Who Won the Redistricting War?
In the midterm elections of 1922, voters in Missouri were invited to weigh in directly on a wide range of issues. Mostly, they were in a rejectionist frame of mind. An amendment to hike politicians’ pay was defeated. (Plus ça change.) So, too, was a law that redrew the state’s congressional districts. Two years earlier, Republicans had swept the state, then passed a blatantly gerrymandered map. Democrats—no saints themselves, when it came to gerrymandering—petitioned for a referendum to reverse the damage, and, in March, 1922, Missouri’s secretary of state confirmed that they had enough signatures to reach the ballot. More than sixty per cent of the electorate voted against the Republican gerrymander. And that was that.
Fast forward a century and change, to September, 2025, and Missouri Republicans once again passed a gerrymandered map. They already enjoyed a significant advantage in the state’s congressional delegation, holding six seats to the Democrats’ two. But President Donald Trump and his allies were on a national mission to redraw electoral districts and pick off as many House Democrats as possible. One of their targets was Emanuel Cleaver, a veteran congressman whose district was packed tightly around Kansas City but would, in its new form, sprawl out into rural areas more than halfway across the state, loosely resembling the snout and head of a cartoon dog.
At the time, Richard von Glahn, the policy director of a local workers’-rights organization, had been looking for a new project. “I was a little bit of a skeptic on whether or not people were really gonna care about this,” von Glahn told me, of redistricting. But he and various allies organized town halls on the issue, and von Glahn found that attendees “were clued into the state of democracy in a way that I hadn’t really expected.” He helped establish a group called People Not Politicians, which aimed to follow the precedent set in 1922 and get a referendum on the ballot to reverse the damage. Just by taking place, the referendum would pause the new map for 2026—stymieing Trump for the midterms, at least.
By December, People Not Politicians claimed to have accumulated nearly three times as many signatures as they needed to force a vote, and had submitted them to the secretary of state, a Republican named Denny Hoskins, who had eight months to certify or reject them. An hour or so before the deadline, on August 4th, he declared that conducting a referendum would be illegal, whether or not People Not Politicians had gathered enough signatures, on the ground that power over redistricting belongs to the state legislature. August 4th also happened to be primary day in Missouri—and voting took place under the new map. A month later, however, the state Supreme Court ruled, seven to zero, that the referendum petition was valid, and that, as a result, the new map never really existed, in a legal sense. The opinion was withering, especially in the footnotes. One dismissed a key Hoskins argument—that reverting to the old map would be confusing, expensive, and practically difficult—as being “particularly misplaced given the secretary’s delay created the confusion, expense, and practical difficulties of which he complains.”
Hoskins and Catherine Hanaway, Missouri’s attorney general, cast the verdict as a dire threat to America’s constitutional republic, quoting Ben Franklin to underscore the point, and took their case to the U.S. Supreme Court. Justice Brett Kavanaugh quickly rejected the appeal without seeing any need to refer it to his colleagues, and the matter appeared to be closed—for an hour or so, anyway. Right after Kavanaugh’s dismissal became public, a federal court ruled in a different case, brought by Missouri Republican congressional candidates and voters, that, since the new map was used for the primaries, it must be used in November, too. This time, it was von Glahn who appealed to the Supreme Court, which put a stay on the new map. Incredibly, the matter still wasn’t settled: an appeals court tried to re-implement the new map, bouncing the question back to the Supreme Court for a third time. Meanwhile, officials had to start sending ballots overseas and open up absentee voting—using the old map, per the state Supreme Court’s order. “Just think about those people in these election offices,” Cleaver, the congressman, told me in the thick of the chaos. “They are having fits!”
The day before absentee voting was due to begin, I spoke with two county clerks via Zoom. Neither was having fits; indeed, both seemed remarkably composed, given the circumstances. Brianna Lennon, a Democrat who serves as the clerk in Boone County, around Columbia, said that she fears voters will feel overwhelmed. “I live it every day, and there’s still things that pop up that I haven’t heard about,” she told me. “I can’t imagine what it would be like for the average voter to try to figure out on their own what’s going on.” (When I put this sentiment to Rachel Lightfoot, Lennon’s Republican counterpart in Polk County, she said, “Brianna is an attorney, and so she follows this stuff way better than the rest of us.”) A few days later, the U.S. Supreme Court once again ruled against the new map, warning—in an unsigned order, with no noted dissents—that using it would “usher in electoral chaos,” given that voting had already begun under the old map. In theory, the casting of ballots should proceed smoothly from here. But, already, many voters have effectively been disenfranchised, having opted for a candidate in the primary who won’t be on their ballot in the fall.
Cleaver told me, with regret, that “the rest of the country seems to be talking about the ‘Missouri mess,’ the ‘chaos in K.C.’ ” But the Show-Me State is not the only one being shown in a bad light right now. Since Trump lit the fuse, last spring, a no-holds-barred redistricting battle has raged across the electoral landscape. In part, this is a story about the short-term desperation of Republicans in the face of midterms that seem set to be disastrous. But the more important story is that the Party has ignited a longer-term conflagration, which is on the cusp of burning out of control. Democrats have increasingly been determined to push back as hard as Republicans are pushing them. “Fighting fire with fire,” Cleaver told me, is “good, in this case, I guess.” But, he continued, “we need to keep in mind that, when you do that, nothing is left but ash in the end.”
When I last wrote about the redistricting wars, a year or so ago, I noted that Trump did not invent gerrymandering, of course; the practice is about as old as America itself, and many parties, some of which no longer exist, have been willing participants. (Trump’s crusade was unusual in that it took place mid-decade—typically, redistricting follows the decennial census, to account for population changes—but even this wasn’t entirely new.) The President did, unquestionably, start the latest round, by encouraging Republicans in Texas to draw new boundaries that would, in theory, make five Democratic districts friendlier for the G.O.P. (“We are entitled to five more seats,” he said.) Elsewhere, North Carolina had carved out one pickup opportunity for Republicans, as, it seemed, had Missouri, pending the referendum campaign. Californians, meanwhile, had voted to suspend a nonpartisan commission that typically draws the state’s map, and make five Republican districts friendlier for Democrats—an explicit response to Texas. Redistricting efforts in other red states—Indiana, most notably—had stalled, despite intense pressure from the White House. The over-all success of Trump’s seat grab was thus unclear.
The Indiana effort soon flamed out conclusively; a bloc of Republicans in the state Senate voted it down, holding firm even amid bomb threats and swatting attacks. Virginians then voted, in a referendum, to bring as many as four seats into the Democratic column; throw in a single seat in Utah (which is now solidly blue, following a court battle with origins that long precede the national tit-for-tat), and Democrats, as NPR put it in late April, appeared to have an “edge.” But, not long afterward, lawmakers in Florida approved a new map aimed at flipping four seats to Republicans, and in early May Virginia’s top court struck down the redraw there, on procedural grounds. The same week, most of the Indiana legislators who had voted against redistricting and were up for reëlection lost to Trump-backed challengers, a fact that didn’t change any district lines but that was seen, nationally, as a resounding win for Trumpian vengeance politics. By May 8th, Politico declared the redistricting wars over—and Republicans the victors. Two days later, James Blair, a Trump adviser who was a driving force behind the push, took a victory lap on X. “Two weeks ago people were dooming and asking wAs rEdIsTrIcTiNg wOrTh iT?” he wrote. Now, he predicted, Republicans could once again expect double-digit gains.
In fact, the most important change in that period wasn’t anything that happened in Florida—or Virginia, or Indiana—but a decision out of the U.S. Supreme Court. Under the Voting Rights Act, first passed in 1965, states had been barred from drawing district lines in ways that denied voters of color an equal chance to select their preferred candidates—a crucial, ongoing bulwark protecting minority representation. At the end of April, however, the Court had reached a decision in Louisiana v. Callais, a closely watched case challenging the constitutionality of these rules, and, by six votes to three, gutted them—raising the standard of intentionality such that previously illegal racial gerrymanders are now kosher as long as they can be justified as partisan instead. (And they can be, since party votes in the affected districts generally split along racial lines.) Quickly, Republicans created three more seats that they ought to win, in Louisiana, Alabama, and Tennessee. Justin Jones, a lawmaker in the last of those, burned an image of a Confederate flag at the state capitol in protest, and likened local Republicans to Bull Connor and George Wallace. Steve Cohen, the veteran Democratic congressman in the affected district, around Memphis, decided not to run in the new one, citing its vastly increased physical size, and the difficulty that he would face in campaigning across it due to a disability caused by childhood polio.
Not every state that could have drawn new lines post-Callais did so, however. Republicans in Georgia and Mississippi did not rush them through, and a gaggle of lawmakers got in the way in South Carolina, in a stand that had a whiff of Indiana’s, but with less drama and fewer headlines. The states that did redraw seem to have kicked a hornet’s nest of anger among Black voters. Shomari Figures, the Democratic congressman targeted in Alabama, is, by some estimates, still competitive in his new seat. So, too, is Don Davis, in the North Carolina seat that was redrawn last year, before the Callais verdict (though his Republican opponent, Laurie Buckhout, was apparently confident enough of victory to place a bet on herself on the prediction market Kalshi, which promptly suspended her account). The House Democrats’ campaign arm is now plowing extra resources into the gerrymandered seat in Tennessee.
Indeed, the political environment is so toxic for Republicans that the Party no longer looks likely to realize anything near its projected redistricting gains. In August, Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, played down expectations that the G.O.P. would pick up all four of its targets in his state; in Texas, where the redraw relied, to no small extent, on the continued support of recent Latino converts, a plus-five map could wind up being plus-two or -three. Republicans may even lose a redrawn seat that they currently hold, to the quinceañera-hopping Tejano musician Bobby Pulido. (“Redistricting is construction, not sales,” the operative who drew the Texas map disclaimed recently. “Just because you build it doesn’t mean they’re going to come.”) Nationally, analysts are now pegging net G.O.P. gains from redistricting anywhere from six seats to none. When I spoke to the independent data journalist G. Elliott Morris in late September, he put the number at two.
This is hardly cause for triumphalism among Democrats. Even two is not zero—especially in this age of closely divided Congresses and growing factionalism, in which a handful of members can determine the balance of power and cause headaches for party leaders in the process. And gerrymandering to steal seats is offensive on principle; neither party should have to perform disproportionately well in an election just to reassert a level playing field. The creation of more vulnerable districts for Democrats, for instance, has limited the money available for them to go on offense, in a midterms cycle in which Republicans have had a significant cash advantage. For my piece a year ago, I quoted Sam Wang, a professor at Princeton, who pointed out that gerrymandering produces fewer competitive districts, enabling bad actors to concentrate voter-suppression efforts in a handful of places. Wang told me recently that he is still concerned about this possibility, especially given that the small number of competitive seats in Texas and California have big Latino populations. “Actions that may intimidate Hispanic voters from participating could make a big impact,” he said.
Whatever happens in November, the redistricting wars have already been strikingly disruptive to voters across the country: a recent report from Protect Democracy, a nonprofit group, found, for example, that one in ten Americans has been assigned to a different congressional district than the one they were in in 2024. If this trajectory continues, those proportions will only grow, with red states turning maximally red and blue states maximally blue. “The impact of mid-decade redistricting on this cycle might not be everything that folks feared,” David Daley, the author of three books, one memorably titled “Ratf**ked,” about gerrymandering and elections, told me. “But what’s coming is real Armageddon.” America, Daley added, has seen this kind of map before, “and back then we called it the Union and the Confederacy.” Dire stuff. But what would Armageddon look like? And can it be averted?
Despite the Supreme Court’s triple intervention, the battle over Missouri’s congressional map likely isn’t over. Lennon, the Boone County clerk, predicted that there will be uncertainty as to whether the election winners can even be seated in Congress; surely, there will be litigation to that end. Meanwhile, voters will have their say in the referendum that People Not Politicians ultimately succeeded in forcing onto the ballot, and could opt to approve the new, G.O.P.-friendly lines for the next election cycle. Even if they don’t, state lawmakers seem poised to try again. Travis Crum, a law professor at Washington University, told me that next time Republicans might target the seat of Wesley Bell, a Democratic congressman from St. Louis, whose district was previously protected under the V.R.A. The southern states that didn’t redistrict post-Callais certainly seem to be shaping up to do so ahead of 2028. And states like Texas, for example, could revisit their pre-Callais redraws, and get even more aggressive.
Democrats aren’t done, either—even if, as I noted last year, blue states often face higher hurdles to implementing partisan gerrymanders, including independent commissions such as the one that Californians voted to circumvent, temporarily. Republicans are “gonna proceed with diabolical intensity,” Hakeem Jeffries, the House Minority Leader, and likely its next Speaker, told my colleague Jason Zengerle. “And we don’t just have to match it—we have to exceed it with righteous intensity.” The Callais decision has supercharged this mind-set. In Maryland—where the Democratic president of the state Senate had previously blocked Jeffries’s push to add another blue U.S. House seat, citing legal risks, among other objections—Democrats eventually voted to tee up a referendum, this November, on an amendment aimed at defanging those risks heading into 2028. New York Democrats are preparing a referendum of their own, in 2027, that would ask voters to weaken their California-style redistricting commission. (A similar effort in Colorado foundered in court.) Democrats are also eying states, such as Michigan and Wisconsin, where they currently lack the legislative majorities or supermajorities to draw new maps, but where they could gain ground in the midterms.
Many corrosive consequences would follow such a race to the bottom. The perception of cheating would likely cause trust in politics to crater even further. Increasingly anti-democratic practices could become normalized, and not only on the right. After the Virginia Supreme Court overturned the redistricting referendum there, top Democrats reportedly discussed a response that would have involved lowering the retirement age for judges in the state, effectively firing them en masse; per Zengerle, Jeffries rejected the idea, but at least one member of Congress endorsed it publicly. The number of swing House seats nationally—already at a low ebb—could shrink to as low as the teens, insulating most members of Congress from routine electoral accountability. In such seats, the primary becomes the real election, a dynamic that tends to favor the coronation of extremely polarizing nominees since, typically, that electorate is composed of committed partisans. As Protect Democracy outlined in its report, constantly shifting district lines would insulate representatives from the judgment of a portion of their constituents (because voters wouldn’t fall under the same district anymore), increase reflexive partisan voting (because more voters would be unfamiliar with the candidates in front of them), make it difficult for civil-society groups to organize durable coalitions across cycles (because, again, the voters they’re organizing would keep changing), and pile further pressure on election administrators.
There would be downstream effects on representation, too. If establishment Democrats succeed in gaining control over New York’s congressional map ahead of 2028, for instance, they could draw the lines to shore up Party incumbents and disadvantage insurgent challengers. This specific scenario is still hypothetical, but in general, mapmakers using their powers to litigate factional and personal grievances isn’t hard to imagine. Paul Mitchell, a consultant who drew the new map in California last year, told me recently that that process ran smoothly because it was an urgent response to Texas, and state Democrats thus didn’t have time to go on “side quests.” Mitchell likened it to his wedding reception, which he and his wife decided to plan with five days’ notice. “If we’d had a year to do this, my God, every member of Congress” would have raised objections, like “Oh, but my cousin lives in that area,” or “I went to high school over there,” Mitchell said (of the redistricting, not his wedding).
More insidiously still, the Republican gerrymanders enabled by Callais will surely continue to weaken Black representation in Congress. Democrats, in their rush to respond, might exacerbate the problem in states they control; Callais, after all, applies across the board, and blue states could use that license to themselves spread minority voters among whiter districts in a manner that increases the Party’s over-all chances. “People think, ‘Well, they won’t, because Black voters and Latino voters are part of their coalition,’ ” Richard L. Hasen, an election-law expert at the University of California, Los Angeles, told me. But, he continued, mapmakers are “probably going to look at short-term gains,” and may well be willing to sacrifice a Black representative if doing so increases their seat yield.
Already, the redistricting wars have stoked intraparty tensions. Following the G.O.P. redraw in Florida, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a long-serving congresswoman and former D.N.C. chair, decamped for a different district, which has traditionally had a Black representative, and won the primary against an otherwise all-Black field. She was criticized for doing so, though not universally; some Black Democrats, including Cleaver, stood by her, pointing to her history of fighting for causes that matter to Black communities. “The prospect of us turning our backs on a friend is extremely distasteful,” Cleaver told Politico. “Wouldn’t it be ugly if I’m driving down the street with Debbie Wasserman Schultz in my red convertible, and I see an African American standing on the road without a ride, and they ask me to stop, put Debbie out of the car? Let them get in because they are African American? I don’t roll like that.”
When Mitchell and I spoke, he compared the redistricting wars to “us going out, getting shitfaced, and crashing the car.” Maybe, he suggested “we wake up in the morning and realize that we need to change our behavior.” It’s rare to lose your shirt betting against politicians doing that. (And nowadays, it’s easier than ever to place the bet. Just ask Laurie Buckhout.) But Armageddon isn’t a certainty. There’s a chance that the redistricting wars could fizzle on their own, if politicians conclude the effort isn’t worth it; at some point, they will butt up against the limits of moving voters around without endangering existing seats. The referendums aimed at facilitating future Democratic gerrymanders in Maryland and New York could easily fail.
Even if the wars do continue, the identities of both major parties are in flux—existing coalitions are shaky, and the tremors could lead to unexpectedly competitive races in seats drawn around outdated assumptions. Wang, the Princeton professor, told me that “it feels like we’re due” for a realignment, citing A.I. and the growing resentment of élites as possible dimensions. Morris, the data journalist, noted that, historically, when a party is locked out of power in a given locale, “there is a seeking of new conflict to establish a new competitive equilibrium among voters.” The “obvious example,” he said, is “the Republican Party courting Southern racists” in the sixties, though there are others, dating to the Progressive and New Deal eras. Morris cautioned, however, that without some sort of institutional reform, the dominant party in a state could simply keep redrawing maps to keep up with changing voter behavior. Various national lawmakers, including representatives directly threatened by redistricting, have introduced legislation aimed at implementing national standards to stop this from happening. Recently, members of the Problem Solvers Caucus, a cross-party group that seeks “common-sense solutions to key issues,” unveiled four bills that would, among other things, mandate independent commissions and ban repeat redistricting between censuses.
Some reformers have their sights set even higher. The redistricting wars—and, even more so, the broader context of Callais—have intensified discussions, at least in media and academic circles, around the idea of departing radically from the current electoral system, by creating bigger districts with multiple representatives, who would be elected according to the share of the vote they or their party receive. Whether such multi-member districts would totally end gerrymandering depends on their design, which remains hotly contested. But, done right, they should insure that a state’s House delegation at least roughly reflects the partisan makeup of its popular vote. This is currently skewed in many places, and not only in those states which have taken up arms in the recent redistricting wars. Massachusetts, for instance, has no Republican representatives whatsoever, a fact that appears to be less a result of gerrymandering than the relatively diffuse spread of G.O.P. voters statewide.
Proportional representation might be pie in the sky, but Morris, for one, sounds optimistic that it really could be implemented one day. The U.S. still uses an electoral system that was “invented in the seventeen-hundreds, before electricity existed and before most houses in America had indoor plumbing,” he told me, and there are recent examples of other countries, such as Germany and New Zealand, switching to something better. “Optimistic” is one way of putting it, anyway. “The alternative is democratic collapse,” Morris said. “You really don’t have any choice but to be optimistic.”
There are several potential roads to reform, some likelier than others. A few observers told me that they don’t think durable change will be possible without major changes to the Supreme Court—a tall order, in light of its current, strongly conservative composition. And yet Congress does have well-established power over elections, and it could act, if members come to the realization that the redistricting wars are bad for them all, and that new rules, whatever those might look like, needn’t come at the expense of their own careers. (Wang told me that he is currently working on research that might suggest, counterintuitively, that some incumbents could be more likely to keep their seats under a shift to proportional representation than otherwise.) Reformers can, at least, keep pressing their case in the court of public opinion—usually a pre-condition for change, if no guarantee. History shows us that this can work, and also that, when it comes to redistricting, politicians don’t always behave in the polarized, nakedly partisan ways we’ve come to expect.
In the years after voters in Missouri rejected the Republican map of 1922, partisan passions around redistricting in the state seemed to cool; in 1930, the chair of the Democrats’ state committee declared that “there is no politics—or should be none—in the laying out of districts.” These words would subsequently prove hollow: prior to the elections of 1932, the Democrats in control of the state legislature failed to produce a map that was acceptable to the Republican governor, and in the absence of a compromise the state was forced to elect its members of Congress “at large,” with no district lines at all. (In a sense, the whole state temporarily became a multi-member district, but voting was not proportional; indeed, Democrats claimed every single seat.) Decades passed and redistricting remained a contentious issue, in Missouri and nationally.
The nineteen-sixties ushered in what has since been dubbed a “redistricting revolution.” The Supreme Court, which had previously declined to get entangled in what Justice Felix Frankfurter once called the “political thicket” of mapmaking, issued a series of rulings aimed at eliminating extreme population disparities between rural and urban districts, a standard known as “one person, one vote.” (Chief Justice Earl Warren considered one of these decisions the most important of his tenure.) The same decade, out of the crucible of the civil-rights movement, Congress passed the V.R.A. None of this laid the groundwork for proportional representation; if anything, it took a step in the other direction. (In 1967, Congress mandated single-member districts, which, in part, had the effect of blocking Southern states from using at-large elections to lock out minority representation.) But, for the demands of the era, it was progress.
The implementation of these improvements was messy, including in Missouri; in 1969, the Supreme Court adjudged that a recent redistricting plan in the state fell short of one person, one vote. Even so, the map had, by that point, already produced a majority-Black district in St. Louis, thanks to the advocacy of what the Times called a “determined coalition of Negroes, Republicans and Southeast Missouri Democrats.” When William Lacy Clay, Sr., who would go on to represent the district as Missouri’s first Black congressman, heard on the radio that the new lines had been confirmed, he pulled over his car to tell his wife he was running. (“Right on,” she replied.) Even before he won the election, he was thinking of his mandate as being bigger than a single, geographically bounded seat, given the dearth of other Black representation in D.C. “I will need all the office staff I can get,” he told a Times reporter, while driving through his future district. “I figure my constituency will stretch from the Mississippi River to about the Rocky Mountains.” ♦