What did Donald Trump do today?

He suffered another huge loss in a war he started without thinking it through, and now can't get out of.

Voters in Virginia tonight approved a constitutional amendment to allow its Democratic-majority legislature to redraw its Congressional districts in a way that will probably net Democrats four House seats in the midterm elections this year. The most likely result is that Virginia's House delegation will go from a close 6D-5R split to a 10-1 Democratic advantage.

The amendment will allow the Virginia legislature to offset partisan redistricting in states controlled by Republicans—who were acting on direct orders from Trump. Texas, Missouri, Ohio, and North Carolina have already done so. Trump has been desperately trying to get Indiana and Florida to do the same, although Indiana Republicans flatly refused (causing an irate Trump to lash out so furiously that one of his supporters tried to get a Republican state senator shot).

The problem—and this may sound familiar—is that Trump seems to have assumed that the initial battle was the whole war, and that his "enemies" wouldn't or couldn't fight back. But the Democratic-led states of California and Virginia did, and Utah was ordered by courts to redraw its own maps in a politically neutral way that will nevertheless probably yield another Democratic-leaning district. The result is that Trump's desperate attempt to shore up his party's razor-thin margin in the House has so far netted…

…a loss of one seat. 

The contest in Virginia was relatively close tonight, with the pro-redistricting amendment passing by only 3%. That is the closest that Democrats have come to a loss in a genuinely contested election since Trump returned to office, with backlash against Trump propelling them to almost absurd margins in off-year and special elections. 

The reason for the narrow margin is that partisan gerrymandering is usually unpopular with Democratic voters, who have most often been the victims of it. Both the California and Virginia measures are temporary, and were promoted as leveling the playing field until the normal post-census redistricting will take place after 2030.

Tonight's windfall for Democrats isn't necessarily the end of the story. The Florida legislature may pass legislation that might net Republicans two more seats. But, as in Indiana, there's growing resistance inside the GOP to following Trump off what looks like an electoral cliff in the midterms, and for very good reason. Gerrymanders work by making the margin of victory in "safe" seats smaller, not larger, while packing the opposition party into as few districts as possible. But in a wave election—and Trump's profound unpopularity more than a year into his second term means this is shaping up to be one—the "safe" seats can suddenly become very competitive, and the opposition party can win more seats than it would have without the gerrymander. 

Yesterday, Trump may have inadvertently boosted the Virginia amendment's chances of passing when he warned that "if the Democrats get additional seats, they're going to be making changes at the federal level." Tonight, in spite of another ongoing social media binge, he's avoiding the subject.

Why does this matter?

• A smarter president probably wouldn't have bungled this quite so badly, or gotten into this situation at all. 

• This all started because Donald Trump once again wasn't willing to risk letting Americans pick their own government by respecting the results of a free election.