😬Inside the Dem panic over Va. redistricting
The finger-pointing is already well underway.
Welcome to “The Inner Circle” — and happy Cinco de Mayo. In today’s edition:
—A scoop from our show “The Huddle” this morning: Virginia Democrats are eating their own over the stalled redistricting fight.
—Why the buzz about the White House quietly prepping for Democratic oversight is actually quite laughable.
—And a few thoughts on the DCCC taking heavy fire from the Hispanic and Progressive caucuses for weighing in on primaries.
Mentions: Abigail Spanberger, Hakeem Jeffries, Scott Surovell, Louise Lucas, Mark Warner, Tim Kaine, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, President Trump, Janet Mills, Graham Platner.
🥴PANIC IN RICHMOND— Forget waiting for the Virginia Supreme Court to rule on the state’s redistricting fight — Democrats aren’t even pretending to keep it together behind closed doors anymore. The blame game has officially started. And my co-host on “The Huddle,” DAN TURRENTINE, a longtime Dem strategist, has the inside scoop.
Just last fall, the same senior Virginia Democrats who pushed the redistricting gambit were telling Dan the effort was a slam dunk — that they were 90 percent confident the court would quickly allow the new maps to take effect. Yesterday, those same folks told Dan their confidence has cratered to under 50 percent.
The source of panic? That the state’s high court failed by Friday afternoon to toss the GOP’s challenge to the new maps. “The Democrats are becoming pretty anxious here,” Dan said on our show this morning, spilling the tea.
AND THE KNIVES ARE OUT FOR SOME BIG NAMES. Per Dan’s reporting, Governor ABIGAIL SPANBERGER’s staff is quietly sniping at state Senate majority leader SCOTT SUROVELL and state Senate kingmaker LOUISE LUCAS — two lawmakers who pushed back hardest on the legal warnings last fall.
You may recall that Lucas effectively called Virginia Sens. MARK WARNER and TIM KAINE weaklings for being hesitant in the first place — though both eventually got on board. (ICYMI, I pasted her post below…)
If this effort goes down, those quotes won’t age well. “People are lining up behind the scenes to go public, I think, very quickly if this does not go through,” Dan foreshadowed.
BUT HERE’S THE THING — Pointing fingers won’t let Spanberger off the hook, which we discussed at length on the show. Yes, she may have privately raised concerns about the effort early on. But she’s the one in the ads. She’s the face of this thing. As our other co-host SEAN SPICER put it bluntly: “She ate the political cookie on this one.”
The other name in the crosshairs if this goes down? House Minority Leader HAKEEM JEFFRIES. Dan is already hearing from some Virginia Dems who say the Democratic leader pushed too hard despite legal concerns. (Though, let’s be fair to Jeffries — he would have been slammed by the party if he hadn’t leaned in, and his team would likely wear such criticism as a badge of honor.)
TO BE SURE, Democrats could still win this court battle. But the behind-the-scenes freakout shows the level of concern. Indeed, the legal vulnerabilities are real — and they are stacked. Sean, a Virginia native, has been harping on about the apparent procedural problems for months:
That Democrats failed to provide a required 90-day notice before the election.
That Democrats used “misleading” ballot language when they framed the question as one of “fairness.”
That they didn’t follow the statute requiring an “intervening election” of the House of Delegates between two votes approving a constitutional amendment.
And that the special session was invalidly called and used to advance the effort.
DEMOCRATS, OF COURSE, ARGUE that they followed the letter of the law and that all of these process concerns are just shades of gray. But the court need only agree with Republicans on one of those tenets and the map reverts to the current 6-5 split.
The political consequences could be brutal. Democrats sank more than $60 million into the effort — and as Dan said on the show, “if donors feel like they just got played, that’s going to be a problem.” Worse, momentum is its own currency in the midterms. “If this court shuts this down,” Sean told us, “you’re going to go from Abigail Spanberger riding high, Hakeem Jeffries yelling F-A-F-O to suddenly them on their heels. And I think that’s going to be huge.”
We’ll see what the court does.
🫸 WHAT OVERSIGHT? — Washington is atwitter today over this WaPo scoop: That the White House counsel’s office is privately giving 30-minute briefings to political appointees on how to prepare for the wave of oversight that’s coming if Democrats take back the House. The advice, per the story: understand how oversight works, never put anything in writing, and respond to inquiries in a “timely manner.”
Forgive me for chuckling. I covered oversight during Trump 1.0, and let me remind everyone: Trump’s White House didn’t comply with diddly-squat last time — and they sure as heck won’t comply this time either. Trump boasted back in 2019 that he would ignore “all the subpoenas” — and ignore them he certainly did. The admin waved things off. They ran out the clock. And in large part, they got away with it.
So the entire premise of this WaPo story — that the White House is meaningfully prepping appointees because they’re going to actually engage with oversight — kind of falls apart on contact.
MY CO-HOST SEAN MADE agued that this is essentially a standard ethics briefing dressed up as a scoop:
“In most organizations in the federal government, there is some kind of reminder about what is proper use of government resources, what is subpoenable, what you’re supposed to do to maintain proper practices… I didn’t read too much into this,” he said.
On executive privilege, Sean was even more direct: “They’re going to resist a ton of subpoenas.”
Which is exactly my point. If the White House plan is the same as last time — stonewall, claim privilege, run out the clock — then these 30-minute briefings won’t matter much in the long run.
IN DEFENSE OF THE DCCC — The Hispanic Caucus and the Progressive Caucus are publicly torching the DCCC this week for putting a thumb on the scale in primaries across the country, with some members threatening to withhold their dues. The Hispanic Caucus went a step further — appearing to accuse party leadership of not prioritizing Hispanic candidates, which is a substantially heavier charge than the usual sour grapes you hear when someone’s preferred candidate gets passed over.
I made some calls on this, and I want to push back on the pile-on a bit. While the DCCC declined to endorse CHC-backed Randy Villegas (Calif.) and Carol Obando-Derstine (Pa.), its worth noting that three of the eight endorsed candidates they unveiled yesterday are indeed Hispanic. People defending the DCCC also argue that the committee’s picks had far more local endorsements and local labor endorsements than the alternatives.
The short of it is this: The committee isn’t tossing darts at a board — they’re picking who they think can actually win in the general. That’s literally their job as they try to not only flip the House — but drive up the margin as much as possible.
BUT THE MORE REVEALING DYNAMIC here isn’t whether the DCCC is right on the merits. It’s how rare it is — historically — for caucuses to publicly drag their own party committee like this. Dan said the quiet part out loud: “Stuff like this didn’t happen under NANCY PELOSI.” He’s right — because members were too afraid of her.
So what changed? Two things.
First, the establishment’s batting average is just not great right now — and members know it. The Senate version of this fight is happening in real time, with Schumer’s preferred candidate in Maine, Gov. JANET MILLS, flaming out in spectacular fashion to oyster farmer GRAHAM PLATNER just last week. Senators are also snubbing Schumer in Iowa and Michigan, backing insurgents over the DSCC’s preferred candidates.
Clearly, the left feels emboldened. Which leads me to…
Second — and this is the bigger structural shift — this is an anti-establishment moment for Democrats — full stop. The base is angry, the energy is on the left, and any signal that party HQ is putting its thumb on the scale is going to be read as the establishment trying to rig things.
🎥🎤🎧ON TODAY’S “THE HUDDLE” — Sean, Dan and I discuss all of the topics above. Plus, the Pro-Life movement turns on President Trump and the White House eyes new oversight of AI models. Subscribe to our new YouTube channel — or follow along on Apple or Spotify.