Welcome to Washington: With Control of the House at Stake, Bad Omens Loom for Democrats in Redistricting Wars

As new analysis shows Democrats gaining the upper hand in the gerrymandering war kicked off by President Trump last year, the opposition party is receiving some discouraging signs. In the coming weeks, two powerful courts will say whether or not Democrats will hold their lead, or if they will fall behind. Welcome to Washington, where the narrowness of the Republicans’ House majority is making life nearly impossible for Speaker Mike Johnson. A procedural vote to begin considering several must-pass bills is stalled as hardliners revolt and Democrats refused to bail the speaker out. If Mr. Johnson has any hope at all of keeping his majority, those aspirations lie in Virginia and in Florida. This week, Governor Ron DeSantis unveiled a new congressional map proposal to eliminate four blue seats in his state. The legal rationale for the mid-decade gerrymandering is a tricky one, given the Supreme Court has not yet weighed in on the central question at the heart of Mr. DeSantis’s push. The governor, who has admitted that he may again run for the White House, argued this week that race-based gerrymandering prescribed by the Voting Rights Act is unconstitutional, which is the rationale for redrawing the maps. Usually, that would kick off a lengthy legal fight, though with the court preparing to rule on that very question, Mr. DeSantis is hoping to get a head start. Many legal observers believe that the provision of the Voting Rights Act mandating the drawing of majority-minority districts will be declared unconstitutional under the 14th and 15th Amendments. Some point to the fact that Justice Samuel Alito has not yet written a court opinion this term as a clear indicator that he has been tasked with writing the Callais opinion — something that has voting rights analysts worried. In a memo to state lawmakers on Tuesday, Mr. DeSantis’s general counsel, David Axelman, wrote that the Supreme Court has “signaled” that racial gerrymandering is “unconstitutional.” The high court has not yet ruled on it, but Mr. DeSantis’s team seems confident that such a victory is coming. “The use of race in redistricting should never happen. Any decision taken ‘because of race’ triggers (and should trigger) the strictest of federal constitutional scrutiny,” Mr. Axelman wrote. Again, later in his memo, Mr. Axelman writes that the Supreme Court “is poised to” declare racial gerrymandering unconstitutional, not that the court has actually ruled on the matter. The potential of a Justice Alito-penned Callais opinion is not the only cloud hanging over Democrats. On Tuesday, the Virginia supreme court declined to overrule a lower court’s injunction blocking certification of the statewide redistricting amendment which passed earlier this month. Virginia’s highest court is a bit of an enigma, with its composition nominated and confirmed by the two houses of the legislature. Unlike most other states, neither the governor nor voters play a direct role in choosing who serves on the high court. Currently, the seven-member court is made up of three justices who were confirmed during total Republican control of the legislature, one who has been confirmed during total Democratic control, and three have been confirmed when the legislature was divided.The fact that the Virginia high court declined to stay the lower court’s order could be the clearest sign yet that Democrats’ Virginia gerrymander may be declared unconstitutional. “In the ‘tea leaves’ category, this is as positive a ‘tea leaf’ as one might imagine!” the state’s former attorney general, Ken Cuccinelli, wrote on X Tuesday. “If [the Virginia supreme court] thought they would let the referendum stand, then logically they would have lifted the injunction on counting and certifying the votes.”“Caveat: this is still just tea leaves, but it’s a good sign,” Mr. Cuccinelli wrote. Across all of the states that have redrawn congressional maps in the last year, Democrats either have a narrow edge or are tied with Republicans, though that could quickly change based on the court results in Florida and Virginia. Across Texas, Missouri, North Carolina, and Ohio — all of which have already finalized their lines for the 2026 elections — the GOP is now favored to pick up anywhere between six and nine seats. So far, California is the only state to pass a partisan gerrymandering measure which is aimed at giving Democrats five seats. A state court has also drawn a deep-blue district in Utah, pursuant to the state’s independent redistricting law which the Republican-controlled legislature has been accused of ignoring. Assuming the Virginia maps stand, Democrats will likely flip ten seats through redistricting alone. If the Virginia supreme court does strike down the maps and the United States Supreme Court permits Florida to move ahead under a Callais precedent, then the Democrats’ retaliation in the gerrymandering war may have all been for naught.

Welcome to Washington: With Control of the House at Stake, Bad Omens Loom for Democrats in Redistricting Wars

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