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Democrats on Wednesday celebrated an election win in Virginia<\/a> that could put them slightly ahead in the national redistricting competition that President Donald Trump triggered<\/a> in an attempt to preserve his party’s House majority in this year’s midterms, but it will not be the final round.<\/p>\n The Virginia Supreme Court will now decide whether Democratic lawmakers violated procedural rules when they referred a constitutional amendment to the ballot authorizing the new U.S. House districts that could help Democrats win as many as four additional seats in the state. If so, that could invalidate the map voters narrowly approved Tuesday.<\/p>\n What happens next in Florida also will matter.<\/p>\n The state’s Republican-controlled Legislature is to meet in a special session next week that GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis called in part to draw a new map to expand the party’s congressional majority there. The U.S. Supreme Court is scheduled to issue an opinion by the end of June in a Louisiana case that could overturn a key provision of the Voting Rights Act<\/a> and lead to redrawn political maps across the South, though almost all of those could not happen until 2028.<\/p>\n After voters passed the Virginia amendment, Democrats could tentatively claim that they netted 10 seats nationally from the mid-decade redistricting, compared with the nine that Republicans claim. Even if things swing again in the GOP’s favor, the net result of Trump’s campaign would be at best an incremental increase in the number of GOP-leaning House seats at a time when his approval rating is dropping and Republican anxiety over losing control of Congress in November is rising.<\/p>\n \u201cWe have successfully blunted Trump\u2019s attempt to completely hijack the midterms,” said John Bisognano, president of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee.<\/p>\n Many Republicans agreed.<\/p>\n \u201cThe GOP will now lose net seats across the country. If you\u2019re going to pick a fight, at least win it,\u201d Ari Fleischer, who was a spokesman for President George W. Bush, posted on the social media site X after the Virginia vote. \u201cAll this was foreseeable and avoidable. We should not have started this fight.\u201d<\/p>\n Adam Kincaid, executive director of the National Republican Redistricting Trust, argued that it is too soon to declare one party a victor.<\/p>\n \u201cIt’s an ongoing process with many legal challenges pending, and it’s far too early for sweeping statements on the final outcome,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Trump on Wednesday tried to undermine the Virginia result by leveling groundless accusations of fraud similar to ones he made after losing the 2020 presidential election<\/a>. He called the Virginia vote \u201cRIGGED\u201d and \u201cCrooked\u201d in a post on his social media site and added: \u201cLet\u2019s see if the Courts will fix this travesty of ‘Justice.’\u201d<\/p>\n Redistricting is typically done every 10 years after each census, unless ordered by a court. But last summer, Trump pushed a redrawing in Texas, prodding the state’s Republican-controlled Legislature to add up to five winnable House seats<\/a> for his party. Trump then began pressuring other Republican-run states to follow. Missouri, North Carolina and Ohio have since created more GOP-leaning seats in addition to Texas.<\/p>\n Democrats began to fight back, even though they were more constrained because several Democratic-controlled states had maps drawn by independent commissions rather than lawmakers and governors.<\/p>\n