Following a wave of congressional redistricting before the midterm elections, a nationwide fight for partisan advantage is shifting into a new phase that may impact representation on issues ranging from taxation and social programs to education funding, housing policies, and infrastructure maintenance.
The Republican-controlled Legislature in a southern state will meet June 17 for a special session dedicated to redistricting for the 2028 elections. The session’s agenda covers new voting districts for Congress as well as state House and Senate seats — and possibly even the state’s utility regulatory commission.
This will be the first instance since a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision reduced minority voting protections that a state legislature will try to redraw its own districts. Republican lawmakers in one state and Democratic legislators in another may also pursue legislative redistricting before their 2027 and 2028 elections, respectively.
However, it’s unclear how many legislatures will take similar action, and whether this mid-decade redistricting trend will reach down to county commissions, city councils, and school boards that make numerous decisions affecting residents’ daily lives. The potential impact could be far-reaching.
“The stakes here are not political, they are deeply human,” said Joe Kennedy III, founder of Groundwork Project, a nonprofit that supports local civil rights and democracy organizations.
Voting district lines are usually redrawn once every ten years following each U.S. census to reflect population shifts. However, last summer, President Donald Trump encouraged Republican lawmakers in one state to redraw congressional districts to attempt gaining additional seats in the midterm elections. Other states subsequently conducted their own partisan gerrymandering efforts.
A 6-3 Supreme Court decision in late April then sparked additional redistricting activity. The court overturned a majority-Black congressional district in one state as an illegal racial gerrymander, giving Republicans in other states justification to reshape districts with significant minority populations that have elected Democrats.
A federal judge determined in 2023 that some congressional, state Senate, and state House districts in one state were drawn in a racially discriminatory way. The Legislature promptly passed revised maps with new majority-Black districts, though they produced minimal changes to Republican majorities in the 2024 elections.
The Republican governor has summoned lawmakers into special session to redraw districts again following the Supreme Court’s decision in the case from another state. This could enable Republicans to reverse the court-mandated changes they implemented in 2023 and potentially redraw other Democratic-held minority districts to benefit the GOP.
Republicans have not yet revealed specifics of their strategy. However, a Democratic state representative who is seeking the attorney general position criticized the planned redistricting as a way of “rigging maps to maintain power.”
Several months prior to the Supreme Court ruling, a study by Fair Fight Action and Black Voters Matter predicted that Republicans in 10 Southern states could eliminate 191 Democratic-held legislative seats — including 140 districts with Black or Hispanic majorities — if the Supreme Court weakened federal Voting Rights Act protections for minorities.
“If anything, our report was an understatement,” Cliff Albright, co-founder and executive director of Black Voters Matter, recently told The Associated Press. “What’s at stake is the future of this democracy.”
Other experts don’t anticipate that many seats being redistricted. But they do expect the Supreme Court’s ruling to have effects across states.
“We’re going to potentially see a lot of frenzied efforts at every level, including at the local level, to try out undoing district maps and configurations that have performed quite well in providing improved representation for communities of color,” said Kareem Crayton, vice president of the Washington office of the Brennan Center for Justice.
The precedent from the recent Supreme Court ruling is already being used in multiple states. Following the decision, a federal appeals court is permitting one state to use a state Senate map approved by Republican lawmakers in this year’s election rather than one imposed by a federal judge who determined the state had weakened the voting power of Black residents. The modification affects two state Senate districts in one metropolitan area.
The Supreme Court has returned legislative redistricting cases filed on behalf of Black voters in one state and Native Americans in another state to lower courts for additional review in light of its decision. An attorney general in another state has requested the Supreme Court do the same for legislative redistricting cases involving Hispanic voters in that state.
Approximately half the states have constitutional provisions that ban mid-decade redistricting of state legislative seats, said Justin Levitt, a law professor at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles who operates the “All About Redistricting” website.
But even in states where it’s permitted, lawmakers may have less motivation to redraw their own districts than those for Congress, Levitt explained. Politicians who advocated congressional redistricting for the 2026 midterms often defended it as a method to counter gerrymandering in other states and secure as many seats as possible for their party. They had additional motivation because a shift of just a few seats nationally in the November elections could determine control of the closely divided U.S. House.
In contrast, most state legislative chambers are already controlled by one party.
“There’s a lot less incentive, if you already control the state legislature by 10 or 12 seats, to eke out an incremental one or two at the expense of really ticking off your own party membership, or at the expense of maybe risking losing seats in a broader way,” Levitt said.
The Supreme Court ruling making it harder to prove Voting Rights Act violations has already impacted some local governments.
Plaintiffs have voluntarily dropped a challenge to commission districts in one county. A federal court has accepted new legal briefs in a challenge to Board of Supervisors districts in another county. And one state’s attorney general has asked a federal appeals court to consider the case when deciding a challenge to how judges are selected in one county.
Over approximately the past four decades, data from the University of Michigan indicates that cities, counties, and school boards have been involved in more than three-fifths of the 466 lawsuits alleging violations of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits providing minorities less opportunity than other voters to elect the representatives of their choice.
But that doesn’t necessarily mean local governments will rush to redistrict due to a weakened Voting Rights Act. The Supreme Court decision opened the door for officials to justify redistricting based on partisan goals. However, many local offices are officially nonpartisan.
