Recent Supreme Court decisions have eased the way for states to enact more partisan gerrymanders. Now legislatures are racing to redraw their congressional maps in rare mid-decade redistricting efforts that may reconfigure the calculus of who will win the majority in the U.S. House of Representatives after the midterm elections this November.
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.
Legal experts worry that the end result of this partisan gerrymander scramble will be a reduction in fair representation in the U.S. House, with Republican voters in blue states and Democrats in red states less likely to have their voices heard. Moreover, Democratic-leaning nonwhite voters could see their political power considerably diluted—if not wiped out entirely in the red states racing to delete majority-minority districts.
“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.”
Since Trump called on Texas to redraw its maps last year, several states have undertaken this process, resulting in new districts ahead of the midterms. These efforts could add up to a dozen or more new Republican House seats after the November elections. Although some Democratic states—notably California, the most populous state—have punched back, other efforts have been rebuffed. An attempt to redraw Virginia’s electoral map to add new Democratic seats in 2026 was struck down by the state Supreme Court. Meanwhile, both Republican- and Democratic-majority states will take up redistricting ahead of the 2028 cycle. (In their gerrymandering efforts, some Democratic-led states have argued that this is a temporary measure intended to counter Republican mid-decade redistricting.)
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.
“When politicians don’t believe that there is accountability, that allows for those politicians to advance either their personal interests or very narrow political interests—by the wealthy, the well-connected, corporations,” said Noureldin. As a result, he continued, Congress will become “less and less responsive to the needs of everyday Americans.”
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.
In early June, the Supreme Court paved the way for Alabama to eliminate one of two majority-Black districts, in an unsigned shadow-docket decision. This proposed map had been struck down by a lower court, which included two Trump-appointed judges. To Kareem Crayton, a vice president for the Brennan Center for Justice, a think tank focused on democracy and voting rights, this decision demonstrates how the conservative majority on the court believes drawing maps to benefit Republicans is wholly divorced from how it might affect minority voters—who overwhelmingly vote for Democrats.
“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.
The current race to gerrymander congressional districts is not unprecedented in the modern era. Republicans underwent a concerted effort ahead of the 2010 election to win state legislative majorities with the goal of controlling redistricting after that year’s census. Daley said that Republicans were able to successfully gain control of several state legislatures because “Democrats were fully asleep to the importance of this issue.”
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.
Experts say that a 2019 Supreme Court decision opened the door to the redistricting wars of the present moment. The conservative majority’s decision in Rucho v. Common Cause found that federal courts did not have the power to police partisan gerrymandering.
“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.”
Leeper noted that racial gerrymandering is still theoretically illegal, even if the Voting Rights Act has been “severely undercut.” She added that it is still possible to challenge certain redistricting efforts on the state level in states where there are prohibitions on partisan gerrymandering; for example, the Campaign Legal Center is engaged in a lawsuit in Florida, where voters in 2010 approved an amendment to bar redistricting that favors one party. However, it does make state-by-state reform that much more difficult.
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.
“What we learned is that it is possible to have more fair redistricting. It’s possible to have groups of independent people who are representative of their states come together applying fair redistricting criteria, and the result is maps that are substantially more fair,” said Leeper. But she added that “in the absence of a national standard,” independent states may be less likely to pursue independent redistricting commissions in the future.
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.
“Independent redistricting processes in of themselves work, but only if everyone is using them,” said Noureldin. “If not, then they’re not actually working to achieve a fair map across the congressional landscape.”
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.
There have been recent unsuccessful congressional efforts to address gerrymandering. In 2021, when Democrats held both the White House and both chambers of Congress, legislation that would have made it difficult for states to impose partisan gerrymandering came close to passage. Although it was approved in the House, it failed in the Senate, as the narrow Democratic majority was unable to end the legislative filibuster.
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.
“This is a much more effective long-term game for Republicans than it is for Democrats, and if Democrats don’t look ahead to what’s coming in the 2030 census and reform this, if given the shot in 2028, they’re going to be in the wilderness for a long time,” said Daley.
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.
“Gerrymandering works to a point. It has a lot of collateral damage. But at some point or another, the dam breaks,” Crayton said. “When it does, people are going to be a little dismayed,” he said, and the resulting reform might be “more sweeping than they would even imagine.”
“They will have themselves to thank for it,” he said.
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