The Virginia Supreme Court on Friday struck down a voter-approved ballot measure that had allowed Democrats to redraw the state’s congressional districts, potentially giving their party up to four additional U.S. House seats in the midterm elections.
In its ruling, the narrowly divided court found that Democrats had not followed the proper legal procedures in their rush to get the map approved before the fall. “While the Commonwealth is free by its lights to do the right thing for the right reason, the Rule of Law requires that it be done the right way,” the justices wrote in their majority opinion.
The ruling is the second major blow to Democrats in their ongoing effort to keep pace with Republicans in the parties’ nationwide redistricting battle. Democratic House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries vowed on Friday to try to overturn the ruling in Virginia.
The Virginia court’s decision came less than two weeks after the Supreme Court’s conservative majority ruled that Louisiana lawmakers had violated the Constitution when they drew up a new congressional map that created a second majority-Black district in the state, saying that it wasn’t required under the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
The decision is likely to make it harder for lawmakers to draw up districts that shield nonwhite voters from having their voting power diminished — and easier for lawmakers from either party to redraw districts that help them win.
Even before these recent bombshell rulings from the courts, partisan redistricting — the fraught process by which states redraw their voting maps to benefit the party in power — was already rampant across the country. Since last year, Republicans in red states (like Texas) and Democrats in blue states (like California) have launched unprecedented mid-decade efforts to maximize their electoral muscle and put new maps in place in time for November’s midterms.
Since the Supreme Court’s ruling, one Republican-led state, Tennessee, has already approved a new map for November’s midterms that eliminates its only majority-Black district. Three other Southern states —Louisiana, Alabama and South Carolina — have at least started the process.
Here’s everything you need to know to keep tabs on Republicans and Democrats as they rush to remake the political landscape — including how their efforts could affect the 2026 midterms and 2028 presidential election.
What is redistricting?
Every 10 years, the census determines how the 435 seats in the House of Representatives are divided between the states. Once states know how many seats they’ll have, they get to choose how to carve up their territory into their allotted number of districts.
In most cases, district maps are approved by the state legislature, which creates an obvious incentive for the party in power to manipulate the maps to their advantage. When they do that, it’s called gerrymandering. Gerrymandering is nothing new, but it’s become increasingly important over the last two decades as both parties have gotten more and more aggressive in how they slice up their district maps to maximize the number of seats their members win.
Here’s a simple example of how gerrymandering can allow a party with even a slight majority of voters to dominate a state’s congressional representation. Click the arrows below to cycle through various redistricting scenarios.
What’s happened so far
The country was already in the midst of an unprecedented redistricting race even before the Supreme Court’s decision was handed down.
It started last summer in Texas, where the Republican-led Legislature pushed through new district lines that will likely give Republicans five additional seats in the House after the midterms.
Three other red states quickly followed suit. Missouri and North Carolina both carved up their congressional maps to give the GOP one additional seat from their states. Ohio approved a new map that could tilt one or two seats to Republicans. Florida’s Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, who had been discussing his redistricting plans for months, finally made it official on Monday by signing a new map into law that could give Republicans four additional seats.
Democrats in California moved to counteract the GOP’s gains by pushing a new map with five new safe Democratic seats. California’s laws required voters to approve the change, which they did by a large margin last November. In Utah, a judge ordered the GOP-run state Legislature to throw out its previous map, which made all four of its districts safe for Republicans. The decision is likely to give Democrats one additional seat. Last month, Virginia voters approved a map that would have given Democrats four more safe seats.
Before the two big recent court decisions, the redistricting fight had been a relative stalemate. After all those changes across the country, the final tally put the GOP just one or two seats ahead. But with the four seats from Virginia erased from Democrats’ count, and the Republicans poised to make even more gains after the Supreme Court’s ruling, the GOP could end up with an advantage of up to a dozen seats by the time voters cast their ballots in November.
A map of seats gained by each party before recent court decisions.
What the Supreme Court ruling means for the midterms
All of the redistricting so far has happened under the old interpretation of the law, which limited how much areas with high concentrations of minority voters could be broken up. The court’s new ruling weakens those protections and would make certain challenges harder to win, opening the door for states to gerrymander their congressional maps even more aggressively than before.
That said, the timing of the court’s decision limits how much it can effect this year’s midterms. Most states are well into their party primaries, which means it’s too late for them to redraw their district lines at this point.
It will have at least some impact, however. Three Republican-led states are scrambling to get new maps in place in time for them to be used this election cycle, and one already has.
The day after the decision was handed down, Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry suspended House primaries in his state to allow the Legislature time to approve a new congressional map. The new standards established by the Supreme Court could theoretically allow Louisiana Republicans to eliminate both of the state’s Black-majority districts, but reports suggest they are likely to pursue a map that only breaks up one of those districts.
Republicans in Tennessee moved quickly to approve a new map that breaks up the state’s only Democrat-held district, giving the GOP full control of Tennessee’s nine House seats.
Tennessee provides an example of how the court’s ruling makes more aggressive gerrymandering possible. The state’s lone blue district in 2024 included Memphis, a city that’s more than 60% Black, according to the U.S. census. Until recently, courts might have rejected a map that broke up Memphis’s minority voting bloc on the basis that it violated the Voting Rights Act. But now, with protections weakened, Republicans have approved a map that slices up Memphis, so its voters are spread out over several safe red districts.
Comparing Tennessee’s 2024 congressional map to the map that was approved for the 2026 midterms.
The Alabama Legislature is also holding a special session on redistricting to potentially pass a new map that could eliminate one or both of the state’s two Democratic districts. But that effort is complicated by a court order barring Alabama from changing its maps until 2030. The state’s attorney general has asked the Supreme Court to lift that order in light of its decision.
The South Carolina state Legislature has also taken the first steps of a potential redistricting push, which would likely target the state’s only Democratic district.
If all four states are able to put new maps in place, it could give four or five additional seats to Republicans.
A map of where things stand after two major redistricting rulings.
Whether the GOP’s advantage with redistricting will ultimately allow them to maintain control of the House remains to be seen. The president’s party has lost an average of 20 seats over the last 10 midterm elections. Republicans lost 40 during Trump’s first midterms in 2018. Trump was in office for the midterms in 2018.
How things could escalate ahead of the 2028 election
The immediate impact of the new Supreme Court decision might be modest. But if several Republican-led Southern states succeed in redrawing their maps this year as a result of the ruling, Democratic states are likely to try to retaliate in 2027 and beyond.
There have been rumblings that New York and Colorado might move first, following in the footsteps of California and Virginia to help cancel out Republican gains across the South. If those two states eventually amend their constitutions to allow partisan, legislative redistricting, they could, in theory, put an additional 11 congressional districts under Democratic control.
More extreme scenarios are possible as well: Last week, one Democratic congresswoman from Alabama reacted to the Supreme Court’s ruling by saying she would now happily slice and dice previously settled maps in order to “take 52 seats from California … and 17 seats from Illinois.”
That would mean unanimous Democratic control of each state’s congressional delegation. But it would also create even more convoluted districts that trample on longstanding norms — keeping communities of interest together, maintaining geographic compactness, protecting the voting power of minorities — and risk further eroding Americans’ confidence in their democracy, which gerrymandering has already been shown to do.
The question for 2027 and beyond is whether either party is willing to go that far — because if one does, the other is almost certain to follow. The result, as the New York Times recently put it, would be “a great carving [that] 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.”
“I have long felt that we all have to play by the same set of rules,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democrat from New York, told reporters on Wednesday. But “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.”
Nearly 6 million people in California voted for Republican House candidates in 2024. In the most extreme scenario, those 6 million voters would have their voices effectively erased from the electoral process. The same thing could happen to the 4 million Democratic voters in Texas, or the 3 million Republican voters in New York — and so on, in one state after another.
