In a call with The Mercury, Holder outlined his support in the context of the national movement in red and blue states.
Former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder ardently defended Virginia’s mid-decade redistricting proposal on a call Friday — a day ahead of his participation in a get-out-the-vote rally in Arlington while former Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin was set to headline a rally opposing the proposal in Lynchburg Saturday.
Virginia is one of 13 states to pursue redistricting over the past year. After President Donald Trump encouraged Texas to redraw its congressional lines to bolster GOP representation in the nation’s legislature, Democrats began to push back.
Virginians will decide whether to allow the state’s legislature temporary power to redraw its congressional districts in a referendum on April 21.
“They’re afraid that if we have a fair election, they’re going to lose the midterms,” Holder said of Republicans ahead of congressional elections later this year that are seen as a litmus test of whichever party controls the White House and Congress.
“You got to win the midterms, because if we don’t win the midterms, it’s just going to be — I mean, they’ll find a reason to impeach me,” Trump said earlier this year, NBC News reported.
This year every House seat in the nation is up for election, while a portion of the Senate is also on the ballot.
More than a check on Trump, Democratic states seeking redistricting hope to help their party make gains in the Republican-controlled Congress, while GOP states aim to ensure they maintain and expand their control.
Holder said the political environment required Democrats at the state and federal level to get aggressive in their campaign to redraw maps.
“I think what the Republicans expected from Democrats was that we would write op-eds. I’d go on television (and) do interviews with you and say: ‘oh Charlotte, this is terrible.’” Instead, he added, “What we said is, ‘no, we’re going to be tough.’”
But Holder is an unlikely advocate for the pro-redistricting movement, lending his presence to the effort alongside other national figures including his old boss, former President Barack Obama.
As founder of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, Holder’s fight has usually been to prevent gerrymandering, not temporarily support it.
Holder has pressed the U.S. Supreme Court amid legal challenges over Republican efforts to eliminate one of two majority-Black districts in Louisiana, a state where one-third of residents are Black.
He sees a difference in race-based gerrymandering versus the partisan map redrawing now happening across America triggered by Trump. Holder said his organization and Democrats in Virginia and other states seeking to counter-redistrict “didn’t want this fight.”
“But we have to do something,” he said, to balance the field that Republicans altered. “It’s a temporary measure for an extraordinary moment,” he said of Virginia’s proposal to redraw its map.
How the process would work
If voters allow lawmakers to remake the state’s congressional maps mid-decade, the maps would favor Democratic districts 10-1. The map would be in place until 2030 and the state’s redistricting commission would set the map every 10 years after that.
Republican state and federal lawmakers have lambasted Democrats for promoting the amendment and balked at the idea of losing ground in representing the state in Congress.
Gov. Abigail Spanberger, however, said they were silent as GOP states did the same thing.
“Had they spoken in opposition to those efforts, I would perhaps take their level of consternation with a bit more seriousness,” she said when casting her vote in favor of the amendment last month.
Holder emphasized that the process will put the choice in the hands of Virginians.
“The voters get to decide.,” Holder said. “In Texas and in Missouri, North Carolina, the Republican legislature, at the behest of Donald Trump and his cronies in the White House, just imposed redistricting on those states.”
Early voting for the redistricting proposal will continue through April 18. Ballots will be open for in-person voting April 21.
FULL COVERAGE: Virginia’s redistricting referendum
