When the Texas Legislature, with the prodding of President Donald Trump, redrew that state’s congressional lines last summer to try to increase the number of seats held by Republicans, it was guaranteed to be only the first salvo in a redistricting war.
Less than a year later, six more states have taken the unusual step of a mid-decade redistricting, all with the goal of increasing one political party’s advantage in the 2026 midterm elections. Florida could be the eighth state to do so during a special legislative session that began this week.
So far, the political score from this blatant manipulation of voting boundaries is nearly a draw. If the new maps in Republican-friendly Ohio and Democrat-friendly Virginia survive legal challenges, the tit-for-tat redistricting is expected to help Democrats pick up 10 House seats in the November federal elections and the Republicans nine. This is not counting for the seats that are expected to switch from Republican to Democrat because they are in toss-up districts that historically vote in non-presidential-election years against whichever party is in the White House.
The drawing of congressional lines, which is required after every census to account for population shifts, is an exercise that has long been fraught with politics. The problem, though, has been exacerbated by the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled in 2019 that gerrymandering — the drawing of voting lines to try to ensure a specific outcome — was constitutional as long as it was done for strictly partisan reasons.
That misguided decision by the court’s conservative majority turned loose those who concluded that there was no reason to wait until the 2030 census to draw new district lines. They could take a second crack at it now to tilt the electoral scale more heavily in their party’s favor.
Republican-dominated Texas provided the initial mischief, but Democrat-dominated Virginia reaffirmed last week that the problem is not confined to one party. Voters there approved a constitutional remap that, if not overturned on a technicality, could give the Democrats 10 out of Virginia’s 11 seats in the House next year. The Democrats’ current advantage is just 6-5.
Previously, Virginia had been one of those states that had tried to insulate congressional redistricting from politics by using a bipartisan commission to draw the voting lines. It cast those noble intentions aside, though, in order to increase the odds that Democrats will gain control in Congress and impose greater legislative restraint on Trump.
No matter who wins in November, this unleashing of partisan redistricting comes with a steep cost to the nation. The whole point of partisan redistricting is to shrink the number of House districts that are competitive between the two parties. When only one party has a reasonable chance of winning in the general election, candidates focus solely on their party primaries, which tend to appeal to the extremes. Moderation disappears both in the rhetoric politicians use and in the positions they take.
Two entities could stop this tit-for-tat redistricting and the increased polarization it fosters. Congress could adopt rules that limit redistricting to once a decade. Or the Supreme Court could reverse its 2019 decision, having now seen the havoc and unfairness that the ruling has created.
The Supreme Court is already entangled in a separate redistricting dilemma, as it tries to find the right balance between the Voting Rights Act, which has promoted the creation of districts in which minority groups are the majority, and the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection under the law. By condoning partisan redistricting, the court only made its balancing act more difficult, since it’s practically impossible to distinguish between partisanship and race when boundaries are drawn to favor one political party over the other.
The only way for the court to get out of this box is to reconsider its 2019 decision and instead find that all gerrymandering is unconstitutional, regardless of what form it takes.
