The Supreme Court’s decision to upend a key provision of the Voting Rights Act has plunged the nation into a dizzying new era of partisan conflict, most likely ushering in a forever redistricting war that could produce fewer competitive seats in Congress and further polarize American politics.
Left as probable casualties are longstanding principles of fair representation — along with American voters, who are likelier now to be shunted into hyperpartisan districts drawn in each state to benefit the party in power. A great carving could effectively dilute the power of millions, especially minority voters, and make partisan primaries more important than general elections when it comes to choosing leaders.
“We lost one of the last seatbelts of our democracy,” said Alanah Odoms, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Louisiana.
The ruling by the court’s conservative majority struck down Louisiana’s congressional map, describing it as an unconstitutional gerrymander that improperly considered race to create a majority-Black district. The ruling, Democrats argued, effectively removed one of the final guardrails that kept the most ruthlessly partisan interests at bay when it came to drawing congressional and legislative maps.
Some also fear that the court’s decision will reverberate beyond the halls of Congress.
“Judges, school board members, councilmen — doesn’t matter, it will affect them all,” Press Robinson, a Louisiana resident who pushed for more minority representation in the state’s congressional maps, said on Wednesday.
More broadly, minority voters fear a backslide after losing what they say was a critical legal protection.
“Black Americans have never been fully represented in the electoral process,” said Damon Hewitt, the president of the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, a civil rights group. “This ruling makes it less likely that we ever will.”
In the court’s majority opinion, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. cast the ruling as a limited one that preserved a central tenet 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 are supposed to be drawn once a decade to account for population shifts and ensure fair representation. But last year, President Trump started a rare, mid-decade gerrymandering arms race when he asked Texas officials to create a new map to benefit Republicans in what was widely anticipated to be a difficult midterm cycle for the party. California countered with a map favoring Democrats. Several other red and blue states followed.
The court’s decision on Wednesday has already prompted Louisiana and several other states to consider new maps in time for this year’s midterms. Still others are considering a fresh round of redistricting ahead of 2028. Election lawyers in both parties are contemplating a host of legal challenges as officials try to understand the Supreme Court’s new guidelines.
A coldblooded consensus has emerged among Democrats and Republicans as both parties battle purely for power, casting aside longstanding principles of fair representation that previously informed the redistricting process. “Maximum warfare, everywhere, all the time,” Representative Hakeem Jeffries, a Democrat from New York and the House minority leader, said recently. He was echoing an adage first proffered by allies of Mr. Trump last year.
Such aggressive gamesmanship in redistricting could run roughshod over longstanding norms for drawing maps, such as keeping communities of interest together, maintaining geographic compactness and protecting the voting power of minority voters.
A preview of this polarized future is already evident in the newly drawn districts in Florida and Virginia, where lopsided control of congressional seats will no longer reflect the partisan makeup of each state’s electorate.
In Florida, Republicans could hold 24 of 28 congressional seats after they approved a new map this week that was drawn in anticipation of the Supreme Court’s decision. The math is stark: In a state where Vice President Kamala Harris won 43 percent of the vote two years ago, the G.O.P. could control 86 percent of House seats.
Democratic state lawmakers mentioned that lopsided statistic often on Wednesday as they tried unsuccessfully to stop the new map.
“You think that this is just about preserving a Republican majority in the midterm,” State Representative Fentrice Driskell of Tampa, the House minority leader, told her Republican colleagues. “I stopped by to tell you today that you are destroying democracy with this vote.”
Yet Democrats did something similar in Virginia last week, most likely 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 seized on the disparity and how it would dilute the voting power of conservative voters. Jason Miyares, the former Republican state attorney general, accused Democrats of trying to silence “millions of conservative voices” through “deceit” and an “unconstitutional power grab.”
While such comparisons fail to take into account some factors that go into map drawing, such as how a party’s voters are dispersed through a given area, the overall trend points to distorted representation in Congress. Some states are even discussing how to achieve single-party control in their House delegations.
Hours after the court’s decision, Republicans across the South called for the elimination of majority-Black districts, all of which Democrats currently control. In Tennessee, Representative Diana Harshbarger, a Republican, said the state’s last Democratic-held district, a majority-Black one in the Memphis area, was “created to comply with a now-outdated interpretation” of the Voting Rights Act. The decision “opens the door for Tennessee to draw a new map,” she said.
Since the ruling, Mr. Trump has encouraged state Republicans to move quickly to improve their political fortunes in the fall elections.
“This should give us one extra seat, and help Save our Country from the Radical Left Democrats,” Mr. Trump wrote on social media on Thursday in an exhortation for Gov. Bill Lee of Tennessee to take action. “Thank you Governor Lee — PUSH HARD!”
In response, Democrats threatened mutually assured destruction.
“I have long felt that we all have to play by the same set of rules,” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democrat from New York, told reporters on Wednesday. “If Republicans are going to redraw North Carolina, if they’re going to redraw Texas, if they’re going to redraw and gerrymander every one of their states, then unfortunately we have to provide balance to that until we get to the day when we can all finally agree to put this behind us.”
Representative Terri Sewell, a Democratic House member from Alabama and a member of the Congressional Black Caucus, was more blunt.
“I’d take 52 seats from California,” Ms. Sewell said, a reference to turning all 52 seats in California blue. “I sure would — and 17 seats from Illinois.”
When districts are drawn to protect incumbents and carve out clear, safe partisan advantages, competition is often a casualty. After the last round of nationwide redistricting in 2021, when both parties sought to protect their current advantages, competition quickly became an endangered species.
About a third of the current members of the House ran unopposed in their primaries. All but 12 of those districts were considered “safe” seats, meaning 124 House members essentially faced no challenge to their re-election. Close races are rare: Just 8 percent of congressional races (36 of 435) were decided by fewer than five percentage points, according to a New York Times analysis last year.
Consequences from the death of competition are readily apparent. Roughly 90 percent of races are now decided not by general-election voters in November but by the partisans who tend to vote in primaries months earlier, according to the analysis.
The trend continues down the ballot, where state legislative districts are often heavily gerrymandered. More than three-quarters of state legislative primary races in 2024 were uncontested, according to voting data from The Associated Press. Just 7 percent of general election state legislative races (400 of 5,465) were decided by fewer than five points.
Audra D. S. Burch, Patricia Mazzei, Emily Cochrane, Eduardo Machado and Tim Balk contributed reporting.
Nick Corasaniti is a Times reporter covering national politics, with a focus on voting and elections.
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