GOP notches more victories in redistricting fight
Courts sided with Republicans in Tennessee and Virginia
What happened
Democrats were left scrambling last week after a back-to-back set of redistricting losses narrowed their odds of taking back the House in November, with the Supreme Court clearing the way for Alabama Republicans to redraw the state’s electoral map and Virginia’s high court throwing out a Democratic map designed to flip red House seats blue. The ruling by the Supreme Court’s conservative majority could allow the Alabama legislature to use a 2023 voting map that eliminates one of the state’s two majority-Black districts, both of which are currently held by Democrats. A lower court had blocked that map on the grounds that it violated Section 2 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which bars racial discrimination in voting. But the high court’s conservative justices said that decision should be reconsidered in light of last month’s Louisiana v. Callais, in which the court found the creation of majority-Black districts to be an “unconstitutional racial gerrymander.” In the Louisiana legislature, a Senate committee passed a congressional map that will eliminate one of two majority-Black districts, while in Tennessee, Gov. Bill Lee signed into law a new congressional map that carves up the state’s sole Democratic-held district, based in majority-Black Memphis. It’s “unbelievable how people seem to want to turn things backward,” said Barbara Love, a Black woman who lives outside Memphis.
In Virginia, the state’s top court reversed a new electoral map approved by voters in a ballot measure in April, which was designed to flip four Republican-held House seats. The court ruled 4-3 that Democratic lawmakers had violated a procedural mandate by rushing to pass the redistricting before November’s midterms. State Democrats said the ruling amounted to “judicial defiance” of voters’ will and appealed to the Supreme Court.
In a rare setback for President Trump, who has urged red-state legislatures to redraw maps, Republicans in South Carolina rejected a redistricting plan designed to eliminate the state’s sole Democratic-held House seat. State Senate Majority Leader A. Shane Massey said carving up the district, held for 34 years by influential Rep. James Clyburn, could backfire by diluting GOP support in other districts. He also warned that the current redistricting wars may anger voters. “Too many people in power,” Massey said, “just want to do whatever it takes to stay in power.”
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What the editorials said
“America’s re-gerrymandering arms race is here,” said the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and you can thank President Trump. The seed was planted last year when Trump demanded Texas and other red states rip up their maps mid-decade to boost Republicans’ midterm edge, a practice previously “unheard of.” That left Democrats in California, Virginia, and elsewhere not only justified in following suit “but virtually obligated to.” Having state maps constantly redrawn to favor the party in power “is intolerable to democracy.” But that’s what we face until Congress steps in “to impose uniform redistricting standards.”
Pardon us while we “revel in” the “comeuppance of Virginia Democrats,” said National Review. With their “lavishly funded” referendum they rammed through an “absurdly lopsided” map that stood to boost their House-seat edge in the “purplish” state from 6-5 to 10-1. But state law dictates that any referendum to amend the constitution must be passed twice, with a general election in between. The first vote came late in October 2025, after some 1.3 million early ballots had already been cast for the November election. The high court’s ruling that Democrats violated the letter and spirit of the law “isn’t even a close call.”
What the columnists said
The blitz to disenfranchise Black Southern voters is “more than a tragedy for voting rights,” said Paul Waldman in Public Notice. It’s a virtual “revival of the Confederacy.” Even as aggrieved white Republicans have revived Confederate symbols, ended diversity initiatives, and otherwise tried to walk back the civil rights movement, progressives have held faith that their foes “were fighting a doomed rearguard action.” But it’s now clear that the Right never lost its own faith that with enough determination “the 1960s could be undone—and maybe some of the 1860s as well.”
Such “hooey” makes it sound like Republicans are demanding “literacy tests at voting precincts,” said Barton Swaim in The Wall Street Journal. What they’re combating, and what the Supreme Court “rightly ended,” is the practice of “packing” Black voters into districts designed “to advantage one party.” Democrats can “gussy it up with lofty talk” of “vote dilution,” but the “ugly fact” is that such districts divide voters according to skin color.
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The GOP’s strong-arming “could backfire badly,” said Henry Olsen in The Washington Post. Yes, it will boost the party in the short term. But New York, Colorado, Maryland, and other blue states could well turn the tables and rub out Republican districts. Lawmakers in many of those states are constrained by legal and structural barriers that prevent mid-decade gerrymandering. But they can be undone, and Democrats will be under “enormous pressure” to “fight fire with fire.”
“This is getting dangerous,” said Jamelle Bouie in The New York Times. The redistricting rush will push American politics to an “even more dangerous place of high partisan tension and ideological Balkanization,” where the House “looks something like the Electoral College.” A system in which a party can eke out control of a state capitol and then redraw congressional maps to lock themselves in power is “not a democracy in any meaningful sense.” But that seems to be “where the United States is headed, if it’s not already there.”