SCOTUS just unleashed a gerrymandering dragon

So much for the mid-decade redistricting wars ending in a tie. 

On April 21, Democrats engineered themselves a 10-1 gerrymander in Virginia, a pickup of four seats. Party leaders declared it payback and boasted about their new fighting spirit.

Political pundits declared the mid-decade gerrymandering war had been fought to a stalemate, or that it had even backfired on Republicans. Five new red seats in Texas, balanced by five blue ones in California. Four new Democratic seats in Virginia to counterbalance Ohio, Missouri and North Carolina. No harm, no foul!

Then the big shoe dropped. The Supreme Court, in a 6-3, party-line decision in Callais v. Louisiana, struck down Louisiana’s congressional map and installed new limits on the Voting Rights Act that will make it all but impossible to challenge districts that dilute minority voters. A report by Fair Fight Action and Black Voters Matter found this could erase up to 19 House seats held by Black and Latino members, largely across the South and Southwest. 

The Callais decision will have huge repercussions. It will decimate minority representation in Congress, potentially wipe as many as 200 state legislative districts held by Blacks and Latinos off the board, and perhaps most insidiously, impact city councils, school boards, judicial races and tiny municipal boards across the South that might not get any media coverage at all. It will make everything about our toxic, polarized politics worse and do tremendous damage to voters everywhere.

It will also reignite the gerrymandering wars. The political calculus for Democrats is rough. Despite what more hopeful analysts and some at the New York Times would suggest, this is a steeper road for Democrats both short-term and long-term. 

Most of the damage will be felt in 2028. Some will be felt right away. Already, red states that can jump quickly have — just as Texas and others rushed to enact new voter ID and other election measures in the hours after the 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision ended preclearance. Then, as now, things had not changed in the South, despite the Court’s assurances.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, anticipating the decision, pushed a new congressional map through his state’s legislature. It adds four new GOP seats and creates a 24-4 edge.

On Thursday, Louisiana took the frighteningly authoritarian move of cancelling its May 16 congressional primary — with early voting already underway — so that lawmakers could enact a new map that erases two districts currently held by Black Democrats. About one-third of Louisiana’s population is Black, and the Voting Rights Act protected those voters from being sliced and diced across the state’s six districts in a way that made them unable to elect a member of their choosing.

Now that those protections are gone, officials in Tennessee, South Carolina and Mississippi are also considering or likely to hold special sessions quickly. Alabama, so far, appears unlikely to move.

If most of those states act, those gains plus Florida would gift Republicans up to nine seats this cycle via unprecedented gerrymanders six months before the midterms. (The Court has developed something called the Purcell Principle to prevent dramatic changes close to elections; but like so many things with this Court, it is applied unequally depending upon whether the changes help Republicans or Democrats.) 

Democrats lack additional options this cycle. Their hopes of reclaiming the House take a small but serious hit; if nine additional seats are drawn off the board, they’ll have to win a dozen to get to 218. President Donald Trump’s historic unpopularity looks certain to create wave conditions, but the shrinking number of competitive districts and the party’s own brand problems present challenges. 

Thanks to Court’s GOP supermajority, however, the 2028 gerrymandering wars will begin in earnest the day after the midterms. And if this decade’s battles were historic and unprecedented — and they were — well, you ain’t seen nothing yet. (Call it the Roberts-Alito Overdrive.)

Republicans will likely draw themselves a near-solid South. By 2028, in addition to the four in Florida that disappeared this week, they could easily redraw the Memphis-area seat in Tennessee, the two Black districts in Alabama, two in Louisiana, as well as the South Carolina seat currently held by Democratic Rep. James Clyburn and the Mississippi district held by Rep. Bennie Thompson, another Democrat.

Republicans will also take another look at Florida and Texas, where there could be another two or three potential pickups. A new map in Georgia could yield two more. Democrats who think they can prevent Georgia by winning the governor’s mansion this fall are forgetting that Republicans could just as easily pass a 2028 map this session, and strengthen their hand on state legislative maps as well, before Gov. Brian Kemp leaves office.

Expect the GOP to move again in Missouri as well; Republicans fractured Kansas City into three pieces this year to pick up one seat, but left the Democratic seat in St. Louis alone out of litigation fears. With those limits gone, that seat might be as well. 

In a full-on gerrymandering armageddon, they’ll also return to the seats that the GOP left on the table this year. That includes two in Indiana, the Louisville-area seat in Kentucky, the Kansas City district in Kansas, and, if they hold a trifecta this fall, a single district in New Hampshire.

Another possibility is Nebraska. Moderate Republicans in the state’s technically non-partisan legislature have prevented a wholesale gerrymander of the Omaha-area district that Democrats expect to capture this fall after the retirement of Rep. Don Bacon. But it is very likely that some of those members may lose primaries this year. That could put Nebraska’s seat back in play — and the “blue dot” Electoral College vote that goes with it. 

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Then it will be the Democrats’ turn. And while Democrats have done plenty of their own gerrymanders over the years in blue trifecta states — most notably in Illinois and Maryland — they will look to engage in maximalist, full-on warfare of their own.

They’ll start in New York and Colorado, where efforts are already underway. Democrats could pick up three to five seats in the Empire State in 2028. Colorado, like California and Virginia this year, will need to first suspend its nonpartisan commission, scuttling one of the nation’s fairest and most competitive maps. Amending the state constitution will require the approval of 55% of state voters, a heavy lift. The Virginia amendment only won 51%. Yet Colorado is a little bluer, of course, and the stakes will be heightened post-Callais. If approved by voters, Democrats could easily draw an 8-0 map despite Colorado’s purplish nature, and gain four seats.

The next largest bounty is in Illinois. Democrats looked at a new map there this year but did not move forward; spaghetti-strand districts starting in Chicago and moving north to south could generate a 17-0 map. Illinois highlights the complexity of this issue for Democrats, however, especially within their own coalition. Maximizing partisan gains here will require spreading Black voters across more districts, potentially also a threat to minority representation. 

Maryland’s Democratic state senate declined to move on an 8-0 map this spring that would have cut out the state’s single GOP district. The Callais decision will likely lead senate leaders to re-examine that for 2028. 

New Jersey and Washington state both use commissions to draw lines. They will be under pressure to enact a partisan map instead, as will Oregon, which has a single Republican district.

Democrats could win additional 2028 targets by winning state-level trifectas in 2026. The most likely targets include Wisconsin and Minnesota, and then to a lesser extent, Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania would be the most difficult and unlikely. There are strong state supreme court precedents against partisan gerrymandering, and the state is simply more closely contested than Virginia, Colorado or California. It is very difficult to imagine that Democrats could win a constitutional fight here with voters or judges.

Speaking of California: Expect Democrats to go for another mid-decade gerrymander here, and ask voters to approve a 52-0 map, or something close to that, that would wipe Republicans off the board entirely.

That’s 15 seats, counting four in California, four in Colorado, four in New York, one in Maryland and two in Illinois. It could go a little higher. The trouble for Democrats — and for those who advocate all-out warfare without accounting for the GOP’s broader opportunities — is that they begin to run out of options. Too many analyses are overly optimistic: A Fair Fight Action report, for example, that suggests Democrats could win six seats in Pennsylvania, and three each in Minnesota and Wisconsin, looks wildly rosy and unimaginably difficult to win, draw and maintain. It could just as easily be zero seats from those states. 

And then things get really dangerous for Democrats. There will be reapportionment after the 2030 census to reallocate states based on population. The latest census estimates suggest blue states could lose at least a dozen seats. California could lose four, New York two, with Rhode Island, Minnesota, Illinois, Oregon, Pennsylvania and Michigan going down one. Those seats will be moving from states largely drawn by Democrats to states drawn in 2021 entirely by Republicans: Texas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Utah, Arizona and North Carolina. Electoral College votes will move from blue states to red states with them, making the road to the White House steeper beginning in 2032 as well.

One thing is for certain: It’s highly unlikely that independent commissions will return to California, Virginia, Colorado or anywhere else anytime soon. California Democrats sold its plan as temporary. They’ll be back in 2028 and probably again in 2030 to unwind it for real.

Make no mistake: The blame for this lies with the Supreme Court. The 2019 decision in Rucho v. Common Cause not only closed the federal courts as a solution to this problem at precisely the moment federal judges appointed by both parties said, time and again, that only the courts could protect voters from entrenched representatives. It also accelerated and incentivized both partisan and racial gerrymanders nationwide after the 2020 census. Now, with Callais, the Court has removed all barriers and protections. The ensuing chaos is theirs to own, to this Court’s enduring, historic shame.

Voters of color will pay the highest cost, as redrawn maps crack them so that it becomes all but impossible in many parts of the country to elect a representative of their choosing to speak on behalf of their interests. A forever gerrymandering war will also dilute the votes of urban and blue-state Republicans, as well as rural and red-state Democrats. It could push the number of competitive districts nationwide into single digits, out of 435. It will make hyper-partisan primaries more important than the general election. The best solution is now a more proportional House — larger, multi-member districts and ranked choice voting, such as the Fair Representation Act long-sponsored by Democratic Reps. Don Beyer of Virginia and Jamie Raskin of Maryland — that would elect representatives that actually reflect the political and racial breakdown of every state.

Until then, we are rapidly headed toward a nation where maps dictate that only Democrats are elected from blue states, and only Republicans in red ones. Even the states that are roughly 50-50 will send Congressional delegations of just one party to Washington.

We’ve had this solid map of red and blue before. Back then, the two sides were called the Union and the Confederacy.