The Seven Biggest Ongoing Gerrymandering Fights
The state that successfully killed Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act is inching closer to finalizing a new congressional map that would give the GOP one more House seat
The fallout from the Supreme Court gutting Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act in Louisiana v. Callais is in full swing, as red states are locked in a mad dash to implement new congressional maps that will secure more seats, sacrificing minority voters in nearly every circumstance. Lower courts are equally busy, with legal challenges being brought left and right by both Republicans and Democrats to stymie each other’s power grabs and limit the damage in midterm elections that are now just six months away. Strap in, as we use this week’s newsletter to unpack the state of play in the U.S. gerrymandering wars.
Typically, states create new congressional maps every 10 years, in line with the national decennial census. However, last summer, President Donald Trump upended this practice when he urged Texas to redistrict mid-decade in order to net Republicans more congressional seats, an attempt to mitigate Democrats’ expected sweep in the 2026 midterm elections. Texas enacted a new map that gave Republicans five new House seats, but California responded with its own tit-for-tat gerrymander which also netted the country’s largest Democratic state an additional five Democratic seats. Other Republican-leaning states, including Ohio, Utah, and North Carolina, jumped in to follow suit.
Then last month, there was another shock to the system. The U.S. Supreme Court released its decision in Callais, and overnight the national redistricting effort leveled up, as states were no longer bound to create districts that prioritized minority voters. Literally within hours Florida’s Republican-controlled Legislature passed a new congressional map that would net Republicans four additional seats. We’re now about two weeks out from Callais becoming public, and more states are jumping into the fire, though as we noted in this newsletter last week, this is a fight to the bottom that hurts voters and American democracy.
Nevertheless, redistricting is happening whether we like it or not. It may well determine the balance of power in Washington this year and onward, making it one of the most politically salient issues today. To help everyone understand and track what is happening with redistricting and where, here are the latest legal battles over congressional maps we are keeping an eye on:
1. Virginia
After Virginia’s Supreme Court late last week rejected Democrats’ new electoral map, one that would have flipped four Republican-held U.S. House seats to Democrats, Attorney General Jay Jones asked the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene. The emergency application argues that the Virginia’s Supreme Court’s 4–3 decision amounted to “judicial defiance” of the will of the state’s voters, who voted in favor of a mid-decade congressional redistricting effort last year. The question at the heart of this legal challenge has to do with the timing of the referendum posed to voters, with the Virginia Constitution preventing amendments unless there is an intervening election between the first and second votes on a proposed amendment that is introduced and passed in the Legislature. As Slate’s Alexis Romero explained, the Virginia Legislature voted on Democrats’ new congressional map and then introduced it to voters right before last year’s November election, then after voters approved it, the Legislature again voted on the measure in February. But the state’s Supreme Court ruled that the 2025 election had already begun when the Legislature passed the amendment the first time, because the first early voters had already cast their ballots. By that standard, Virginia’s Legislature did not put a full election between its first proposed amendment vote in October and its second in February, since some mail-in ballots were received before Democrats unveiled their new map.
Jones’ last-ditch effort to get the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene is risky. The court only has the final word on federal law and does not traditionally weigh in on state Supreme Courts’ decisions. Virginia is asking a conservative majority court to upend this practice, which could come back to bite Democrats all over the country in any number of potential voting cases. Given the court’s 2023 ruling, though, in Moore v. Harper—and given the partisan stakes—SCOTUS is unlikely to act, meaning Virginia’s Democratic gerrymander is all but dead.
2. Louisiana
Within 24 hours of the Supreme Court releasing its decision in Louisiana v. Callais, Gov. Jeff Landry canceled his state’s May 16 House primary election until state lawmakers can pass a new congressional map. Meanwhile, numerous lawsuits have been filed against Landry that seek to block the suspension of the May 16 election.
Still, the state that successfully killed Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act is inching closer to finalizing a new congressional map that would give the GOP one more House seat in Louisiana. The state Senate voted on Wednesday to advance a map that preserves a Black-majority district in New Orleans while splintering the only other Black-majority district in Baton Rouge. This map still has a ways to go in Louisiana’s Legislature, but if it is ultimately adopted, it would be the third set of congressional maps the state has had since the 2020 census. Wednesday’s vote came after Louisiana’s Senate held a contentious committee hearing where lawmakers considered four different maps, three of which eliminated at least one or both of the state’s Black-majority districts. Four of the state’s sole Black legislators pleaded with their colleagues to preserve Louisiana’s two Black-majority districts in a state where a third of voters are Black. Hundreds of residents were also in attendance.
3. Alabama
On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a lower court order that had forced Alabama to use a court-imposed House map until the 2030 census, but a group of Black voters quickly filed suit to prevent a new map from taking effect. The Supreme Court’s decision meant that Alabama could use a map that state lawmakers created in 2023 that eliminates one of only two Black-majority districts.
The plaintiffs in this case are seeking a restraining order from a district court, while on Tuesday, Gov. Kay Ivey announced that a special primary election for the four affected congressional districts would be held on Aug. 11 after the state voided its May 19 primary, for which early voting was already underway. Pending what the district court rules, the August primary is expected to reflect the 2023 map drawn by Alabama Republicans that eliminates one of two Black-majority districts. This will net Republicans in Washington one more congressional House seat.
Alabama had been locked in litigation over its congressional maps since 2020, when a group of Black voters and civil rights groups sued the state for creating a congressional map that they argued was in violation of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. District courts continuously found the state’s map did indeed violate the VRA, and the Supreme Court even sided with those lower courts as recently as 2023. Ultimately, though, the justices granted Alabama’s appeal to restore its 2023 map with an unsigned order on Monday, in the wake of Callais.
4. Tennessee
Within days of the Supreme Court issuing its Callais decision, Tennessee lawmakers pulled together a new U.S. House map that carves up the state’s sole Black-majority district, effectively awarding Republicans all nine of Tennessee’s congressional districts for this year’s midterms. Within hours of Gov. Bill Lee signing the new map into law, the NAACP’s Tennessee chapter jumped in to challenge its legality. The group is also suing Lee and the Tennessee General Assembly, arguing proper procedures were not followed when Lee called a special session to redraw congressional maps and asking a court to stop the new map from going into effect.
On Tuesday, the Davidson County Chancery Court set a hearing for the NAACP’s case for May 21. Tennessee’s primary election is on Aug. 6.
5. Illinois
Back in 2011, Illinois adopted its own Voting Rights Act, and the same week that the Supreme Court issued its Callais decision, Illinois House members passed an amendment that would have taken a provision within the federal VRA and brought it into Illinois’ version. However, after Callais, Democratic lawmakers decided against moving forward with the amendment. Nevertheless, the conservative group Public Interest Legal Foundation filed a lawsuit hoping to weaken Illinois’ VRA, arguing it violates the 15th Amendment.
However, as Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern noted, even if Illinois is forced to “unpack” its majority-minority congressional districts, it could end up simply spreading out the state’s Democratic voters more efficiently, and Republicans wouldn’t end up with any more seats. The lawsuit also stands to threaten other state-level VRAs where Republicans may try to seek more power.
6. Missouri
On Tuesday, the Missouri Supreme Court enacted a new congressional map created by the state’s Republican lawmakers that breaks up a Democratic seat in Kansas City. The decision ruled on two separate legal challenges that were initiated last year, when Missouri first began a mid-decade redistricting effort at the urging of President Donald Trump. The first lawsuit argued the new Republican congressional map violated the Missouri Constitution’s decennial rule for redistricting mid-decade and its compactness requirement.
The second legal challenge has to do with a statewide petition that gathered over 300,000 signatures in opposition to the Missouri law that enacted the mid-decade congressional map, which Republican Secretary of State Denny Hoskins has yet to validate. The Missouri Constitution allows laws to be suspended when a referendum petition is submitted and meets the minimum threshold of signatures with at least two-thirds of the state’s congressional districts, but the Missouri Supreme Court rejected the argument that the new map must be temporarily blocked. Hoskins has until late July to validate the petition, while Missouri’s primary is on Aug. 4. A last-minute decision, even if in favor of the petition, could still make it nearly impossible to stop the primary.
7. South Carolina
Up until Wednesday, it seemed as though South Carolina was taking a back seat in the redistricting wars. Five Republicans joined all Democrats in opposing a measure that would have enabled the Senate to consider a redistricting vote, even after the current legislative session ends later this week. And Republican Gov. Henry McMaster was dismissing calls to order a special legislative session, until Wednesday. Unnamed sources told Politico that McMaster is expected to announce a special session on redistricting, which will tee up South Carolina’s sole Black-majority district, held by longtime Democratic stalwart Jim Clyburn, for the chopping block.
A special session with allow Republican members of South Carolina’s Legislature to pass a new congressional map with a simple majority. The state’s June 9 primary is less than a month away, and early voting is supposed to begin at end of May. It’s a striking turnaround, since 24 hours earlier, South Carolina Republican Senate Majority Leader Shane Massey had delivered an impassioned speech defending his decision to oppose any redistricting efforts to eliminate the state’s single Black-majority district. Massey noted that carving Democrats out of South Carolina’s congressional maps completely would risk the state losing an influential figure the next time there is a Democrat in the White House.
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Elsewhere in Jurisprudence
Slate has launched a new season of its award-winning podcast Slow Burn! This new season is called Becoming Justice Gorsuch, and is hosted by Slate executive editor Susan Matthews. The series takes a deep dive into how the justice manages to maintain his anonymous “nice guy” conservative persona while gutting the Voting Rights Act, ending affirmative action, and dismantling the constitutional right to reproductive care. It explores Justice Gorsuch’s personal life and his judicial temperament, including a pivotal case from nearly 20 years ago that seemed to have shaped his judicial philosophy. You can listen on your phone or on your computer here.
In this week’s episode of Amicus, Dahlia Lithwick sits down with two federal judges who are intimately familiar with the new war on the judiciary, which has created an undeniable uptick in threats against American judges and their families. U.S. District Judge for the Western District of Washington Robert S. Lasnik and former U.S. District Judge for the Northern District of California and current executive director of the Berkeley Judicial Institute Jeremy Fogel discuss how the judiciary has a long history of being threatened, but this time things are markedly different. As they note, the president of the United States and his Department of Justice have never directly targeted judges the way Donald Trump has.
This week’s Slate Plus bonus episode is a post–Louisiana v. Callais assessment, in which Dahlia chats with Balls and Strikes’ Madiba Dennie about the new onslaught of states choosing to gerrymander their Black voters’ congressional districts out of existence. They also touch on how the U.S. Supreme Court greenlit this arms race in an effort to beat back multiracial democracy, yet insists their decisions have nothing to do with politics.
Last week, the Supreme Court of Virginia struck down state Democrats’ new congressional map that voters approved mere weeks prior. Slate’s Alexis Romero explains the court’s “head-spinning” opinion and how it manages to butcher the legal question at the heart of this case while also cherry-picking history. The outcome is devastating for Democrats, who have filed a last-ditch effort to revert the state Supreme Court’s decision with the U.S. Supreme Court.
Down in Alabama, state Republicans are pushing to use a 2023 congressional map that was previously found to be in violation of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, a move endorsed by the U.S. Supreme Court. As Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern explained, last week the high court issued a shadow docket decision essentially striking down its 2023 ruling in Allen v. Milligan, which had found Alabama’s redistricting plan unlawful. The latest Alabama decision further contradicts Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion from two weeks ago in Louisiana v. Callais, where he explicitly promised the court was not diminishing the constitutional guarantee against “present-day intentional racial discrimination regarding voting.” Mark concludes that “the best answer we can postulate is the most cynical one: Alito was lying in Callais.”
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