It has been a little over three weeks since Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan gave a downbeat public assessment of the court’s impact on American politics. Speaking to an audience at Catholic University’s law school in Washington on Oct. 20, Kagan cited recent rulings by the court’s conservative majority that undid restrictions on campaign finance, allowed partisan gerrymandering and made it far more difficult for states to draw “majority-minority” House districts under the Voting Rights Act.
“The court has kind of blinded itself to the very deleterious effect of their rulings on how the political system works,” including more polarization and the possibility that Black officeholding in the South would “plummet,” Kagan lamented. The result is “a democracy that does not work as well as it should.”
Her comments have not aged well — fortunately. The Nov. 3 midterms were not an example of democratic dysfunction. The system worked, enabling voters to express discontent with the status quo and hold officials they deemed responsible accountable.
Rather than more polarized, less responsive, government, Nov. 3 gave rise to new, and potentially healthy, two-party competition in previously red states across the South — notably Texas, where Republicans lost their decades-old monopoly on power.
In fact, none of the worst-case scenarios for the Supreme Court’s rulings have so far panned out. Yes, 2026 saw a “race to the bottom” on redistricting, as Kagan noted in her remarks. Republicans and then, in retaliation, Democrats engaged in nakedly partisan mid-decade gerrymandering. And under the court’s 2019 ruling in Rucho v. Common Cause, federal judges were powerless to stop them.
Yet the blue tsunami swamped Republican maps; Democrats won numerous supposedly safe red House districts. In North Carolina, a map the GOP legislature intended to yield an 11-3 advantage has so far produced nine Democratic winners, with four races still too close to call.
Which brings us to Louisiana v. Callais, the Supreme Court ruling this year that all but banned “majority-minority” districts, triggering an outpouring of liberal condemnation.
“I will be interested to see, for example, whether time will vindicate the majority’s view that the ‘great strides’ made in African American office-holding, ‘particularly in the South,’ will hold up after the issuance of this opinion,” Kagan wrote in her dissent, quoting Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr.’s opinion. “My own guess is not.”
Guess again: As Kagan and other liberals expected, three GOP-run Southern states — Alabama, Louisiana, and Tennessee — changed their maps to eliminate “opportunity districts” drawn to favor Black candidates. But the impact on Black and Democratic officeholding in the 11 former Confederate states was modest.
Twenty-two Black candidates in that region for the House have won so far, with another likely to win in Louisiana’s December runoff. That’s 23 — and if two candidates in North Carolina win their so-far uncalled races, the total number will be unchanged. Five of the nine declared winners in North Carolina are Black.
Louisiana will probably have one fewer Black member of Congress. Alabama will still have two: Shomari Figures won his district even though the gerrymander reduced the Black share of its voting-age population.
Mississippi will have its first Black senator since Reconstruction; Georgia, the nation’s first-ever Black woman governor, a Democrat; and Florida its first-ever Black governor, a Republican. South Carolina is adding seven Black Democrats to its legislature; Black Democrats flipped GOP-held state legislative seats in Alabama, Arkansas, Texas and Georgia.
Future redistricting in three Southern states — Georgia, North Carolina and Texas — could be less partisan, and less favorable to Republicans, because Democrats now control their governorships and at least one house of the state legislature.
One hopes both parties learned a lesson about gerrymandering’s unintended consequences. After the 2030 census, California might even abandon the gerrymander it engineered to favor Democrats this year, as the voter-approved law enabling the “temporary” redistricting provides.
As for campaign cash, which the Supreme Court deregulated in two historic cases — Citizens United in 2010 and National Republican Senatorial Committee v. FEC in 2026 — it was not the decisive factor many in both parties expected, just as it hasn’t been in many previous campaigns.
“The people of America look around this political system and think that all this money chasing all these political candidates is a nightmare. And they’re right,” Kagan said at Catholic U.
No doubt. But after Nov. 3, the guy living a nightmare was Elon Musk, who blew nearly half a billion dollars on Republican candidates. A Black woman Democrat, LaKesha Womack, beat White Republican Tim Moore in North Carolina even though he raised $2.1 million to her $60,000.
Of course, none of this was foreordained. It took effort to overcome the advantages Republicans tried to create for themselves. And whatever the political impact of the court’s rulings, Kagan and her fellow dissenters might well have been right on the legal issues.
Still, if the Republican-appointed justices were motivated by partisanship, as so many Democrats warned, their plot failed. It’s just possible these conservatives really believed what their opinions said: that the Constitution supported their views and that the political process could counteract any “deleterious effects.” If so, they have been vindicated.
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