Partisan, or racist? Republican states redraw congressional district maps under new Supreme Court rules

Republican states are "cracking" Democratic districts to get 10 more seats in the House this fall. There was no racist intent, Republican Supreme Court justices conveniently find.

After the 2024 elections the makeup of the House of Representatives was 220 Republicans and 215 Democrats. This amounts to 50.6% Republican representation in the House, after receiving 51.3% of the voteshare in the 2024 election. To maintain a representative democracy, the representatives should reflect the makeup of the people. By party, it did, or very nearly.

Partisan divides are not the only measure of whether representation is fair and democratic. Before Congress passed the 1965 Voting Rights Act, less than 1% of the House was Black (three seats), compared to 10% of the population. Today, 61 Black people represent their districts in the House, which is 14% of the House, compared to 12% of the population.

But this year the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) has gutted the Voting Rights Act (VRA), threatening Black representation in Congress, amid a flurry of mid-decade redistricting efforts. Redistricting generally happens every 10 years after the federal census, with the exception of maps that have been struck down in the courts. It was one of these instances that brought Lousianna v Callais to the Supreme Court. In 2022, Louisiana had one “majority-minority district,” i.e. a district where a majority of the population is a racial minority, which was 17% of the state’s 6 representatives, despite 40% of the state’s population being a racial minority, predominantly Black. Louisiana then redrew their map in 2024 to add a second majority-minority district, in accordance to Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. In Louisiana v Callais this year, the Supreme Court ruled that Louisiana shouldn’t have redrawn their map because in order to invoke Section 2 of the VRA, a plaintiff would have had to prove that racial discrimination in map-drawing was intentional, rather than proving that a discriminatory result occurred.

Proving intent is an incredibly high legal bar, so this decision makes suing for discriminatory map-drawing very difficult. To prove that a lack of majority-minority districts is unconstitutional, plaintiffs would have to prove that a map could be drawn in which a majority-minority district would vote Republican to prove the intent was racial rather than partisan, even though the majority of minority voters tend to vote Democrat. With this decision, the Supreme Court essentially negated its own 2023 decision which upheld Section 2 of the VRA, deeming an Alabama map unconstitutionally discriminatory in a very similar case.

After the decision, Louisiana suspended their Congressional primaries (after tens of thousands of Louisianians had already voted) to redraw their map, and Alabama petitioned the Supreme Court in an effort to use the map that had been ruled unconstitutional in 2023. SCOTUS granted that request despite a lower court repeatedly ruling that the map was intentionally racially discriminatory. Tennessee also moved to redraw their maps, cracking their only Democratic district in majority-minority Memphis for Republican advantage of one additional seat, leaving Tennessee without any Democratic districts despite 34% of voters in the state voting for a Democrat last election. And Florida quickly redistricted for a Republican advantage on four additional seats.

Preceding this strikedown of the Voting Rights Act, a flurry of states had moved to redistrict mid-decade voluntarily since last year. The movement began with President Trump demanding that the Texas legislature redistrict for a Republican advantage on five additional House seats. Mid-decade redistricting is a rare affair, but it has never been done at the public request of the President. And it didn’t stop at Texas–Trump began to pressure other states to redistrict, many of which have proceeded with voluntary redistricting efforts. Some states, such as Indiana and South Carolina, have pushed back against this pressure. But local Republican legislators up for re-election who defied the President lost their primaries to Trump-endorsed candidates.

In response to Texas, California passed a referendum for their voters to approve the state to redistrict for a Democrat advantage on five House seats, despite its usual process of redistricting through an independent commission. Virginia voters also passed a referendum to redistrict to advantage Democrats, but their state Supreme Court struck the new maps down for procedural reasons and the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear the case, rendering the new map void. Utah was forced to redraw by law and formed a single new Democratic district (their previous map didn’t have any Democratic districts).

Alabama, California, Florida, Louisiana, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, Tennessee, Texas, and Utah have redistricted for a net advantage of +10 Republican seats for the 2026 midterm elections (about +2% of House seats). With Trump’s low approval rating, especially on issues like inflation and the economy, a blue wave would normally be expected for the midterms. But with Republicans working over the last year to redraw maps in their favor, that trend may be undercut, in addition to the pushing out of several Black representatives.

Proportional Representation, a form of representation used by most modern democracies, could be the antidote to gerrymandering.