Let’s face it, folks: Democrats are just better at this crap than we are.

The crap I’m speaking of is hardball politics, and the truth of it is plain to see. It’s the Chicago style writ large, from Barack Obama getting all his opponents thrown off the ballot in his first political race to what we saw yesterday in Virginia: a naked political power grab that immediately disenfranchised nearly half of the state’s voters.

It was a spectacular gerrymander by first-year Governor Abigail Spanberger, whose quaint-sounding name belies her sleazy, sneaky, cat-scratching approach to politics. The measure barely passed — 51.6% to 48.4% — despite the Democrats outspending the Republicans 4-to-1 on the issue, but that’s of no consequence to the power-mad Democrats behind it. Nor is it any skin off Spanberger’s teeth, even though she’s currently underwater in her state due to her bait-and-switch embrace of hard-left politics. That’s unusual for a new governor still in her honeymoon phase, but she’s a heck of a party hack, and the folks are figuring that out — albeit too late.

What we have, then, is a radical redistricting plan that will likely give the Democrats 10 of the state’s 11 congressional districts instead of the narrow (and appropriate) 6-to-5 advantage they currently enjoy. And what this means nationally is that the Republicans’ chances of holding the House in the November 3 midterms just got that much more difficult.

Impeachment 3.0, anyone?

So, in a state that gave Donald Trump 46% of its votes in the 2024 presidential election, Republicans will likely be represented in just one of its 11 congressional districts. In the run-up to her election, Spanberger posed as a sensible centrist and promised not to push for the divisive referendum. Suckers!

A case can be made that the Republicans started all this when Texas Republican Governor Greg Abbott oversaw the redistricting of his state to better reflect its political makeup. But what Virginia has done is way out of proportion with its political makeup.

“Even in defeat, this is a powerful message,” said Brian Cannon of the bipartisan group No Gerrymandering Virginia. “Despite being outspent by well over $60 million and facing biased ballot language, over a million Virginians stood up against a partisan power grab.”

So, is it an unconstitutional power grab, or is it just a case of the Democrats fighting fire with fire and being better at it than Republicans?

I think both. Republican strategist Josh Holmes agrees. “I think this is one of the most audacious, deceptive campaigns I’ve seen in modern history,” he said on Fox News this morning. “I mean, this is gerrymandering on steroids.”

It’s also a colossal trampling of minority rights. And what a minority it is. A full 48.4% of Virginians didn’t want to do this, and yet now they’ll be punished across the state by the 51.6% who did. And so, depending on which side of that issue you fall, you either get more than 90% of the congressional representation across your state, or you get less than 10%.

But for a single deep-red district on the west side of the state, the stark gerrymander will eliminate congressional representation across the vast expanse of Virginia’s rural areas — which is to say, most everything outside of Northern Virginia. As Holmes mordantly put it, “This is basically the NGO class of Northern Virginia that controls all 10 districts. … It’s outrageous.”

Spanberger, of course, blamed this radical disenfranchisement on the Orange Man. “Really,” she said, “this all began when President Trump said that he believed he was entitled to congressional seats and the legislature at the time in Texas responded. … Virginia created a plan that was wholly responsive to the actions of other states, uh, and temporary in nature.”

So, where do we go from here? Given what California did earlier, it seems like the Democrats have pretty much fully played their hand in terms of gerrymandering the blue states. Indeed, as Holmes adds, “They are accomplished gerrymanderers. They have done this for decades.” Holmes also questions the wisdom of getting into the gerrymandering slop with these Democrat pigs. As he puts it, “In some ways, it’s akin to challenging a serial killer to a murder war.”

Former Governor Glenn Youngkin, a class act in governance if ever there was one, took to social media to express his displeasure: “I urge the Virginia Supreme Court to rule against this unconstitutional process that will disenfranchise millions of Virginians.”

So what about the red states? It looks like Florida might be the next battleground, depending on what Governor Ron DeSantis chooses to do. Solidly red Indiana could also do something, though the Hoosier State has so far been reluctant to flex its muscles.

“What they did from a ballot-question standpoint,” says Holmes, “is blatantly illegal. It violates the black letter of the statute on how you’re supposed to frame a ballot question.”

Indeed, ballot questions should be plainly worded and easily understood. But the language of the ballot referendum was dripping with deception. It read: “Should the Constitution of Virginia be amended to allow the General Assembly to temporarily adopt new congressional districts to restore fairness in the upcoming elections, while ensuring Virginia’s standard redistricting process resumes for all future redistricting after the 2030 census?”

Restore fairness? How is that language even remotely truthful?

But what does it say when a political party spends four times as much on its political message as its opponents and still only barely ekes out an electoral victory? What it means is that most Virginians recognized this was a sleazy, scummy power grab, but a narrow majority voted for it anyway.

So shame on Virginia. But only on the 51% who voted for this abomination.