The next redistricting war will be even harder for Democrats

Just as the redistricting wars were coming to a close, the Supreme Court blew up the entire landscape with a decision that all but gutted the Voting Rights Act.

And since that decision last week, Republicans around the country have been moving quickly to see how they can take advantage of the new redistricting rules. Republican-led states, particularly in the South, can now eliminate a swath of majority-minority Democratic districts and max out the seats the GOP can hold.

Key takeaways

• The Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais has encouraged Republicans across the nation who want to redraw congressional maps to eliminate Democratic-held, majority-minority seats, particularly in the South. That’s on top of the 2026 mid-decade redistricting moves they made this year.
• Democrats want to respond after the midterms with similar redraws to eliminate Republican seats in Democratic-run states.
• But that puts Democrats in a tough situation: They may have to dilute majority Black and Latino districts to do this, and have conversations about how to preserve racial representation.

At least six Republican governors, in Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, South Carolina, Louisiana, and Mississippi, have already said they intend to do this — though only Louisiana and Tennessee look likely to be able to redraw their maps in time for the 2026 midterm elections. That’s in addition to the round of mid-decade redistricting that Florida capped off last week by creating four more GOP-friendly seats.

Under the new redistricting playing field that the Supreme Court has created, Republicans stand to gain up to 19 new seats over the next two cycles, according to an analysis by Fair Fight Action circulating among Democrats. Democrats are now once again under pressure to retaliate by using the same court decision to increase their advantage in states like New York, California, Colorado, Maryland, and Illinois in 2028 and beyond. The same Fair Fight Action report maps out ways they could squeeze 10 to 22 more friendly seats in response.

“I can’t speak for my chairwoman, but I’d take 52 seats from California and 17 seats from Illinois,” Alabama Rep. Terri Sewell, whose district is likely to be eliminated after the Supreme Court decision, told reporters. In other words, a fully Democratic map in both states.

But that kind of total-war approach can’t happen without changing the makeup and lines of districts traditionally held by Black, Hispanic, and some Asian American representatives. It would require two sacrifices: for some nonwhite Democratic politicians to potentially give up seats the civil rights movement fought to create, and for voters of color to give up influence in House districts they currently dominate.

“Democrats inherently, as part of our platform, our ethos, believe in a multiracial, pluralistic democracy where we believe in empowering people of color. In a lot of cases, up until Callais, you could have your cake and eat it, where you could do that without having to sacrifice anything electorally for it,” Democratic pollster Adam Carlson told me. “But when Republicans are changing the rules, you don’t really have a choice at a certain point. You have to have that conversation of tradeoffs.”

If the effort to match Trump’s redistricting scheme over the last year was treacherous, these future gerrymandering efforts may end up being even more painful and rocky. It will pit the principles of racial representation that inspired the Voting Rights Act against the desire to defeat the Republican Party that enabled the law’s effective demise.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries summarized this tension last week, telling Politico that House Democratic leadership is “looking at every opportunity to ensure that communities of color will continue to have the chance to elect the candidate of their choice…while at the same time doing what is necessary, as occurred in California, to decisively respond to efforts by Republicans to gerrymander congressional maps.”

Illinois shows how hard the next map fights will get

In Illinois, any attempt to eliminate the state’s three GOP-held seats would require redrawing lines to dip into the heavily populated and diverse Cook County, home to Chicago.

But when Democrats considered a mid-decade redistricting move to counter Republicans this cycle, there was one major obstacle: opposition from Black political and civil rights groups over reducing the influence of Black voters in elections.

While the new seats might reliably lean Democratic, they’d also be less likely to consistently elect Black candidates. That fueled opposition from members of the Illinois Legislative Black Caucus, and their concerns forced Democrats to back off on redrawing them.

“We cannot respond to the facially racist efforts of the Republican Party to rig the 2026 midterms by doing anything that furthers their long-term goals of wiping Black representation off the map,” Willie Preston, a Chicago-area state senator and the chair of the Illinois Senate Black Legislative Caucus, said in October. “I look forward to supporting any map that does not dilute the 1st, 2nd or 7th Congressional Districts.”

These tensions are likely to resurface if Democrats try to push for a more aggressive map in 2028 and beyond that would require spreading urban Black and Latino communities across more districts, diluting their influence in each seat while boosting the party overall.

“How you draw a 17-0 map in Illinois is through a really ugly gerrymander — like strips of bacon coming out of Chicago,” Zachary Donnini, head of data science at the election tracking site VoteHub, told me. “Everyone gets a little bit of Chicago.”

But the scale of the post-Louisiana v. Callais Republican gains could also make it harder to resist some changes. La Shawn Ford, a state representative and Democratic nominee in the 7th Congressional District this year, said this year’s failed redraw would not be the end of the conversation.

“That was then,” he said. “The fact that this is moving very fast and that there’s been moves that have actually become laws in other states — I mean, Illinois can’t just say, no.”

While Ford said he expects more openness to redistricting from his colleagues, “if they see that the districts are at risk of losing Black representation, you’re going to get major pushback.” Democrats would have to tread carefully and be “strategic in our map-making” to manage competing concerns.

Black voters and elected leaders, Ford said, see the issue through the lens of Reconstruction after the Civil War, when Southern whites violently ended a brief period of Black representation in Congress and instituted Jim Crow laws and restrictions. But just as Black leaders were wary of surrendering influence as a result, the sight of historic Southern seats being wiped away could also prompt an emotional response that demands action.

“It’s a shame that Black people have to be front and center in this discussion, but the courts literally threw us right into the fire,” he said.

Beyond Illinois, other difficult conversations are on the horizon

Regardless of how the Illinois representation debate goes, Democrats will face a hodgepodge of scenarios, processes, and roadblocks in trying to draw, get citizen approval, or push through new maps to counter Republican gains. And in many of those states where Democrats can squeeze out more seats, similar kinds of identity politics will come into play.

In California, for example, the more maximalist redraws of the state — like another viral map that shows a theoretical 52-0 map for 2028 — would require diluting the influence of Black, Asian, and Hispanic voters to draw out the remaining four safe Republican districts.

Particularly in California, which has served as a pipeline for sending Hispanic and Latino politicians to Congress, attempts to dilute Latino voting power may spark backlash from local, state, and federal Latino elected leaders and local communities who fear the loss of majority-Hispanic districts. Of the state’s 52 congressional districts, 16 are majority-Hispanic/Latino and Latino voters exert significant influence in six more.

“To give up that influence for a party that has repeatedly failed to deliver on working-class Latino voters’ priorities and is now asking for additional sacrifice to give itself a political boost may not be acceptable,” Sonja Diaz, a founding member of the UCLA Latino Politics and Policy Initiative, told me.

Diaz, who helped lead the City of Los Angeles’s 2021 city council redistricting commission, told me she hopes future redistricting efforts balance the need to empower Latino voters with partisan goals. She noted the state has been able to do this before: The mid-decade redistricting plan passed in last year’s special election delivered more seats friendly to Democrats and increased Latino representation through two Latino-influence districts, one of the main reasons Latino civil rights groups and organizations did not oppose it vigorously. But pushing too far could backfire on national Democrats.

“Having New York Democratic leadership tell us what to do in a state like California, or even in a state like Illinois, when there are serious grievances that extend beyond the second [Trump] administration is nonsensical,” she said.

In addition to racial representation concerns, incumbents also might be less willing to give up political safety — extreme gerrymandering means making some seats more competitive, even if they still lean Democrat. One Latino member of Congress, Rep. Robert Garcia, tried to serve as a party model by embracing a new California map that made his district more white and less Democratic by taking in more voters from conservative strongholds.

One trend that could be helpful: Americans’ growing willingness to elect minority candidates. Well into the 21st century, Black members of Congress were extremely rare outside majority-minority districts designed to favor them, even heavily Democratic ones. But in the Trump era, Democrats have increasingly elected Black candidates who were not only running in whiter congressional districts, but battleground ones, including Colin Allred, Lauren Underwood, Lucy McBath, and Anthony Delgado. They’ve elevated minority candidates in major statewide races as well.

Meanwhile, post-2026 redistricting drives will likely face less of a challenge of racial representation in the other states that Democrats can turn to: Washington and Colorado, for example, are primarily white states that can squeeze out at least five more Democratic-friendly seats; a fight to redistrict in more diverse Maryland, meanwhile, may hinge on one Democratic lawmaker’s decision.

But the real mess might come after that, in 2032 — the first post-Callais, post-census, complete congressional redraw. By then, many states will have added or lost seats to population change, and the Supreme Court will have had more time to detail how its VRA decision works in practice.

“That’s when you can start from scratch,” Carlson said. “That’s when you might start to see proposals for these insane maps.”

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