that weakened voting rights for minority communities, which triggered a wave of Republican redistricting efforts in Tennessee, Alabama, and Louisiana. Meanwhile, a new Marist poll shows President Trump at a 37% approval rating, the lowest of either of his terms.

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Republicans and Democrats are locked in redistricting battles across multiple states while Trump's polling numbers spark debate within GOP ranks — whose vision for the party's future is actually winning?

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Virginia ruling: procedure vs. democratic outcome

Conservative

The Virginia Supreme Court didn't override democracy — it enforced it. A 52%-48% margin doesn't launder a procedurally defective ballot placement into constitutional validity. A constitution that bends to irregular procedure is no constitution at all — it's a document that belongs to whoever controls the process in a given moment.

Liberal

You're asking us to separate the procedural argument from its beneficiary, but Donald Trump himself called it a 'huge win for the Republican Party' — not a win for process integrity, not a vindication of constitutional norms, a win for his party. When the person celebrating a ruling is a president at 37% approval, the claim that this is purely neutral jurisprudence asks a lot of credulity.

Conservative

Trump celebrating a ruling doesn't make the ruling wrong — that's just guilt by beneficiary. If a procedurally defective amendment had helped Republicans and a Democratic court struck it down, you'd be citing the same precedent approvingly.

Liberal

Maybe. But I'll concede the narrower point: Democrats made real errors here, and the loss in Virginia is partly self-inflicted. That concession, though, doesn't travel to Tennessee — and you know it.

Memphis map's racial targeting and timing

Conservative

Steelmanning the opposing case honestly — splitting a majority-Black district into three Republican-leaning ones, days after a Supreme Court ruling weakened VRA protections, looks like coordination. But what that argument still can't answer is this: the VRA doesn't guarantee any racial group a district drawn in its favor — it prohibits deliberate racial dilution as the primary purpose. Tennessee Republicans will argue they're responding to population distribution and partisan geography, and current precedent gives them legal room to do so.

Liberal

You just said the timing 'looks like coordination' and is 'genuinely hard to rebut on its face' — those are your words. The district being carved up is the home of the civil rights movement, where MLK was killed fighting for sanitation workers, and it contains 17% of Tennessee's Black population. The legal room you're describing is the gap between what is defensible in a weakened-VRA courtroom and what any honest observer can see on a map.

Conservative

The gap between 'looks bad' and 'is illegal' is exactly where courts are supposed to operate — and you'd insist on that distinction if the politics were reversed. The question of racial motivation is live and should be litigated; I said that.

Liberal

Then let's litigate it — but stop treating 'it hasn't been struck down yet' as a defense. The Nashville map in 2022 wasn't struck down either, and Jim Cooper still doesn't have a seat.

Mid-decade redistricting as partisan norm

Conservative

Since the founding, drawing congressional districts has been the constitutional prerogative of state legislatures. Democrats exercised that power aggressively in Maryland, Illinois, and New Mexico after 2020 — mid-decade redistricting included. When New Mexico's Democratic legislature redrew its maps in 2021 to shore up a Democratic seat, the critics now condemning Tennessee were largely silent. The principle that mid-decade redistricting is norm-breaking collapses the moment you apply it equally to both parties.

Liberal

New Mexico shored up one competitive seat for a party that had just won the national popular vote. Tennessee carved up the only majority-Black district in the state, coordinated with Alabama and Louisiana, immediately after a court ruling removed federal oversight. Calling those the same thing isn't even-handedness — it's false equivalence that erases the specific targeting of Black political representation.

Conservative

You're grading the legitimacy of redistricting by the demographics of who loses representation, which means the rule isn't 'no mid-decade redistricting' — it's 'no mid-decade redistricting that disadvantages groups I designate.' That's not a legal principle, it's a political preference.

Liberal

No — the rule is the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits racial dilution as a primary purpose regardless of mid-decade timing. The demographic specificity isn't my preference; it's the statute's.

Redistricting severing voter-preference feedback loop

Conservative

A 37% presidential approval rating with 63% of Americans saying the economy isn't working for them is a public sending a clear signal. If redistricting insulates a legislative majority from that signal — if the mechanism by which voters change their government is structurally disabled — we face a real question about whether the system produces accountable governance or calcified incumbency. I believe the conservative answer is better candidates and better policy, not federal judicial supervision of every map. But a party that redraws its way to survival has not been held to account.

Liberal

You just described the problem precisely. Structural map advantages already allow a party to hold House majorities while losing the national popular vote — that's a documented mechanical fact, not a hypothetical. When you add mid-decade redistricting on top of that existing advantage, at a moment when 63% of Americans say the economy is failing them, you're not just insulating incumbents — you're installing a circuit breaker against accountability by the people who benefit from the outage.

Conservative

The circuit-breaker framing assumes maps are the primary variable. Candidate quality, turnout infrastructure, and message failures by the opposition also explain why disapproval doesn't always translate into seat flips — Democrats lost working-class voters well before this round of maps.

Liberal

Candidate quality and turnout don't explain why a party can lose the popular vote and keep the House. That's the map. And you said so yourself two turns ago.

Conservative's hardest question

The Memphis map's timing — passed days after a Supreme Court ruling weakened VRA minority protections, targeting the state's only majority-Black district — makes the racial-motivation argument genuinely hard to rebut on its face, even if current legal precedent does not automatically invalidate it. A conservative who believes in equal protection under the law should be uncomfortable arguing that the intent behind this sequence of events is purely geographic rather than racial.

Liberal's hardest question

The Virginia ruling has a genuine legal basis: if Democrats made real procedural errors in placing the amendment on the ballot, the court's enforcement of constitutional process is defensible on its own terms — and a liberal commitment to institutional legitimacy cannot simply be abandoned when rulings go the wrong way. Democrats' loss in Virginia is partly self-inflicted, which complicates the narrative of pure Republican anti-democratic aggression even as the Tennessee situation remains indefensible.

The Verdict

Both sides agree

Both sides agree that the Virginia Supreme Court's procedural ruling has a genuine legal basis and was not simply invented partisanship, even though the outcome benefited Republicans and Democrats made real mistakes in ballot placement.

The real conflict

FACTUAL: Whether the Tennessee Memphis map constitutes intentional racial dilution or legal geographic/partisan redistricting—conservatives argue current VRA precedent permits it; liberals argue the timing (immediately after Shelby County weakening) and the targeting of the only majority-Black district make racial intent plausible but currently legally unprovable under existing doctrine.

What nobody has answered

If both parties have demonstrated they will use mid-decade redistricting when legally available, and neither can claim it violates current law, what mechanism prevents an escalating cycle where legislatures perpetually redraw maps to chase short-term partisan advantage, ultimately destroying the stability of any electoral map?

Sources

Week in Politics: Redistricting fight in Tennessee and Virginia; latest poll on Trump

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