Barack Obama’s Breathtaking Racial Redistricting Hypocrisy

Barack Obama is a real piece of work. Seriously, he has no shame.

One week after the former president successfully gaslit a small majority of Virginians into voting for a redistricting initiative that got rid of the state’s two majority-minority congressional districts, he has the gall to condemn the Supreme Court’s ruling against the practice of redistricting along racial lines.

He doesn’t really care about giving black voters better representation—he cares about the Democrats’ grasp for raw, naked political power, by any means necessary.

What Is Racial Redistricting?

While the Constitution generally prohibits sorting citizens based on race, lower courts have long interpreted the Voting Rights Act of 1965 as effectively mandating redistricting along racial lines. This process has ensured that Democrats have more congressional districts in the South—maintained by the legal fiction that drawing maps based on race will give black voters an equal playing field.

Yet the Supreme Court on Wednesday put an end to all that. In Louisiana v. Calais, Louisiana’s Legislature had drawn a redistricting map that preserved one majority black district, but a court mandated that the state redraw the map, to create a second majority black district. Louisiana did so, and faced a court challenge.

The Supreme Court’s majority opinion found that the Voting Rights Act only forbids redistricting explicitly aimed at racial discrimination—not political advantage. This effectively means that southern states can redraw their congressional maps and eliminate majority-minority districts, so long as they do so for political, not racial, reasons.

Democrats hate this, because it destroyed their legal backstop to maintain Democratic congressional districts inside red states.

Obama condemned the Supreme Court ruling, suggesting he was doing so on principle.

“Today’s Supreme Court decision effectively guts a key pillar of the Voting Rights Act, freeing state legislatures to gerrymander legislative districts to systematically dilute and weaken the voting power of racial minorities – so long as they do it under the guise of ‘partisanship’ rather than explicit ‘racial bias,'” Obama wrote on X.

Obama faulted the Supreme Court for “abandoning its vital role in ensuring equal protection in our democracy and protecting the rights of minority groups against majority overreach.”

That’s ironic, because if he really cared about the principle of “protecting the rights of minority groups” in voting, he wouldn’t have supported the blatant partisan power grab in the Old Dominion.

The Virginia Power Grab

While she was running for governor, Democrat Abigail Spanberger said she had no intention of redistricting. After all, Virginia voters had overwhelmingly approved a non-partisan redistricting process in 2020 via constitutional amendment. Yet, after Eric Holder’s National Democratic Redistricting Committee sent a cool $150,000 her way, she changed her tune.

The Democratic map is a farce. It parses out the northern Virginia suburbs—home to many current and former government employees—between five districts, ensuring that my leftist neighbors can outvote Virginians in the middle of the state.

It gets worse, however.

Under Virginia’s current congressional map, adopted after the 2020 census, two districts have a majority-minority voting age population. The Democrats’ proposed redistricting maps would dilute those populations.

A.C. Cordoza, who was the sole black Republican in the state’s House of Delegates before losing his reelection campaign in November, condemned Democrats as “completely hypocritical.”

“These are southern Democrats, who are using their power to disenfranchise African American voters, and minority voters,” he previously told The Daily Signal. “Tell me how that is not the definition of Jim Crow, and they can’t do it.”

Yet Obama aggressively championed the redistricting effort, hectoring Virginians about the need for Democratic partisan advantage—oh, I’m sorry, I mean “fairness”—in our maps.

Obama doesn’t really care about whether black voters get more proportional representation. If he did, he never would have endorsed this monstrosity.

If Obama isn’t opposing the Supreme Court’s Calais ruling on principle, why is he opposing it? He’s doing so for the very same reason he supported the Virginia redistricting effort—it’s all about pure partisan political power.

Partisan Political Power

The Supreme Court’s ruling allows Republican majority legislatures in the South to do the same thing that Democrat majority legislatures in the Northeast have done for decades—draw congressional maps that effectively disenfranchise the minority party for purposes of representation in Congress.

It’s a naked political ploy, and it can backfire—because maximizing the number of Republican-leaning districts means that you have more districts where the likely Republican margin of victory is smaller.

Even so, partisan redistricting has often worked. President Trump won about 37% of the vote in Massachusetts in 2024, but the state has nine Democrats and zero Republicans in the House, for instance. Connecticut (42% Trump in 2024) has five Democrats and zero Republicans.

Of course, a few Republican states have also gerrymandered out Democrat votes. While 38% of Utahns voted for Harris in 2024, the Beehive State has four Republicans and zero Democrats in Congress.

While Trump won 38% of Californians in 2024, Republicans only have nine seats of the 52 total seats, for about 17%. Trump won 43% of the vote in Illinois, and Republicans have only three of 17 seats, only 18%.

Republicans arguably started at a disadvantage, because the U.S. Census Bureau over-counted left-leaning states and under-counted right-leaning states. Since the population number determines how many U.S. House seats a state receives, these errors yield a partisan slant—before any voting takes place.

In all this context, Obama’s hypocrisy is yet more breathtaking. Let’s stop pretending Obama cares about principle here—this is all about political power.

His hypocrisy isn’t a great surprise, but the speed of his reversal should open everyone’s eyes to this disgusting hypocrisy.