Welcome to Washington: Redistricting Wars Are Likely To Get Even Worse for Democrats

In the coming weeks, the Supreme Court will likely have the final say on Virginia Democrats’ attempt to redraw their state’s congressional maps in order to eliminate four Republican districts. Even on the off chance that the high court does overrule Virginia’s top jurists, the redistricting battle could end up failing to yield any benefits for the Democrats. Welcome to Washington, where in just the last few weeks Democrats’ chances of taking the House of Representatives in November have decreased dramatically. The Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais on the role of race in districting is putting multiple deep-blue seats across the South on the chopping block. Lawmakers in Florida have successfully adopted a new congressional map. Virginia’s supreme court invalidated the Democrats’ ten-to-one gerrymander. As of Monday morning, in the GOP’s best-case scenario, Republicans have already picked up 16 seats in the House through gerrymandering alone. Democrats, on the other hand, have likely won a mere six seats — five in California thanks to a voter-approved redistricting effort and one in Utah which was drawn as a result of a state court case. Republicans have even more room to grow, however. Lawmakers in Alabama, Mississippi, and South Carolina are also considering an elimination of multiple heavily Democratic seats thanks to Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion in Callais, meaning the GOP could pick up as many as four more districts this year. If one is doing the math, that means that Republicans — if all goes according to plan — have improved their midterm prospects in 14 seats since last summer, making it far more difficult for Democrats to take the House even in a year when they are widely expected to win the nationwide House popular vote. The first real test of Democrats’ future gerrymandering efforts will likely come before the Supreme Court in the coming weeks. “We respect the court. But we will keep fighting for a democracy where voters — not politicians — have the final say,” the speaker of the Virginia house of delegates, Don Scott, said in a statement after the state’s supreme court struck down the redistricting effort he advanced. Shortly after, Democrats asked the high court at Richmond to pause its ruling in a sign that they would appeal the matter to the Supreme Court. Virginia’s appeal to the nine justices is unlikely to succeed, given the court’s textualist majority. Democrats’ gerrymander in the state was not blocked due to state bans on partisan or racial gerrymandering, but rather it was struck down because of a technicality related to how the proposed maps moved through the legislature. Such a violation of the state’s constitution and laws governing the amendment process will almost certainly make the matter simple when America’s top jurists get involved. If the current six-to-five Democratic majority congressional map in Virginia is kept in place, the opposition party will be especially inspired to search elsewhere for more gerrymandering opportunities. Democratic leaders in Maryland, Washington State, Colorado, New York, New Jersey, California, Oregon, and Illinois have expressed an openness to redrawing congressional maps. Unlike in red states, party leaders may still run into some serious legal challenges. Independent redistricting commissions became in the last decade a favorite tool of Democrats who had hoped to lead by example in order to tamp down on gerrymandering across the country. Now, as Democrats take a more aggressive posture in a redistricting fight, those same non-partisan map-drawing bodies are proving to be barriers. To kill off GOP seats in Colorado, a statewide ballot initiative would have to pass with at least 55 percent of the vote this fall. In New York, Governor Kathy Hochul, who pressed for additional Democratic seats before the 2024 election and has vowed to wage “war” for a redistricting effort, could get caught up in another legal battle. Democrats in New Jersey would either have to pack the state’s bipartisan redistricting commission with their own partisans or take the issue back to the voters in order to change the state constitution. Other Democratic states can push for gerrymandering with fewer legal hurdles, though the very states in question have already drawn as many Republicans out of office as is conceivably possible. Democrats in deep blue states would foreseeably risk multiple House incumbents by stretching voters thinly, even if they did want to gerrymander their states even further.Maryland, California, Washington, and Oregon could all conceivably move forward with a redistricting push come next year. All of those maps are already drawn in such a way as to give Democrats as many seats as possible, meaning Democratic House incumbents could need to give up their own safety in order to expand the House majority.

Welcome to Washington: Redistricting Wars Are Likely To Get Even Worse for Democrats

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