Kyle Sammin: ‘Democracy is on the ballot?’ Don’t believe a word of it.

As candidate Donald Trump clung to a steady polling lead in 2024, first against doddering old Joe Biden, then against the briefly popular Kamala Harris, we heard a lot of the same slogans Democrats used in 2016 and 2020. 

“Democracy is on the ballot.” 

“Character counts.”

“Country before party.”

We’re not even halfway through Trump’s second term and the people of Virginia have done us the favor of proving that they never once believed a word of those bumper-sticker phrases.

If character mattered, if decency made a difference, they would never have elected Jay Jones as Attorney General in 2025. The biggest issue of the campaign sprang from texts Jones sent while a member of the House of Delegates, wishing death on the Speaker, his wife, and their children. When the recipient of those texts — a fellow delegate — remonstrated with him, he doubled down. “Only when people feel pain personally do they move on policy.”

In a later message, Jones made clear that he meant it: “I mean do I think Todd and Jennifer are evil? And that they’re breeding little fascists? Yes.”

That’s as vile as anything on Trump’s Access Hollywood tape, but Jones stayed in the race and every elected Democrat backed him, even as they tut-tutted about his reprehensible language. He won, too. So much for character.

While less salacious, the Virginia Democrats’ dishonesty this week is just as dangerous for democracy as electing deranged attorneys with sick revenge fantasies. On Tuesday, 51 percent of Virginia voted themselves 91 percent of the congressional seats in a dubiously legal referendum to gerrymander the state as grotesquely as any state at any time in this country’s history. 

That’s democracy, I guess — in the sense that democracy is two foxes and a hen voting on what’s for dinner. Virginia’s electoral putsch is, at best, illiberal democracy. More on that concept below.

Gerrymandering is nothing new — it’s named after a Founding Father, after all, Elbridge Gerry. But the last decade or so had finally seen some states pull back from the brink of the most anti-democratic line-drawing. Democrats actually led the way on that effort, mostly because Republicans were benefiting from it more than they were. 

Some states never changed. Illinois and Maryland are masterpieces of Democratic gerrymanders, just as Texas and Tennessee maximized Republican votes through the same methods. But there was some improvement. Here in Pennsylvania, our judicial mid-decade redistricting was closer to normal — with a thumb on the scale for the Dems, who had elected a majority of the judges. It wasn’t a truly neutral process, but it at least pretended to be one.

Then, they stopped pretending. 

New York began the latest round of mid-decade redistricting in 2023 to make the lines more favorable to the Democrats. Texas followed in 2025 to help out Republicans — though the new districts could backfire if local GOP candidates fall short of Trump’s numbers in South Texas.

After that, it was off to the races. California, which had amended its constitution to provide for a “neutral” commission to draw the lines, amended it again to repeal all that and just max out Democratic seats. Indiana’s Republicans bravely refused to join the farcical campaign, while Missouri’s and Ohio’s GOP squeezed an extra Republican seat in their states. Virginia this week followed California in a manner that was even more egregious coming from a narrowly divided state that had also recently forsworn political manipulation of the maps. 

Democracy was on the ballot, and it lost.

Politician after Democratic politician who had campaigned against gerrymandering in the past now turned on a dime to do the same thing — and then some — once they held the governor’s office and a bare majority in the legislature. They barely even attempted to explain their hypocrisy. It was a pure power move. “It’s OK when we do it — because of Trump.”

Character, democracy, bipartisanship: none of it ever meant anything to these people. They did not want to defeat Trump because of any moral lines he transgressed; they wanted to beat him because he transgressed them as a Republican. 

Now, Governor Abigail Spanberger is building an illiberal democracy in Virginia much like the one Viktor Orban built in Hungary. The trappings of democracy will remain, but the party will come before the state or the people. 

Orban just lost his reelection effort in Hungary last week, and it is worth comparing his opponents with Trump’s. Since Orban’s return to office (he lost once before,) he has used the state to favor his party. His opponents have attempted to oust him at the polls in a series of united left-of-center coalitions. They’ve lost and, while their losses were amplified by Orban’s gerrymandering, they also did not carry a majority of the vote nationwide. Whatever problems the Orban government had, the Hungarian people on the whole preferred it to the left-wing opposition.

What changed in 2026? There was a truly united opposition that so valued the idea of ousting the incumbent that they compromised their own favored policies in order to unite the people in a broad-based coalition on one issue: getting Orban out. The leader of the winning party, Peter Magyar, is a center-right figure, not another dreary socialist. The coalition he assembled actually put country over party — and won.

Compare that to the phony efforts of Harris and her campaign, who implored Republicans and independents to vote their way, but refused to moderate their own platform even one iota. If Trump was an existential threat to the nation, wouldn’t she have worked to assemble a broad coalition like Magyar did in Hungary — or like Abraham Lincoln did in his time in this country? 

That she did not shows that “democracy is on the ballot” was just an empty slogan for her, for Biden, and for Spanberger. It was a con, a put-up job, a swindle. The goal was power. Democracy and fairness had nothing to do with it.

Kyle Sammin is the managing editor of Broad + Liberty.