CNN host Abby Phillip went on air and declared — with the dramatic flair of someone watching her party's House majority evaporate in real time — that "we are in the depths of hell" over redistricting. Not a war. Not a famine. Not an actual crisis. Redistricting. Lines on a map. That's what constitutes hell at CNN these days.
When drawing congressional districts fairly is your definition of eternal damnation, you might want to recalibrate your moral compass.
Phillip didn't stop at the one outburst, either. She told her audience that "America's redistricting battles just became a full-fledged war," then doubled down: "So we are, to be frank, in the depths of hell now, when it comes to redistricting." And just to make sure everyone understood the severity of Republicans being allowed to participate in the democratic process, she added: "There is no bottom, officially, here."
No bottom. Because Republicans drew some maps.
As American Wire News reported, the meltdown was triggered by a series of redistricting developments that have been breaking hard against Democrats. The Virginia Supreme Court struck down a congressional map — one that would have created four new majority-blue districts — and Democrats are watching their gerrymandered safety nets get yanked away one state at a time.
In Alabama, Republicans are seeking Supreme Court approval to revert to maps that Democrats fought tooth and nail to redraw after a 2023 court order. The original maps had been challenged for packing Black voters into a single district, but now the legal winds have shifted. The Supreme Court has weakened key provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and Democrats are realizing that the judicial framework they relied on for decades isn't going to save them anymore.
President Trump, for his part, has called on red states to redraw their maps to favor Republicans. And you know what? Good. Democrats spent years gerrymandering every blue state they could get their hands on. They turned redistricting into an art form in states like Illinois, Maryland, and New York. But the moment Republicans play the same game — suddenly it's "the depths of hell."
Virginia voters even passed a redistricting referendum — narrowly — that was supposed to create a nonpartisan process. But when the results don't favor Democrats, the process is suddenly broken. Funny how that works.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and the rest of the Democratic leadership are watching the midterm map shift under their feet, and there's nothing they can do about it. Every legal challenge they file, every dramatic CNN segment they produce, every breathless declaration of democratic apocalypse — none of it changes the math. The maps are moving right.
Here's what Abby Phillip is actually saying when she says "depths of hell": we're losing, we can't stop it, and we don't have a plan. That's not analysis. That's a confession.
When the other side starts publicly panicking on cable news, you don't need a poll to tell you who's winning. You just need a TV.