In 2019, Justice Elena Kagan of the U.S. Supreme Court issued a dire warning about a force that could “irreparably damage our system of government.”
It was the gerrymander, that political practice, almost as old as the country itself, in which a political party creatively draws legislative districts to preserve or enhance its power.
Today, an all-out gerrymandering war, sparked by President Trump, has erupted nationwide, with state legislators on all sides scrambling to redraw congressional maps in hopes of maximizing their party’s chances of controlling the U.S. House of Representatives after the 2026 midterm elections.
It started in August, when Mr. Trump and his allies cajoled Texas lawmakers to redraw the state’s districts, which yielded five Republican-leaning seats. It was matched on Tuesday when voters in California, in a special election, passed Proposition 50, which could squeeze out as many as five new Democratic-leaning districts for the 2026 elections. North Carolina, Ohio and Missouri have also redrawn boundaries; another dozen or so are considering it.
Democrats in California and other left-leaning states argue that they must keep the playing field level as Mr. Trump plows ahead with his own redistricting campaign. The White House and other Republicans proclaim that the new districts push back on the existing Democratic gerrymandering and help them hold onto the House.
But election lawyers and experts say that what is happening now is a crisis with few parallels in American history, especially given the potential weakening of the Voting Rights Act, which the Supreme Court is expected to rule on in the coming months.
They fear this one-two punch could weaken democracy.
“The wheels are coming off the car right now,” said Nathaniel Persily, a professor at Stanford Law School who has studied gerrymandering. “There’s a sense in which the system is rapidly spiraling downward, and there’s no end in sight.”
Congressional redistricting is typically carried out after the national census, which is taken every decade. States can win and lose House seats according to population changes, and state legislatures from both parties have used the once-per-decade opportunity to redraw districts that benefit them politically.
But this year, that norm has been shattered. Election experts worry that if the trend continues, redistricting could become a chaotic and near-constant process, with state lawmakers redrawing districts with the onset of every midterm election.
Political calculations, as well as litigation, could slow the downward spiral. But if not, experts say, the electoral system is likely to encourage even more extremism among candidates, sow confusion and cynicism among voters, and create a reality in which House delegations from some states no longer reflect the political diversity of their residents.
For now, little can stop the states.
Justice Kagan issued her warning about gerrymandering in a dissent to Rucho v. Common Cause, a 2019 redistricting case out of North Carolina. That map, drawn by a Republican-led state legislature, tilted 10 out of 13 districts toward the G.O.P., even though voters in the state were split just about evenly between the parties.
David Lewis, one of the Republican architects of the 2016 map, was blunt in describing his motives: “I think electing Republicans is better than electing Democrats. So I drew this map to help foster what I think is better for the country.”
In the majority opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. determined that federal courts should play no role in regulating gerrymandering for partisan purposes.
The country’s founders, he wrote, understood that politics would play a role in drawing election districts when they gave the task to state legislatures. Judges, the chief justice said, lack the authority and competence to decide when politics has played too large a role in redistricting.
“We conclude that partisan gerrymandering claims present political questions beyond the reach of the federal courts,” he wrote.
The ruling left open the possibility that Congress, state courts or state governments could limit the practice. And in recent years, a number of states, including Colorado, California and Michigan, have created commissions to draw maps in an effort to diminish overt partisanship.
But the escalation of tit-for-tat redistricting threatens to undo that gerrymandering disarmament. The passage of Proposition 50, for instance, overrides California’s independent redistricting commission, which was established in 2010 after a yearslong effort.
The proposition restores the commission’s authority in 2031. But state Republicans filed a lawsuit on Wednesday challenging the new maps and asked the court to block them from taking effect.
Richard H. Pildes, a law professor at New York University, said that gerrymandering generated more controversy when the country was closely divided politically, with power regularly flip-flopping between parties.
At the same time, both parties in recent years have painted the other as a fundamental threat to the future of the republic.
“When the stakes are viewed as so high and the partisan margins of control are so thin,” Mr. Pildes said, “it creates all of this pressure for those who control the structure of elections to use that power to try to advance the interests of their side.”
Many incumbents in Congress already face tougher challenges in their primaries than in the general election, often pushing them toward the more extreme edges of their party platforms.
In the November 2024 elections, just 8 percent of congressional races and 7 percent of state legislative races were decided by fewer than five percentage points, according to an analysis of election data by The New York Times. Roughly 90 percent of races are now primarily determined not by general-election voters, but by the partisans in the primaries months earlier.
Increasingly, members of Congress are not even facing primary challenges: 124 House members essentially faced no challenge to their elections last November.
It’s not only redistricting. The conservative-dominated Supreme Court is currently considering the constitutionality of a key section of the Voting Rights Act, which allows lawmakers to use race as a factor in drawing voting maps. At issue is whether there should be a time limit on the validity of using race-based ways to address past discrimination.
If the court hollows out the landmark 1965 law — a strong possibility, based on oral arguments last month — state lawmakers could eliminate a number of congressional districts in the South that were designed to help Black voters gain representation.
The Supreme Court’s decision may come too late for states to redesign their maps for the midterms. But one possibility, according to a Times analysis, is that Southern states, like Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Tennessee, could eventually draw out of existence districts with significant Black populations that currently favor Democrats.
For first time in decades, these states could send no Democratic House members to Washington, despite the fact that 34 to 38 percent of voters in these states voted for Kamala Harris in 2024.
The elections on Tuesday, with the surprising Democratic surge in New Jersey and Virginia, could limit the appetite for riskier gerrymanders.
State lawmakers may hit a sort of natural mathematical limit to gerrymandering, making their safe seats a little more vulnerable to wave elections as they try to spread voters across districts. And it will be impossible to completely insulate the roughly 35 competitive districts if one party dominates in 2026.
Some states are also resisting the pressure to redistrict, with a few legislators breaking with their own party. On Tuesday, Kansas Republicans dropped their effort to redistrict, unable to muster enough votes to push through new maps.
Last week, Bill Ferguson, the Democratic State Senate president in Maryland, refused to draw new maps, despite the wishes of the governor and other Democratic leaders.
“The legal risks are too high, the timeline for action is dangerous, the downside risk to Democrats is catastrophic, and the certainty of our existing map would be undermined,” Mr. Ferguson wrote in a three-page letter explaining his opposition.
Any seismic overhaul of the electoral system, election experts say, is likely to make voters more confused, with their representatives potentially shifting with every midterm election.
Americans already have an increasingly dark view of government: A large majority now believes that the country is incapable of overcoming its deep divisions, according to a recent poll by The Times.
Benjamin Ginsberg, a prominent Republican election lawyer who has been critical of efforts to undermine the electoral process, has another fear.
The current redistricting battle, he said, is likely to set off a contest within states to create trifectas — meaning that one party controls both chambers of state government and the governor’s seat.
Once that power is locked in, Mr. Ginsberg said, a party could draw new maps that could effectively entrench their hold on government for decades.
“A confluence of events,” he said, “is sending us down a dangerous path.”
Richard Fausset, a Times reporter based in Atlanta, writes about the American South, focusing on politics, culture, race, poverty and criminal justice.
Nick Corasaniti is a Times reporter covering national politics, with a focus on voting and elections.
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