Emergency Measures

On Tuesday the people of Virginia approved a referendum to change the electoral map of the state in favor of the Democratic Party. The amendment to the state constitution will allow Virginia’s General Assembly to temporarily redraw boundaries of congressional districts to give Virginia Democrats an advantage in ten out of eleven. (The state currently sends six Democrats and five Republicans to the House.) As part of the larger redistricting war begun by Republican efforts in Texas, then countered by Democrats in California, the battle in Virginia attracted national attention in the run-up to November’s midterms. Depending on who you ask, the initiative is a noble attempt at putting the finger on the scale to make elections fair again, a necessary if questionably democratic move in a desperate moment of rule by an evil enemy, a cynical tit-for-tat, or a particularly egregious form of partisan gerrymandering that threatens the very conditions of democratic representation in Virginia and the United States.

As political funders fueled the contest with their money, its flames licked across the Potomac. Attack ads echoed outside of my gym. And so late in March, I took the train from D.C. all the way to Vienna, the end of the line. On the third floor of an old redbrick office building near the George Mason campus, I encountered the scrappy urgency of a transient campaign operation getting underway. Armed with an external battery for my phone and two stacks of glossy flyers, I ventured out into the field as a canvasser in favor of the redistricting. The campaign rhetoric would need some clarification at the doors, I thought; this should only be considered an attempt to restore free and fair elections or level the playing field at the national level, not the state. But according to the Virginia Democrats website, this was “a one-time, emergency exception designed specifically for the current moment,” and the standard bipartisan process would resume after the 2030 census. I was less concerned with the details. After a year spent in D.C. under the Trump administration that had immiserated much of the city’s workforce, flooded the streets with the National Guard, and sent helicopters to hover over my neighborhood while masked ICE agents conducted raids, I felt happy to throw my weight behind a countervailing effort to deploy emergency powers.

Unlike the Austrian city of the same name back in 1848, there was no popular uprising being fomented at the Vienna station this spring, not obviously. The suburbs have long been a symbol of an America devoid of politics. Something repressed roiled under their placid visage, but the danger was supernatural (as in slasher films such as Halloween) or psychosexual (American Beauty, Blue Velvet), not political. In this tradition, the suburbs do not even deign to repress political activity. If Baron Haussmann once made the boulevards of Paris wide to prevent the people from taking the streets as they had during the June Days uprising of 1848 and to make suppression of protests easier, no such efforts are needed in those aborted arrondissements that in America we call cul-de-sac, the bottom of the bag. The French radicals of ’68 cried sous les pavés, la plage!—under the pavement, the beach—as they tore up the streets, yet no one would know if such wonders existed under the tarmac of Fairfax. To most, the surface appears adequately serene.

On foot with no other pedestrians in sight, black backpack filled with flyers and provisions, I cut the frame of an outside agitator. Accompanied by children hiding behind legs at half-opened doors, parents responded like guarded Bartlebys—I’d prefer not to answer. Yet more often I encountered a surplus of enthusiasm. I had expected to feel like a nuisance knocking on doors, but my presence felt more superfluous than intrusive. Behind closed doors and watchful Ring cameras stood partisans at the ready. “I’m here about the election,” I would barely utter before my interlocutor would profess their enthusiastic support for the redistricting, thank me for my service to democracy and offer a glass of water. Most already had a plan to head to their local polling station. A middle-aged Iranian man asked if I had gone to the recent No Kings protest and, when I responded no, told me I should be ashamed of myself for insufficient commitment to the cause. Against their external appearance of calm, the suburbs roiled with civic fervor.

The vast majority of northern Virginians I spoke with—many of whom were federal workers or immigrants tired of being disrespected by the second Trump administration—seemed to have few qualms about changing congressional districts to functionally if temporarily deny representation to Republicans in their state. Desperate times called for desperate measures, many said, and I agreed. Part of me found this pragmatism refreshing. It was, after all, a marked departure from the claims to moral high ground of norms and legalism that have defined much of the Democratic Party crusade against Trump. My simplest pitch—if you don’t like the MAGA crew, vote yes—convinced the most hurried voters. A more elaborate version of that sentiment swayed a woman whose disillusionment with the Democrats caused her to lash out at me with a bitter “Does it even matter?” A shrugging concession (“It’s not my favorite way to do politics, but this is where we find ourselves”) tended to sit well with the moderates.

But occasionally I would encounter a dissenter among even the most consistent Democratic voters on my contact list. A young man in a shotgun townhome as straight and narrow as his commitment to procedure told me that two wrongs do not make a right, his voice quivering with indignation; an older woman glared at me as she told me that she thought the electoral map of Virginia was plenty fair as it stood. I thanked them and moved on without mustering a good response. Were the rest of us really so eager to silence our neighbors? And if this was only supposed to be an emergency, short-term measure, what did it suggest about the future of small-d democratic politics?

On the car ride home from my last day in the field, a fellow canvasser, who told me he had reluctantly worked on five campaigns since his time with Bernie Sanders at the 2020 Iowa caucuses, said that he responded to similar objections with an appeal to game theory. If and only if both parties engaged in the redistricting war, he said, eventually—perhaps as soon as 2030—they would find themselves with electoral maps so distended and strange that they would agree to something more reasonable. I found this scenario comforting in its absurdity. Earlier in my canvassing, a middle-aged man, cell phone holstered, chuckled ruefully at the state of U.S. politics and remarked: “Maybe things will get so bad that people will fix it.” Unlikely as that seemed to me, I had no better endgame in mind.