These endeavors were inspired by President Donald Trump, whose exhortations last year for Texas lawmakers to redraw their maps in favor of his party kicked off a frenzy of tit-for-tat redistricting from both GOP-controlled and Democratic-led states, with Republicans in particular benefiting under the aegis of the conservative-majority Supreme Court. Meanwhile, Trump has successfully challenged some of the GOP state legislators that stood in the way of his redistricting plan, supporting primary opponents more likely to follow his bidding.
“By 2028, I think we are likely to be looking at a radically and maximally gerrymandered national map, in which blue states elect almost entirely blue delegations, red states elect just about entirely red delegations,” worried David Daley, a senior fellow at the civic organization FairVote and the author of Ratf**ked: Why Your Vote Doesn’t Count. “It’s the kind of map we’ve seen before in this country. It’s just that back then, we called it the Union and the Confederacy.”
Omar Noureldin, senior vice president of policy and litigation at Common Cause, a government watchdog group that supports national redistricting reform, said allowing politicians to “choose their voters” would skew lawmakers’ incentives away from the constituents they purport to represent.
In April, the Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais weakened the 1965 Voting Rights Act, making it much more difficult to challenge partisan gerrymanders that dilute the power of minority voters. Piling onto the preexisting map-redrawing efforts in states such as Ohio, Texas, and Missouri, additional GOP-controlled Southern states moved this spring to redraw their congressional maps with the goal of reducing the number of Democratic districts. This will result in reduced representation for Black voters.
“This court seems way more attentive to the concerns of protecting power than they are to the Constitution’s attention to assuring that voters have their say,” said Crayton.
However, there was also a bid during that decade to push back against gerrymandering. Four of the nine states with independent commissions saw them established after the 2010 census. Support for independent redistricting particularly soared in 2018, when voters in five states approved reforms to make the process of drawing congressional and legislative maps less political.
“Regardless of whether or not it’s wrong, they just said they wouldn’t address it, which just left a free-for-all. Now states each have their own standard which they’re governing themselves by,” said Simone Leeper, senior legal counsel for redistricting at the Campaign Legal Center, which has challenged some of these new maps. “What we’re seeing now is the natural result of the Supreme Court’s choice not to have a national standard.”
In most states, the legislature draws congressional districts with the approval of the governor, although some require a supermajority to adopt a map. Nine states have independent redistricting commissions, which are intended to create electoral districts without undue political influence, but with consideration for fair representation and adherence to federal and state constitutions.
Because the number of states that have independent redistricting commissions is so low, their impact on a national scale is relatively limited. It creates an “imbalance,” said Noureldin, where some states have fair representation while others are wholly partisan.
Supporters of anti-gerrymandering reforms agree that, with a Supreme Court intent on creating stricter scrutiny for racial gerrymanders, any truly effective action to change redistricting would need to occur on a national level. Some organizations advocate for more proportional representation in Congress, or reforms to the Supreme Court, although it’s far from certain whether these ideas could garner necessary support from lawmakers.
If Democrats win the White House and both chambers of Congress in 2028, Daley believes that they should take the opportunity to end the filibuster and approve legislation to bar partisan gerrymandering on a national level. He noted that the 2030 census—which will precede another round of redistricting—will reflect a loss of population in several blue states and an increase in several red states, meaning that Democrats are slated to lose seats in the House to the Republicans’ gain. If they do not account for that future, Daley argued, it will become increasingly difficult to gain a majority in the years to come.
Voter backlash to gerrymandering could counter some of these efforts to skew the game in their favor. It’s possible that Republicans in Texas and Florida, for example, could witness the “dummymander” effect, in which Democrats could flip a seat intended to favor Republicans because the GOP state lawmakers spread their supporters too thin across districts. Crayton also noted that Senate seats, which represent an entire state, cannot be gerrymandered. If there’s a president who supports gerrymandering reform, and a Congress willing to act, he argued that the lawmakers who support partisan gerrymandering could see greater fallout than they expect.
“They will have themselves to thank for it,” he said.
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