A voter casts her ballot at a polling station on Election Day in Falls Church, Virginia, U.S., November 7, 2023. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque

By Steve Gorman

(Reuters) -The Democratic-led Virginia House of Delegates voted on Wednesday to amend the state constitution to allow legislators to redraw Virginia's congressional maps next year, heightening a multistate, mid-decade redistricting war spawned by President Donald Trump.

Passage of the Democratic-sponsored resolution, on a party-line vote of 51-42, sent the measure to the Virginia state Senate, where the Democratic majority in that chamber was expected to pass the measure as well.

The Senate Privileges and Elections Committee later approved it on an 8-6 vote and the measure was slated for action on the floor of the upper chamber on Thursday.

Under Virginia law, both houses of the General Assembly would have to adopt the constitutional amendment once more early next year before a redistricting plan could be submitted to voters for approval by referendum.

The measure would temporarily bypass an independent redistricting commission that voters created by constitutional amendment in 2020 and enable the Democratic-controlled legislature to reshape congressional boundaries to partisan advantage ahead of the November 2026 midterm elections.

TRADING 'POWER GRAB' CLAIMS

Republican lawmakers cried foul, calling the Democrats' efforts a naked power grab.

But Democrats countered that they were responding to a much bigger power grab that Trump instigated in pushing for Texas to redraw its congressional maps this year in a bid to pick up five more Republican seats in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Republicans, including Trump, openly acknowledge that redrawn maps enacted this summer in Texas, followed by similar moves seeking to gain one seat each in Missouri and North Carolina, are aimed at preserving their party's slim U.S. House majority in the hotly contested 2026 midterm races.

Democrats have fought back by advancing redistricting initiatives of their own, starting in California, where a plan to redraw congressional electoral lines to their party's advantage was passed by the legislature in August and will be decided by voters in a special election next week.

California's plan aims to flip five Republican seats to the Democratic column.

Virginia Democrats entered the fray this week, in the midst of Virginia's closely watched gubernatorial race and election for all 100 members of the state's House of Delegates.

No political map alterations have been specifically proposed in Virginia. But Democrats are expected to draw lines giving them a better chance of gaining at least two additional U.S. House seats. Democrats currently hold six of Virginia's 11 seats in the U.S. House.

Two Republican state senators and a citizen member of the redistricting commission have filed suit in state court, seeking to block the legislature from considering the constitutional amendment by challenging it on procedural grounds.

The exercise of redistricting - the periodic realignment of geographical boundaries defining legislative districts - has traditionally been conducted just once a decade following the U.S. Census to account for population shifts.

This year's widening coast-to-coast redistricting scramble set off by Trump is unprecedented in modern U.S. politics.

Unlike their Republican counterparts in Texas and other "red" states involved so far, Democrats in California and Virginia both face an extra hurdle, constrained by the necessity of amending their state constitutions. As a result, both are leaving the final say to voters.

The next battlegrounds in the war over political maps were shaping up in the Midwest. Indiana's Republican Governor Mike Braun called a special legislative session for next Monday to weigh redistricting proposals, bowing to a White House pressure campaign. The Kansas state Senate president said on Tuesday that he has collected enough signatures to call for a special redistricting session. The House has not yet done so.

(Reporting by Steve Gorman in Los Angeles, Editing by Franklin Paul, Matthew Lewis and Thomas Derpinghaus)