The Supreme Court’s decision to strike down a key provision of the Voting Rights Act has thrust the country into a new era of partisan conflict, potentially forever ushering in a redistricting war that could create less competitive seats in Congress and further polarize American politics.
The potential casualty has been what has been abandoned as long-standing principles of fair representation — with American voters now drawn into hyperpartisan districts drawn in each state to benefit the party in power. A carve-out could effectively weaken the power of millions of voters, especially minority voters, and make partisan primaries more important than general elections when it comes to choosing leaders.
“We have lost one of the last seats of our democracy,” said Alana Odoms, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Louisiana.
The decision by the court’s conservative majority struck down Louisiana’s congressional map, describing it as an unconstitutional gerrymander that improperly considered the race to create a majority-black district. Democrats argued that the ruling effectively removed one of the last guardrails that kept out the most ferocious partisan interests when it comes to drawing congressional and legislative maps.
Some people also fear that the echo of the court’s decision will be heard outside the corridors of Congress as well.
“Judges, school board members, councilmen — doesn’t matter, it will affect them all,” Press Robinson, a Louisiana resident who has pushed for more minority representation in the state’s congressional maps, said Wednesday.
More broadly, minority voters fear a backlash after losing a key legal protection.
“Black Americans have never been fully represented in the electoral process,” said Damon Hewitt, president of the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, a civil rights group. “This decision makes it less likely that we will ever do that.”
In the court’s majority opinion, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. cast the decision as a limited decision that preserved a central principle of the Voting Rights Act, while also addressing a separate matter of fairness – the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution, which he said Louisiana’s majority-minority district violated.
Congressional maps should be drawn once a decade to take into account population change and ensure fair representation. But last year, President Trump set off a rare, mid-decade gerrymandering arms race when he asked Texas officials to draw a new map to benefit Republicans in what was widely anticipated to be a tough midterm cycle for the party. California drew a map favoring Democrats. Many other red and blue states followed.
The court’s decision Wednesday has prompted Louisiana and several other states to consider new maps in time for this year’s midterms. Still others are considering a new round of redistribution before 2028. Election lawyers on both sides are considering a number of legal challenges as officials try to understand the new Supreme Court guidelines.
A ruthless consensus has emerged between Democrats and Republicans as both parties desperately fight for power, sidelining the long-standing principles of fair representation that previously informed the redistricting process. “Maximum war everywhere, all the time,” Representative Hakeem Jeffries, a New York Democrat and House minority leader, recently said. He was repeating a saying first introduced by Mr Trump’s aides last year.
Such aggressive gerrymandering in redistricting could adversely affect long-standing norms for map making, such as keeping communities of interest together, maintaining geographic density, and protecting the voting power of minority voters.
A preview of this polarized future is already evident in newly drawn districts in Florida and Virginia, where lopsided control of congressional seats will no longer reflect the partisan composition of each state’s electorate.
In Florida, Republicans could hold 24 of 28 congressional seats after approving a new map this week that was drawn in anticipation of the Supreme Court’s decision. The math is clear: In a state where Vice President Kamala Harris won 43 percent of the vote two years ago, the GOP could control 86 percent of House seats.
Democratic state lawmakers on Wednesday frequently cited the unbalanced data as they tried unsuccessfully to block the new map.
“You think this is about maintaining the Republican majority in the midterms,” state Rep. Fentris Driskell of Tampa, the House minority leader, told his Republican colleagues. “I stopped by today to tell you that you are destroying democracy with this vote.”
Yet Democrats did something similar in Virginia last week, potentially giving their party 10 of the state’s 11 congressional seats, or 90 percent of the congressional delegation, in a state where Mr. Trump won 46 percent of the vote.
Republicans in the state understood the disparity and how it would weaken the voting power of conservative voters. Jason Miyares, a former Republican state attorney general, accused Democrats of trying to silence “millions of conservative voices” through “fraud” and an “unconstitutional power grab.”
Although such comparisons fail to take into account some of the factors involved in map drawing, such as how dispersed a party’s voters are in a given area, the overall trend points toward distorted representation in Congress. Some states are also discussing how to achieve single-party control in their House delegations.
Hours after the court’s decision, Republicans across the South called for the majority-Black districts currently controlled by Democrats to be abolished. In Tennessee, Representative Diana Harshbarger, a Republican, said the state’s last Democratic-held district, a majority black district in the Memphis area, was “drawn to comply with the now outdated interpretation” of the Voting Rights Act. “This decision opens the door to drawing a new map for Tennessee,” he said.
Since the ruling, Mr. Trump has encouraged state Republicans to move quickly to improve their political fortunes in the upcoming elections.
“This should give us an extra seat, and help protect our country from radical leftist Democrats,” Mr Trump wrote on social media On Thursday, Tennessee Governor Bill Lee was encouraged to take action. “Thank you Governor Lee – push harder!”
In response, the Democrats threatened mutually assured destruction.
“I have long felt that we all have to play by the same rules,” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a New York Democrat, told reporters on Wednesday. “If Republicans are going to rebuild North Carolina, if they’re going to rebuild Texas, if they’re going to rebuild and organize each of their states, unfortunately we’re going to have to provide a balance until we get to the day when we can finally agree to leave this behind.”
Representative Terri Sewell, a Democratic House member from Alabama and member of the Congressional Black Caucus, was more blunt.
“I’ll take 52 seats from California,” Ms. Sewell said, referring to turning all 52 California seats blue. “I’m sure — and 17 seats from Illinois.”
When districts are drawn to protect incumbents and provide clear, safe partisan advantages, competition is often a casualty. Following the last round of nationwide redistricting in 2021, the competition quickly became an endangered species as both sides sought to protect their current advantages.
Nearly one-third of current House members were unopposed in their primaries. All but 12 of those districts were considered “safe” seats, meaning that 124 House members essentially faced no challenges in their re-election. Close races are rare: According to a New York Times analysis last year, only 8 percent of congressional races (36 of 435) were decided by less than five percentage points.
The consequences of the death of competition are painfully obvious. According to the analysis, about 90 percent of the races are now decided not by general-election voters in November but by partisans who vote in primaries months earlier.
This trend continues down the ballot, where state legislative districts are often heavily crowded. More than three-quarters of state legislative primary races in 2024 were uncontested, according to polling data from the Associated Press. Only 7 percent of state legislative races (400 out of 5,465) were decided by less than five points in the general election.
audra ds burch, Patricia Mazzei, Emily Cochrane, Eduardo Machado And Tim Balk Contributed to the reporting.
