Gerrymandering Is Only Going to Get Worse

Legal experts warn that the current partisan redistricting efforts could signal the beginning of the end for fair representation.

Recent Supreme Court decisions have eased the way for states to enact more partisan gerrymanders. Now legislatures are racing to redraw their congressional maps in rare mid-decade redistricting efforts that may reconfigure the calculus of who will win the majority in the U.S. House of Representatives after the midterm elections this November.

These endeavors were inspired by President Donald Trump, whose exhortations last year for Texas lawmakers to redraw their maps in favor of his party kicked off a frenzy of tit-for-tat redistricting from both GOP-controlled and Democratic-led states, with Republicans in particular benefiting under the aegis of the conservative-majority Supreme Court. Meanwhile, Trump has successfully challenged some of the GOP state legislators that stood in the way of his redistricting plan, supporting primary opponents more likely to follow his bidding.

Legal experts worry that the end result of this partisan gerrymander scramble will be a reduction in fair representation in the U.S. House, with Republican voters in blue states and Democrats in red states less likely to have their voices heard. Moreover, Democratic-leaning nonwhite voters could see their political power considerably diluted—if not wiped out entirely in the red states racing to delete majority-minority districts.

“By 2028, I think we are likely to be looking at a radically and maximally gerrymandered national map, in which blue states elect almost entirely blue delegations, red states elect just about entirely red delegations,” worried David Daley,  a senior fellow at the civic organization FairVote and the author of Ratf**ked: Why Your Vote Doesn’t Count. “It’s the kind of map we’ve seen before in this country. It’s just that back then, we called it the Union and the Confederacy.”

Since Trump called on Texas to redraw its maps last year, several states have undertaken this process, resulting in new districts ahead of the midterms. These efforts could add up to a dozen or more new Republican House seats after the November elections. Although some Democratic states—notably California, the most populous state—have punched back, other efforts have been rebuffed. An attempt to redraw Virginia’s electoral map to add new Democratic seats in 2026 was struck down by the state Supreme Court. Meanwhile, both Republican- and Democratic-majority states will take up redistricting ahead of the 2028 cycle. (In their gerrymandering efforts, some Democratic-led states have argued that this is a temporary measure intended to counter Republican mid-decade........

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