Late last month, the US Supreme Court struck down a Louisiana congressional district that had been drawn to have a majority of Black voters. In the process, the high court eviscerated a key provision of the landmark Voting Rights Act and opened the door to Republican state legislatures across the country to redraw their congressional maps in ways that eliminated so-called majority-minority districts. Such districts have generally voted Democratic.
Just a week later, the Virginia Supreme Court invalidated that state’s congressional map on technical grounds. The Democratic-controlled legislature had drawn that map — with voter approval — to maximize Democratic-leaning seats in response to partisan redistricting campaigns in Texas and other Republican states.
Just a few weeks ago, the redistricting war to see which party could squeeze the most seats out of new congressional maps seemed to be a draw. No longer. By most accounts, Republicans are now coming out ahead, thanks to those two court decisions. But will that be enough to tilt the midterm elections in the GOP’s favor? We asked our three writers.
Democrats still have an edge, if they can find a message
When it comes to carving out voting districts that help their candidates, Republicans have two big court decisions on their side: The Supreme Court ruling on the Voting Rights Act and the Virginia Supreme Court ruling against a redistricting map drawn by Democrats. Now Republican state legislatures are focused on trying to carve out more Republican seats in several states.
Republicans can carve away, but the party is still saddled with high gas prices, the highly unpopular attack on Iran by the US and Israel, and the extreme, everyday chaos of Donald Trump’s presidency.
Because of those factors, the midterm elections are still the Democrats’ to lose – if they muster the discipline to make affordability the main focus of 2026, and can unite Americans who are exhausted by the daily turbulence of the Trump administration around a more harmonious theme of government.
That’s what Democratic leaders should focus on in the midterms.
Democrats will also need to make and win the counter-argument to Trump’s 2024 campaign strategy of pairing anger about the high price of eggs (and other things) with the politics of hate towards immigrants and transgender athletes. Ultimately, that strategy energized Republicans and won over enough independents to defeat President Joe Biden.
It won’t be easy for Democrats to develop their own clear message – but it’s not impossible, just as it’s not crazy optimism to believe they can still win the midterms.
While Democrats have been dominating special elections, Republicans have failed to flip a single state legislative seat anywhere in the country since Trump started serving his second term. While Republicans argue that outcome is less significant than it would be if it involved a congressional seat or a governorship, it does say something about the current limits of Trump’s message.
Then again, there’s Indiana, where a majority of seven state senators who faced Trump-backed challengers lost their primaries over their opposition to Trump’s demand that they redraw the state’s congressional map. That shows the continuing strength of Trump’s grip on MAGA Republicans. As Axios reported, that outcome will also put pressure on Republican state legislators in other states to enact Trump-backed redistricting measures.
Yet, according to a poll commissioned by Common Cause, the practice of redistricting is unpopular with Democrats, Republicans, and independents, including voters who supported Trump in the 2024 presidential election.
People understand that redistricting amounts to an unfair rigging of the election process.
Those voters might also be starting to understand that yanking immigrants out of cars and deporting them does not make their own lives any better. Neither does banning transgender women from sports or kicking them out of the military.
The Supreme Court decision on the Voting Rights Act can’t be changed. Let the lawyers argue over the Virginia Supreme Court case, but the arguing should only go so far. Trying to force those justices into early retirement, as some have suggested, is a waste of energy. It won’t generate good will or votes for Democrats.
That happens when Democrats make the case that’s right in front of them – the price of gas and the reality that the politics of hate won’t bring it down.
Has SCOTUS saved the Republicans? Probably not.
By Noah Rothman
For more than 30 years, well before there was a conservative majority on the Supreme Court, right-of-center jurists have warned that the Voting Rights Act was in irreconcilable tension with the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause. In decision after decision, the Court has imposed its remedies on that overbroad statute, each time advising Congress to take proactive action that would make the Court’s job easier. But the lethargic federal legislature did nothing.
In its latest VRA-related decision, a majority of the justices took aim at the interpretations of the law’s Section 2 that supposedly mandated congressional districts that are dominated by American minorities. The judiciary determined that the federal government should intervene in state-level redistricting only when race has been too much of a consideration.
The invalidation of the “majority-minority” district as a constitutional necessity has had a variety of practical consequences beyond pushing America slightly closer to colorblindness. Some say it may save the GOP from decisively losing the mid-decade redistricting wars that Donald Trump inaugurated last year.
Only weeks ago – before the Supreme Court ruling – even partisan Republicans admitted that the effort to scratch out a partisan advantage ahead of a challenging midterm environment had backfired on the president’s party. It was Virginia that had confirmed that impression. Its voters narrowly approved a referendum this year authorizing the state legislature to approve a congressional map that would have eliminated all but one GOP-leaning district in that purple state. But with the state supreme court striking that referendum down on procedural grounds this month, and in concert with the Supreme Court’s decision, Republicans are now enjoying a new lease on their political life.
Red states are heading back to the drawing board, breaking up their majority-minority districts in their attempt to give the GOP more electoral runway. As it stands, it is estimated that Democrats now have as many as 6 new winnable seats, mostly in California. But Republicans are now looking at the possibility of competing in at least 15 new Republican-friendly districts in places like Texas, Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, Tennessee, and Alabama. So, have Republicans been spared the consequences of their own political pugilism? Probably not.
The warning signs have been flashing red for the GOP for months – long before the onset of the Iran War, which only heightened the public’s apprehension over the high cost of daily life in America. Democrats are still far more enthusiastic to vote in November than their Republican counterparts. And if that holds, the Cook Political Report anticipates that Democrats will net House 9 new seats this year, even with Republican gains through last-minute redistricting. That’s more than enough for a majority in the lower chamber of Congress, although not a large one.
The upside potential for Democrats may, however, be more significant. Republicans have spread their voters out across multiple districts in what’s sometimes derided as a “dummymander,” insofar as it creates more Republican-leaning districts that are also less decisively Republican, perhaps meaning that they flip to the Democrats in a wave election, which 2026 could turn out to be.
As Republican strategist Karl Rove said of some of the GOP’s “problematic” new districts (a couple of them in Texas), “Nothing ever plays out exactly in politics as we think it does.”
The Supreme Court’s latest decision could even have the salutary effect of creating more competitive districts, which would compel politicians in both parties to accentuate their cross-partisan appeal. But it will take an election cycle or two before we get there. In the meantime, Republicans are enjoying what is probably a false dawn.
In this country, voters tend to get what they want. No map will change that.
Why Democrats’ popularity — or lack of it — might not matter
The 2026 midterms have so far been an unfortunate display of tactics that undermine the legitimacy of American democracy. In a desperate effort to maintain the GOP’s razor-thin majority in the House, Republicans in Texas redrew their congressional district boundaries to dilute Democratic voting blocs. Democratic states like California responded by redrawing their own maps to benefit Democrats in order to balance the playing field at the national level.
But recently, the Supreme Court further gutted the Voting Rights Act when it ruled that a majority-Black congressional district in Louisiana was an “unconstitutional racial gerrymander,” prompting Republican-led states to rush to redraw their maps in time before the midterms to give the GOP an even bigger advantage than they already have.
So with the election less than 6 months away, elected officials are now choosing their voters instead of the other way around. And with an assist from the Supreme Court, the haphazardly redrawn maps seem to have given Republicans a structural advantage.
Despite all of that, Democrats still have the upper hand heading into November. And that has less to do with gerrymandering than this political reality: Donald Trump is an extremely unpopular president, and his approval ratings keep declining. According to The New York Times’ average of polls conducted by a range of different pollsters, 38 percent of Americans approve of Trump’s job while 58 percent disapprove.
That, of course, doesn’t mean that Democrats are suddenly popular. A majority of Americans still have an unfavorable view of the Democratic Party as a whole. But in a midterm cycle, parties benefit from being in the minority because voters are more likely to blame the incumbents for any dysfunction. And the reality is that voters are unhappy about a lot of things.
In fact, the majority of Americans disapprove of many of the Trump administration’s highest-profile policies. According to a PBS News/NPR/Marist poll, for example, 60 percent of Americans disapprove of Trump’s handling of the Iran War. Even on immigration — which used to be one of Trump’s strengths among voters — only 37 percent of Americans approve of the president’s policies. And when it comes to the economy and the cost of living, most Americans remain deeply frustrated with the status quo.
So long as Republicans stay on this course, these poll numbers will haunt Republicans come November. In conditions like these, Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters are much more likely to show up at the ballot box than Republicans. And no matter how much Republicans gerrymander, maintaining a majority in Congress is still an uphill battle.
Regardless of which party wins the midterms, the only real loser will be the voters living in districts that don’t really represent them. And until Congress bans gerrymandering for good, unfair election maps will become more and more common, all to the detriment of American democracy.
This is an excerpt from Globe Opinion’s weekly politics newsletter Right, Left, and Center. Sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox every Wednesday.
Joan Vennochi is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at joan.vennochi@globe.com. Follow her @joan_vennochi. Noah Rothman is a senior writer at National Review and a regular contributor to Globe Opinion. Abdallah Fayyad can be reached at abdallah.fayyad@globe.com. Follow him @abdallah_fayyad.