The Drive Through Divided Virginia

A 10-hour car ride from Raleigh to Northeastern Pennsylvania provides any North Carolinian ample opportunity to catch up on audiobooks, podcasts, or a favorite playlist. It also, however, allows one to meander through small-town America and take in the countryside; in this case, the lawns of southern and central Virginia dotted with political signs signaling support for controversial pieces of legislation.

Such was my experience several weeks ago when I embarked—on Tuesday, April 21^st—on a journey to a company retreat just outside of Scranton, PA. The day of my departure happened to coincide with the vote on Virginia’s latest redistricting amendment, which proposed temporarily giving back to the Democratically controlled state legislature the power to redraw the state's congressional districts, which had previously been drawn by a bipartisan commission. The proposed maps would reconfigure the state’s Congressional landscape, migrating from six Democratic districts and 5 Republican to 10 D, one R. Naturally, Democrats and their supporters urged a ‘Yes’ vote, with their Republican opponents urging ‘No’.

Entering Virginia from the South via Route 15, I traveled on sleepy country backroads boasting nothing but red ‘Vote No’ signs tucked neatly alongside the highway. As I navigated North past Charlottesville, Fredericksburg, Fairfax, and eventually Leesburg, signs slowly turned blue as ‘Vote No’ became the common refrain the deeper into Democratic territory I drove. One state. One issue. Two opposing sides.

The news that evening would report the amendment passed on a slim party-line vote. A legal battle has ensued; but, if the amendment holds, it will upend the state's bipartisan commission system until 2030, giving Democrats a potential 10-1 district advantage in November’s midterm elections. The ensuing outcome would be, effectively, one-party rule in a state in which the vast majority of counties consistently vote for the minority party.

National Gerrymandering Arms Race

Our neighbors to the North are just the latest example of the ongoing war being waged between Democrats and Republicans nationally in an effort to claim a majority in Congress beginning in January 2027. In a war that started in Texas last year—when the state legislature approved a new, mid-decade map amid pressure from President Trump and his allies to bolster Republicans’ congressional edge—we have since seen other states follow suit with California and Virginia also proposing new maps to flip the math back in their favor, and states like Florida, Georgia, Missouri, New York, and Illinois all expected to follow in retaliation.

North Carolina has not been immune to these maneuvers, with the Republican-controlled state legislature advancing its redrawn map last Fall to engineer a pickup opportunity that would expand the GOP’s 10-4 advantage in our state’s House delegation. A map that, as many analysts have pointed out, has left Forward-aligned incumbent Rep. Don Davis (D) particularly vulnerable in the new District 1 that now favors his Republican challenger.

What this all amounts to—as some political pundits have called it—is a “race to the bottom” in the transparently shameless sprint toward congressional control. A race that tosses aside any consideration for fairness, voting rights, and representation on the one hand, and, at the same time, the utility of a truly representative, divided, and diverse government on the other.

One of the greatest strengths of a state like North Carolina is its “divided” government. The Tar Heel state truly embodies that description, with a Democratic Governor and Lieutenant Governor, a Democratic Attorney General and Secretary of State, and Democratic mayors across all its major metropolitan areas, countered by a Republican-led legislature and two Republican U.S. Senators. National elections in North Carolina are often nail-bitingly close, with Senate and presidential contests often decided by just a few points.

At the local, county, and district levels, however, partisan gerrymandering has made it a one-party game, as is increasingly the case in much of the rest of the country. Contests for U.S. Congress, State Senate, the State House of Representatives, County Commissioner, and on down the line across North Carolina are often decided well before the general election, when primary winners are seen as sure things as they head toward a general election against a candidate in name only, or often no candidate at all. And our state’s near-equal number of registered Democrats and Republicans has no bearing on party representation in the General Assembly, where the GOP holds a 10-seat supermajority in the Senate and 71 out of 120 seats in the State House.

The last few months of the gerrymandering wars have demonstrated how previously unprecedented maneuvers like mid-decade redistricting can quickly lead to one-party dominance in states across the country, turning congressional delegations into one-party fiefdoms despite diverse populations. Looking at this trend, it’s not hard for one to imagine if we are headed toward somewhat of a two-state solution, a phrase historically reserved for the proposal to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by creating two independent states in a land inhabited by both groups of people. In the American example, states with a slight Republican majority (Florida, Ohio, Texas) would inevitably turn solidly Red, while those with a similarly narrow Democratic majority (Virginia, New York, Illinois) would turn solidly—and perhaps permanently—Blue.

This paradigm, whether it arrives in 2026 or far down the line, entrenches unrepresentative delegations that skew far from voter preferences, with pro-Republican gerrymanders making House members notably more conservative and pro-Democratic ones more liberal. In this America, electoral competition is nearly entirely absent, with “safe seats” diminishing voter influence and rendering Congress less responsive to demographic changes or shifting sentiments—both local and national. Ultimately, if left unchecked, the zero-sum game that is the gerrymandering arms race will soon result in a fully divided, heavily polarized America in which not only certain districts, but entire states, are almost entirely hostile to opposing voices and views. Republicans will be persona non grata in Blue states, Democrats the same in Red ones. Minority voices will be unrepresented and unheard. Voters will have No Voice and No Choice.

The Forward Party Prescription

The North Carolina Forward Party rejects this descent into an America divided into a two-state structure. The aforementioned Rep. Don Davis, in full alignment with the Party, has been a vocal critic of such efforts across both his home state and the rest of the country, calling the recent redistricting in North Carolina “one of the darkest moments in our state’s history.” Not only has the NCFP gone on record in opposition to these gerrymandering maneuvers, but we have also continuously championed federal legislation to ban the practice altogether, instead promoting independent districting commissions similar to what was in place in Virginia, or utilizing AI and machine learning to automate and remove human bias from the map-making process altogether.

Concurrently, it is also critical to recognize and reward voices from our own state and elsewhere who cast aside political pressure from within their own parties to call out the ills and inevitably negative consequences of mid-decade redistricting. One such voice was Maryland's Senate President (D-Baltimore City) Bill Ferguson, who—citing the maneuver’s unconstitutionality, legal risks, and the destabilizing effect it would have on the state legislature and government as a whole—blocked his party's mid-cycle congressional redistricting push in early 2026 when he refused to bring a Democratic-favored map to a Senate vote, despite pressure from Governor Wes Moore and other national Democratic Party leaders.

It is with courageous efforts like his that we will resist our slide into a two-state solution. We need to continue to voice our opposition, not only to partisan actors angling for a stronger majority, but more so to friendlier voices within our own coalitions who have not yet taken a stand.

The two-state solution is not a desirable end. For voters supporting the minority party in any state, two options will remain: move, or be left without any real representation. What’s worse, we will inherit a country that more closely resembles the post-secession Civil War era rather than 21st-century America. We simply cannot revert to a landscape littered with Red and Blue enclaves, with nothing in between.  

Instead, we urge all citizens of our state to join us in demanding a truce to the redistricting wars, and ask for your support in promoting people and policies that establish a better way Forward to ensure fairer maps, equal opportunity in elections, and a more balanced, representative government for the people of North Carolina. Take the first step: talk to your friends and neighbors, sign our petition, or contact your state legislators today and pledge to vote only for candidates who commit to ending this arms race. Your voice—and our democracy—literally depends on it.