Punchbowl: Hakeem’s End Zone Dance May Have Been a Safety

Greek tragedies usually hinge on punishment for hubris. This looks more like a Beltway-geek farce.

Two weeks ago, Hakeem Jeffries declared a complete victory in the Great Redistricting War of 2026. The passage of the Virginia referendum had handed Democrats a resounding win and a rebuke to Orange Man Bad, or as Jeffries has taken to calling him of late, the “so-called president.” Jeffries practically dared Ron DeSantis to attempt redistricting in Florida, a challenge which the governor gleefully took up after begging Jeffries to follow through on his threat to personally campaign against it. 

After DeSantis succeeded in stripping Democrats of four more safe House districts, Punchbowl reports today that Jeffries’ end-zone dance last week looks less like a touchdown and more like a safety:

On April 22, House Democrats were riding high.

They’d just won a huge gamble in Virginia, spending tens of millions of dollars on a redistricting referendum aimed at netting them up to four new seats. President Donald Trump — who set off the unprecedented national redistricting fight in Texas last year — was tanking in the polls, dragging down Republicans everywhere.

Overall, it looked like Democrats had held Republicans to a draw in the redistricting wars and were on their way to the House majority.

But the last two weeks have suddenly turned rough for House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and the Democratic Caucus. They’re facing legal setbacks on redistricting across multiple fronts, developments that have reshaped the battle for the House.

As many as 10 seats could now swing toward Republicans in a worst-case scenario for Democrats, although this all remains very fluid.

The biggest risk is the win that precipitated the premature celebration. Virginia Democrats cut all sorts of corners in order to get their redistricting referendum on the ballot last month, including some key rules to guard against abuse in amending the state constitution. Democrats assured themselves and the media that none of that would matter if voters approved the changes, but the Virginia state supreme court turned out to be very skeptical about that argument in their hearing. The ruling has been delayed due to the death of the spouse of one judge on the panel, but as Punchbowl points out, Democrats are worried that Republicans will get the original map back.

As Jeffries found out too, the game wasn’t actually over. It might not have even been halftime. DeSantis took up Jeffries’ challenge and wiped out the four safe Democrat districts in less than three days. More importantly, though, the long-awaited Supreme Court decision on the Voting Rights Act’s Section 2 now forbids the kind of racial redistricting that allowed Democrats to build a high floor in the House. 

Dave Weigel explains how Louisiana v Callais will change the field as states remove such districts to comply with the ruling:

The Voting Rights Act and its legislative updates broke the stranglehold of conservative southern Democrats, who were wiped out fully during Barack Obama’s presidency. The Immigration and Nationality Act changed who came to America — Asian, Latin American, and African migrants, whose entry into the US was limited under old rules that favored European migrants.

And the decennial Census counted new arrivals to determine congressional allocations, whether or not those new immigrants were citizens who could vote. (Republicans can overstate the effects of non-citizens getting counted for congressional apportionment, but it obviously helped the party that most non-white voters support.)

By 2020, this meant that Democrats could win just 41% of the white vote, take the Electoral College, and control the House and Senate. The safest seats in the Democratic House were majority-minority districts, which even deep-red states like Alabama were required to draw to comply with the Voting Rights Act.

All of that enabled a much uniformly progressive Democratic Party — pro-choice, pro-LGBT, pro-gun control, pro-amnesty for non-citizens — to win a governing majority. The premise of the Trump-era GOP is that this majority is a mirage enabled by law.

Take away the VRA districts, Republicans argue, and the current version of the Democratic Party can’t win the House. Halt immigration and stop counting non-citizens in the Census, and its current coalition can’t get to 270 electoral votes.

Weigel boiled down the implications in a terse X tweet:

If you want to come and argue about “uniformly progressive” – welcome, but look at how many pro-life and actually conservative Democrats were part of the pre-Thornberg majorities (before the maps that carved out safe VRA seats)

— David Weigel (@daveweigel) May 6, 2026

Jeffries didn’t have anything to do with Callais, of course, which came from an outside challenge to Louisiana’s attempt to draw a second majority-minority district that stretched across the state for well over one hundred miles. However, the case had been on the Supreme Court docket well before the start of the redistricting war, at a time when it should have cautioned Jeffries into defending the status quo rather than answering Greg Abbott’s move in Texas. When both parties start mid-cycle redistricting, the “norms” argument disappears, and the risks go up for the party that entrenched redistricting power to commissions rather than legislatures in “safe” states. This was always a losing proposition for Democrats even without Callais, but Jeffries’ end-zone dance has unleashed Republicans across the board for new redistricting in the wake of both Virginia’s cooked referendum and the Callais ruling.

Now Democrats may have to face a midterm map where moderate Democrat voters suddenly matter a lot more than Bernie Bros and AOC Acolytes, and they don’t have candidates or an infrastructure that would connect with their new electorates. Weigel’s doom prophecy may not come to pass in 2026, but you can bet it will matter in 2028 and pretty much every election cycle afterward. 

Editor’s Note: The 2026 Midterms will determine the fate of President Trump’s America First agenda. Republicans must maintain control of both chambers of Congress.

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