“Are you looking for something?”
The homeless man, kindly yet befuddled, stands underneath the awning of a long-abandoned Kansas City storefront and searches his shopping cart for an umbrella.
This desolate stretch of road not far from the I-70 interchange doesn’t get much foot traffic, especially amid a September downpour, but he’s right. I am looking for something. I’m hunting for a specific yet invisible spot that will help decide which party controls the closely divided U.S. House after the 2026 midterms.
Hours earlier, Missouri state legislators smashed norms and acceded to President Donald Trump’s demands for a brazen mid-decade redistricting that would award the GOP seven of the state’s eight seats in the House. The gerrymander shattered Kansas City’s 5th Congressional District, long a bastion of Black political power, and scattered the city among three different districts, one of them stretching some 220 miles east to Hannibal and the Illinois border.
All three of those districts intersect at just one Kansas City street corner. Missouri is the Show Me state. I want to see what’s there. Which is to say: I’m walking Independence Avenue in search of a location where our democracy has come to die.
Earlier this summer, the playing field for the 2026 midterms seemed set. Republicans held a slender three-seat edge in the House. Democrats looked like favorites to win control, with a small edge on the generic congressional ballot; in addition, the midterm momentum usually gathers behind the opposition party, especially given a president with an approval rating that dipped into the high 30s this fall. The stakes are frighteningly high. A peaceful transition of power in 2029 might rest upon it. With a punishing Senate map that will require Democrats to hold Michigan, Georgia, and New Hampshire, flip Maine and North Carolina, then find two more seats somewhere from Ohio, Iowa, Alaska, Texas, and Nebraska, winning the House provides the easiest path to checking an authoritarian, anti-democratic GOP.
Then came the Gerrymander Armageddon. Unwilling to risk Democrats holding any power in Washington—let alone subpoena and investigatory power—Trump struck back, beginning in Texas. The president insisted that Republicans were “entitled” to five additional seats, and pressured lawmakers to strengthen an already gerrymandered map by eviscerating Democratic districts in Dallas, Houston, and the Rio Grande Valley. “We have never had the president of the United States call a state legislature, let alone many of them, and dictate a gerrymander … someone with such immense power determined to cheat their way into holding onto it through sheer fear,” said John Bisognano, president of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee.
California responded with a nervy play: Governor Gavin Newsom asked voters to enact a retaliatory 48–4 Democratic gerrymander that erases five GOP seats (and strengthens several incumbents), which passed in November. While the proposal insists on maintaining the independent California Citizens Redistricting Commission, it’s hard to imagine Democrats ever returning to a nonpartisan process after suspending the commission’s map. Enthusiastic Democrats, unaccustomed to playing by GOP rules, certain that five seats in Texas would tip the national map indelibly toward Republicans, encouraged Newsom. His cheerleaders included Democratic and nonpartisan groups that have spent the last decade fighting in favor of commissions and more balanced maps.
“Newsom gets that this is not four years ago or six years ago. We’re living in potentially the last 14 months of the republic unless we save it,” said Beto O’Rourke, the former Texas congressman. “We were like, ‘Hey, you clearly have to color within these lines.’ And the other side was like, ‘Fuck the lines, fuck the rules, fuck the law, fuck the Constitution.’ All they care about is power, and all we care about is being right. When those two ideas conflict, power wins every time.”
The redistricting wars will remain fluid. In mid-November, a federal court in Texas blocked, at least for the moment, the state’s newly redrawn maps from going into effect for the 2026 midterms. Still, those seats can’t be returned to the Democratic column yet. That will require making it past the conservative U.S. Supreme Court. Texas has already filed an appeal straight to the court; the decision on whether to issue an administrative stay, and much of the road from there, rests with Justice Samuel A. Alito. For the moment, let’s presume that power plays in Texas and California (approved by voters in November) will continue to counteract each other. (The new California map must clear a legal hurdle similar to the one in Texas: Republicans have filed litigation calling it an illegal racial gerrymander; that case will begin in early December.)
The simple truth: Even if you pull Texas off the table—which requires believing that, perhaps for the first time, Alito won’t decide a crucial voting rights question in favor of the GOP—Democrats could struggle to win this battle before the midterms. Republicans might not move to redistrict everywhere that they can. But if they do, their playing field is vastly larger than the Democrats’. Nearly all of the estimates of the seats Republicans can steal through partisan gerrymandering before the midterms remain too low. Estimates say seven to 10; the reality, in my view, is 11 to 14, depending on Florida. Two in Ohio, one in Missouri, and one in North Carolina is a solid start.
Trump and the right are exerting maximum pressure. Indiana Governor Mike Braun believes that Trump will threaten the state’s federal funding if he and the legislature don’t agree to a new map that pushes the competitive 1st District, in northwest Indiana, into the safely red column. Braun called a special session in late October; the Republicans might even be able to imagine a 9–0 map with two new GOP seats. (In mid-November, the state Senate president pro tem announced the chamber will not seek to redraw the maps this year after all.) North Carolina enacted an 11–3 GOP map in October, intensifying an already gerrymandered map, as lawmakers hoping for Trump’s endorsement in next year’s U.S. Senate race jumped to give him an extra U.S. House seat. The Club for Growth, the conservative economics-focused PAC, invested megabucks, running digital ads to encourage Tar Heel lawmakers to jump in, which they did within weeks. The group is doing the same in Kansas and planning an aggressive push in Kentucky, Florida, and elsewhere.
When Trump demanded a new map in Missouri, GOP lawmakers quickly fractured Kansas City. In Ohio, GOP hardball secured a new map that could turn two competitive districts currently held by Democrats into Republican seats. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has eagerly pronounced that he’d extend his blatantly unconstitutional gerrymander by targeting as many as five Democratic seats.
At this point, it would be surprising if Kentucky didn’t scribble out the one blue dot on its red map, and if Nebraska didn’t consider making the blue oasis in Omaha more challenging for Democrats as well. In Kansas, which once looked unlikely to attempt a mid-decade redistricting, GOP legislators in the state Senate gathered the signatures in October needed to call a special session to order. In early November, lawmakers in the state House suggested they would not go ahead, a sign that public outrage can still work. However, the Republican state Senate president insisted that the legislature would pursue redistricting next year. New Hampshire Governor Kelly Ayotte has resisted, so far, but lawmakers are eager, and a potential primary challenge from Corey Lewandowski might get her attention. “They can’t win if they don’t cheat,” said Kansas Representative Sharice Davids. Her district in fast-growing Johnson County, which was already gerrymandered in 2022, is in the crosshairs again and could be shattered in half and stretched all the way to the Colorado border.
Those states alone could produce the 11 to 14 additional seats for the likely GOP column. The variation depends on how aggressively DeSantis acts. All this before anyone casts a vote.
Democrats will push back: Litigation is already underway in Texas and Missouri. Missouri voters are circulating petitions to override the legislature’s map. Florida’s state Constitution bars political gerrymandering. The National Redistricting Foundation is preparing to sue in many of these states. “All of them are presenting totally unique opportunities,” Bisognano said. “As soon as [DeSantis’s] fingerprint is on a pen to draw a map, it’s going to be political gerrymandering, and that’s going to get litigated at the state Supreme Court immediately.... He would be asking the state Supreme Court to say that the Florida Constitution is unconstitutional.”
Yet litigation takes time, could extend beyond the midterms, and Republicans have appointed most of the judges. Also, the partisan gerrymandering piece is just Act One.
In October, the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments in Louisiana v. Callais, a racial gerrymandering case that has the potential to upend the remaining tattered pieces of Section Two of the Voting Rights Act. It’s a challenge that Justice Brett Kavanaugh invited, and a case that the GOP supermajority expanded to take on larger constitutional questions that several conservatives have long hoped to decide. If the Roberts court finds that the VRA requires lawmakers to be too conscious of race, and if it reaches a decision in time for Southern states to remap immediately, it could spell the end for majority Black seats in Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, Mississippi, and elsewhere. States across the South would be liberated to draw partisan gerrymanders, effectively at will.
That’s when the math would get brutal. Assume the worst from the Roberts court in a VRA case—usually a safe bet. That’s a potential gift of anywhere from a half-dozen to as many as 19 seats. Then take the under, and estimate the GOP settles on eight seats collectively from Ohio (two), Florida (two), Missouri, North Carolina, and some combination of Indiana, Kentucky, and Nebraska. Suddenly, Democrats need nearly two dozen seats to reclaim the House.
Gerrymandering has been a scourge on our politics for as long as we have had politicians. Much of the extreme right’s takeover of the Republican Party, its dominance of state legislatures, its outsize advantage and influence in Congress has been built via the gerrymander. But we have never seen anything quite like this: maximally gerrymandered maps nationwide, crafted with ever more sophisticated software with volumes of voter data; blue seats in red states, and red seats in blue states, all but zeroed-out; the number of competitive districts in line with the dwindling number of presidential swing states.
How did we get here? It begins with an audacious GOP strategy during the 2010 midterms, executed by an entity called the Republican State Leadership Committee, that remade American politics. It’s boosted by Republicans on the U.S. Supreme Court, who slammed the door on voters, crushed a growing nonpartisan movement, and incentivized extreme gerrymanders everywhere, all to the structural benefit of the GOP. It’s also plagued by the anti-democratic filibuster, which blocks Democratic (and democratic) reforms in Congress, including a popular voting rights package that was stymied in 2022 and that would have prevented this.
We’re here because Republicans found a political advantage, then exploited and protected it at every possible turn, no matter the cost, the Constitution, or the courts. And we’re here because Democrats were caught unawares first by GOP cunning, then by the Republicans’ creative and determined ruthlessness.
“Trump’s penchant for chaos can distract attention from the methodical, ingenious, and complex multistep plans that are unfolding as we speak to subvert democracy from the ground up at the state level, driven by the anti-democratic faction of the far right,” said Ben Wikler, who fought these efforts better than anyone as Wisconsin state Democratic chairman. “All that is not something that just popped into an autocrat’s mind. It reflects a deep dive into state statutes and electoral calendars. It’s real attention to the levers of power: how you win them, how you hold onto them, and how you ensure no one else can ever take them away from you.”
It is a microcosm for our problems. Problems that will be with us after Donald Trump. And which began before he arrived.
Barack Obama delivered his 2008 victory speech wearing a resplendent red tie, a sartorial metaphor that suggested this young, Black president sought a nation beyond partisan polarization. On cable news, pundits and politicians marveled at Obama’s wins in Indiana, North Carolina, Florida, and Ohio, as well as the Democrat’s near filibuster-proof majority in the U.S. Senate, and pronounced an ascendant Democratic coalition that could govern for a generation.
“It’s a bad thing for Republicans when you drill down into these states,” said National Review editor Rich Lowry. “Where did all the Republicans go? Did they all move to Utah?” What only a handful of GOP strategists dared imagine was that the truly transformative election was two years away. It would not be celebrated live around the world from Grant Park, but in VFW halls and Holiday Inn ballrooms as hundreds of new Republican state legislators claimed victories.
The light bulb moment occurred at the Republican State Leadership Committee. The RSLC worked to build Republican power down-ballot, in state legislatures, state courts, and other elections that too often fly under the radar. But the RSLC’s leadership—former party chair Ed Gillespie and visionary executive director Chris Jankowski—understood their far-reaching impact. The 2010 midterms would coincide with the census. Redistricting would follow. In most states, state legislatures drew the congressional map. What if Republicans bought themselves time to fix their demographic problems by dominating redistricting?
The RSLC would call this the Redistricting Majority Project. REDMAP, for short. Had Democrats been paying attention, they might have noticed that Karl Rove published the entire playbook for the Redistricting Majority Project in The Wall Street Journal on March 4, 2010, down to the specific districts in Ohio, Texas, Indiana, and Pennsylvania where Republicans would focus. “These are state legislative races that will determine who redraws congressional district lines after this year’s census,” he wrote, “a process that could determine which party controls upwards of 20 seats and whether many other seats will be competitive.”
Republicans, Rove revealed, would target 107 state legislative seats in Wisconsin, North Carolina, Indiana, Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Alabama, and other states where Democrats controlled at least one chamber. Then, with trifecta control of state government, the GOP would redraw competitive seats to their advantage. “It could end up costing Democrats congressional seats for a decade to come,” Rove suggested.
Maybe Democrats only picked up The New York Times that morning. As the RSLC’s Jankowski directed the group’s millions across swing states, Democrats seemed shockingly invisible. “October. October, I was like, why aren’t they out here? We were pummeling them,” he said. “Overall, they were nonexistent.” That November, over a dozen state legislative chambers shifted into the GOP column. Republicans would control redistricting in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, North Carolina, Wisconsin, Florida, Texas, Alabama, and Indiana. Those lines were invisible until election night 2012. And then everyone would see their impact in the races for Congress and state legislatures.
While the nation celebrated the reelection of its first Black president, Obama summoned Eric Holder to the White House after hours to puzzle through those conflicting results. Iowa, Ohio, and Florida stayed blue. Democratic governors won in Montana, West Virginia, and Missouri. Obama had coattails in the Senate, where Democrats picked up Indiana and held North Dakota, Ohio, West Virginia, Missouri, and Florida.
The U.S. House and state legislatures, though, were a different story. Republicans not only held the House; they commanded it by 33 seats, even though Democrats won 1.4 million more House votes. Obama carried Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, Virginia, and Florida. Somehow, the GOP claimed 64 of those 94 congressional seats. An even split in states they won would have handed Democrats the House. How did they lose two-thirds instead?
“We thought we had done well in terms of the raw vote, but it wasn’t at all reflected in the number of representatives we had at both the state and federal level,” Holder told me. “REDMAP had been a small part of my consciousness before the 2012 election.... Then we saw the election results.”
No one inside the Democratic National Committee focused on redistricting the same way that Republicans did. “I always say that Washington is essentially middle school on steroids. They’re smart, they work hard, and it’s all about them,” said Howard Dean, who chaired the DNC from 2005 until 2009. “They don’t really give much attention to the state legislators and city councilors. But that’s where the action is, and that’s what the Republicans did. They understood grassroots politics a lot better than the Democrats. We haven’t gotten around to it.”
This summer, after Texas announced its plans, Democrats insisted that they knew the stakes and vowed to fight fire with fire. In New York, Governor Kathy Hochul declared, “we are at war,” but she lacked any ammo to fire. Maryland Governor Wes Moore insisted “all options need to be on the table” but waited until November to order a redistricting commission that could grab Maryland’s remaining GOP seat (the Democratic state Senate leader has opposed the idea of mid-decade redistricting). Oregon Governor Tina Kotek passed, because “redistricting is a once-a-decade process.” New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy paraphrased a Sean Connery line from The Untouchables, saying, “Never bring a knife to a gunfight”; then vowed, “we’re from Jersey, baby, and we won’t be laying down”; then took a nice, long nap.
The governors must have known they were cosplaying action heroes for MSNBC viewers. In Illinois, Governor JB Pritzker squeezed everything possible from the Illinois map in 2021. Hochul had no options, given the state Constitution. Murphy never intended to ask his legislature to gerrymander during an election year. Yet by declaring wars they could not fight, the governors created a false expectation that Democrats could escape this mess by acting like Republicans.
But the best way to have matched a high-tech redistricting firefight was by winning elections before the maps were drawn. Otherwise, these gerrymanders remain practically undefeated. Yes, Democrats won the House in 2018—but along with claiming a seat each in Kansas, Utah, South Carolina, and Oklahoma, they won almost entirely seats drawn by commissions, courts, or on new maps that replaced unconstitutional gerrymanders. Pennsylvania, Florida, and Virginia gerrymanders were upended, in part by state courts. Michigan returned to parity after citizens launched a ballot initiative process and created an independent commission via the state Constitution. Ohio, Missouri, Colorado, and Utah joined them in constitutional reforms to the redistricting process that year. Virginia followed in 2020.
By 2021, the situation had improved enough that some observers suggested Democrats had evened the national congressional map. If you squinted closely and believed deeply in political science metrics, it almost looked good on paper. Reality was something else entirely.
Republicans had such a big advantage built in from the previous decade that they could play it safe. They went big in Florida and shored up Tennessee, South Carolina, Utah, Texas, and Oklahoma. They left some seats in case a mid-decade redistricting became necessary. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, Republicans had an answer for every reform. Some they repealed. Some they subverted. Some they just ignored. When state Supreme Court elections became proxy fights over gerrymandered maps, Republicans had a decade’s head start. And a Democratic Party that never saw these gerrymanders coming was left flabbergasted by the deviousness, and even lawlessness, that the GOP would embrace to protect them.
How determined were the Republicans? Consider this story from Arizona, where a commission of five—two nonelected Democrats, two nonelected Republicans, and an independent chair—draw the state’s maps. The nonpartisan Commission on Appellate Court Appointments, or CACA, vets the independent, and the four partisans select the chair from five finalists.
In August 2020, more than 100 Trump supporters gathered in front of Timberline Firearms and Training in Flagstaff for a rally. Representative Andy Biggs, chairman of the House Freedom Caucus at the time, spoke. Trump backers gathered again in September, this time for a “shooting day” to support the president.
A few weeks later, CACA selected the store’s owner as one of the five finalists. Any sense that CACA may have gone a little overboard in this move disappeared with a look at the other finalists, a group that mysteriously included registered independents with deep ties to the state’s GOP power structure. There was the utility lobbyist whose sister ran a “dark money” operation against Democrats. And a Scottsdale psychologist and American Israel Public Affairs Committee board member who had been a prolific donor to Arizona’s former Governor Doug Ducey and many Arizona congressmen. Hmm …
The process was fixed from the beginning, agreed Shereen Lerner, one of two Democratic commissioners. Do you want the gun store owner or the utility lobbyist?
A veteran Republican strategist hears this and chuckles. “Yep! That’s your choice!” says Sean Noble. Noble and his fellow Republicans began planning for 2021 years ahead of time. Ducey thought through redistricting step by step, determined to control the details and not get caught unawares. Step one: Stop appointing Democrats to CACA. “We got our butts handed to us last time because we were not prepared,” Noble told me. “When we did the most recent round, there was a significant process in place. We wanted to have things lined up on the commission as much as we could.”
They sure did. With their “independent chair” in place (they went with the dedicated Ducey donor), the commission hired a mapmaker who, critics charged, specialized in dividing Latino communities to benefit white conservatives. The congressional map has two districts that look competitive but lean consistently Republican. It had its first test in 2022. Democrats captured the U.S. Senate race and nearly every statewide office. Republicans won six of nine U.S. House seats. “We had a crappy top of the ticket, and in the two hardest districts, we prevailed,” said Noble, a knowing uptick in his voice.
Lerner sees those two pseudo-competitive seats as proof that the GOP captured the commission. Both could have been truly competitive. One could have leaned blue, the other red. The “independent chair” would have none of it. How good a job did they do delivering neutral, nonpartisan maps for Arizona? “I don’t think we did deliver that,” Lerner said.
The GOP play in Arizona was so well-planned and creative that you almost need to tip your cap. Others preferred pure power politics. Missouri lawmakers duped voters into repealing the 2018 redistricting initiative before it could be used. In Utah, where voters amended the state Constitution in 2018 to establish an advisory commission for the legislature, lawmakers simply repealed it, then enacted a 4–0 GOP map (Salt Lake City is both liberal enough and large enough to anchor one Democratic district). When a state court found the legislature’s actions unlawful and ordered a new map, lawmakers passed another all-red map in October. (A state judge tossed the GOP map in November and adopted a more balanced one.)
In Ohio, Republicans simply shoved state courts out of the way. GOP lawmakers on the state’s redistricting commission ignored partisan fairness provisions enacted by almost 75 percent of the voters in 2018 and then lawlessly brushed the state Supreme Court aside when it tried to uphold the state Constitution—not just once, but seven times. “We were the preview to what you see now happening with this administration,” said Allison Russo, a Democratic state House member who served on the commission and is now running for secretary of state. “This was going on in Ohio back in 2022, and very few people were paying attention. I think just the violation of the norm of not following a court order from the Ohio Supreme Court, which was and is the highest authority on this redistricting process, was significant. Now we’re seeing that play out on the national stage by this administration.”
GOP Governor Mike DeWine, one of the commission members, pronounced himself “very, very sorry” and conceded that the maps and the process could have been “more clearly constitutional.” That made Maureen O’Connor, the former GOP lieutenant governor and brave chief justice who repeatedly found the maps unconstitutional, snort. “More clearly constitutional! It’s constitutional or it’s not constitutional. It’s like a little bit pregnant.”
Ohio Republicans could get away with this because a handful of GOP voters, including the president of Ohio Right to Life, found two federal judges—Trump appointees, favorites of Federalist Society co-chair Leonard Leo—to deliver a curious ruling that allowed the GOP to run out the clock. The bad behavior won them a four-year map—which they can now gerrymander again mid-decade. Meanwhile, lawmakers fixed their state Supreme Court problem: Starting in 2022, having begun to lose statewide court races, the gerrymandered legislature turned state Supreme Court elections into partisan contests. “The cake was baked,” said Russo. “Now they have a court that will rubber-stamp whatever they send over.”
When O’Connor retired in 2022, she was replaced by a Republican who wouldn’t dare cross the party line. “This was the plan all along,” O’Connor told me. “We soundly criticize elections that happen in Russia or other countries. They have elections. But they’re not meaningful elections. There’s no choice. Are we far from that?”
There’s even less choice in Florida, where Republicans ran a similar play to take over the courts in order to flout constitutional language ratified by more than 62 percent of voters in 2010 that bans partisan gerrymandering. State courts saw through the ruse. In 2015, justices agreed with a lower court’s ruling that struck down eight congressional districts, and delivered a fairer map.
DeSantis, however, demanded the legislature deliver a congressional map with an additional four GOP seats after the 2020 census—and promised to claim even more via a mid-decade gerrymander. His map survived an initial state Supreme Court challenge. The Constitution didn’t change. The judges did. The new court had been carefully vetted by DeSantis and court whisperer Leo, in part for this very purpose.
“We don’t know what this court will do next,” said former Chief Justice Barbara Pariente. But she doesn’t sound optimistic. “We had a system of merit selection and retention for the appellate courts, but the governor changed the way the courts and the commissions were composed. Really, these are now his commissions, essentially, and his courts.” The current courts, she said, has some judges who “would never have passed muster before this and have opinions that are not rooted in the law.… Whether they feel beholden to the governor? Only they know.”
In North Carolina, meanwhile, everyone understands that the state Supreme Court is beholden to the legislature—especially since one justice is the Senate president’s son. A Democratic court looked to end gerrymandering in 2022. It found that maps tilted for either side violated the state Constitution and ordered a map that favored no one. That map elected seven Dems and seven Republicans in 2022. But that fall, Republicans—culminating a decade-long RSLC effort—captured the majority. They overturned that decision and allowed fellow partisans a free hand to gerrymander. The map, used for the first time in 2024, shifted three seats. It produced 10 Republicans and four Democrats.
The GOP majority in the House at the start of this session? Three seats.
The RSLC and Leo’s work backstopping GOP gerrymanders via hijacked state supreme courts became all the more important after Leo’s handpicked majority on the U.S. Supreme Court shuttered the federal courts to partisan gerrymandering claims in 2019’s party-line decision in Rucho v. Common Cause.
The decision was pivotal. It incentivized extreme gerrymanders nationwide and left voters all but powerless to challenge them. Rucho arrived after federal judges nationwide, appointed by Republican and Democratic presidents, examined maps drawn by both parties during the 2011 cycle. Many of those judges recognized that modern gerrymanders, devised on sophisticated software with the help of voluminous voter data, were a serious threat to fair elections, and that the federal courts had a unique responsibility to protect voters. Judges tossed plans drawn by Democrats in Maryland and Republicans in Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan, and North Carolina.
But Chief Justice John Roberts insisted otherwise. In one move, he ended the momentum toward reform both in the courts and in the states. The chief feigned ignorance of the effects, concluding that voters could solve this at the ballot box, and he pretended Congress might fix it. This pushed an issue he had no interest in solving toward a body he knew never would. Roberts praised the winning 2018 nonpartisan movements while ensuring no future state need reform itself. By ending hopes of a national judicial standard, he signaled that states could gerrymander at will, especially those with reliably partisan courts. Once Texas, Florida, and North Carolina were free to do their worst—at any time during the decade—it made no sense for California or others to behave. This summer’s redistricting apocalypse belongs to him.
“The Supreme Court understood the partisan implications and then essentially withdrew from the field and prevented us from making any progress,” said Maryland Democratic Representative Jamie Raskin, who was a constitutional law professor before joining Congress.
Four years later, in a racial gerrymandering case from Alabama, Allen v. Milligan (formerly Merrill v. Milligan), Roberts and Brett Kavanaugh worked together to invite the Voting Rights Act case they really wanted. Roberts and Kavanaugh sided with the liberals to order an Alabama map that created two Black opportunity districts, while patiently teeing up the challenge they desired to Section Two of the VRA. It’s a patient two-step Roberts has long mastered to get his desired results, while maintaining his unearned reputation as an institutionalist. In a brief concurrence, Kavanaugh suggested that he wanted to consider the bigger question and find that the nation no longer needed to take race into account at all. But, he noted, he could not, because that had not been part of the arguments. It did not take long for Louisiana to notice this exaggerated wink—or for the court to order Louisiana v. Callais reargued around those larger constitutional issues. Depending on the nature of the decision and the speed with which it arrives, it’s possible that state legislatures across the South could remap next year, erase once-protected majority-Black seats once and for all, and make both partisan and racial gerrymanders all but impossible to challenge.
Congress did take up John Roberts’s challenge. It ran aground, precisely as the chief justice must have known it would.
When Democrats claimed a Washington trifecta in 2021, their top congressional priority was a collection of clean-government reforms called the For the People Act. It would have overhauled campaign finance, protected voting rights, and ended partisan gerrymandering (both after the census and in the middle of the decade). Democrats couldn’t get it done. New reporting suggests they came far closer than anyone believed.
“It’s two things,” one prominent member told me. “How close we got, which most people don’t know.… How transformative it was. How responsive to the threats at this moment. All of it.” This member continued: “We got so tantalizingly close. Were it not for Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema …”
Every Democrat but one in the House backed HR1. Every Republican lined up to oppose it. (“A lot of people on our side didn’t appreciate how big this was,” the member told me. “But someone who did was Mitch McConnell.”) Without any Senate Republican support, it couldn’t survive the filibuster. Democrats needed Manchin and Sinema’s support to reform the filibuster so that the bill could pass the Senate with a simple majority instead of needing to clear the cloture hurdle of 60 votes; otherwise, a minority of a minority would kill far-reaching reforms to safeguard democracy.
In public, Manchin said consistently that he would not touch the filibuster. But behind closed doors, Democrats believed they had convinced him. Congressional leaders framed the filibuster reform as a return to its original conception, not a permanent minority veto, and they fed Manchin’s considerable ego: He would be the one who fixed the Senate. He would be the leader who made it work again. He would be the Robert Byrd of his generation. After months of hand-holding, Manchin understood the stakes and seemed to signal he would go along.
But under intense pressure from the White House to enact President Joe Biden’s signature Build Back Better program, an embittered Manchin broke away from the party and said he would vote no, effectively killing the stimulus package. All the progress that had been made on voting rights disappeared. Biden had lost Manchin entirely. Manchin declined to comment. “Of all of Manchin’s transgressions against the democracy,” said Raskin, “this might be the most severe sin of them all.”
The For the People Act was dead. Could Democrats have broken the bill apart and worked to get a handful of Senate Republicans onboard for a stand-alone gerrymandering bill? Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi scoffed at that idea. “And you think the Republicans would give us 60 votes for that?” she asked me. “Which one would they give us? Independent commissions?” She ran through a number of reforms. “They would not go for that…. They’re not interested in any of that.”
Perhaps not. But another trifecta window—with Democrats controlling the White House, Senate, and House—closed without electoral reform. It’s hard to imagine when the next might arrive.
If you think the 2026 maps present challenges, however, just wait. A potentially devastating reapportionment looms after the 2030 census. If Democrats were once out-strategized on redistricting because they believed demographics were destiny, well, now redistricting and demographics are aligned against them. Population shifts could send a dozen House seats from blue states to red ones. A Brennan Center study, based on Census Bureau projections, suggests that California could lose four seats, New York two, and Oregon, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Minnesota, Rhode Island, and Wisconsin one each. Texas and Florida would each pick up four. North Carolina, Idaho, Utah, and Arizona would gain one each.
As those House seats shift, Electoral College power moves with them. Kamala Harris would have won in 2024 had she held the Midwestern “blue wall” along with Nebraska’s “blue dot.” In 2032, that won’t add up to 270 electoral votes.
Which is to say: If Democrats lack control of enough states to gerrymander their way out of their gerrymandering problem in 2026, it will be even harder come 2032. The bonus five seats Democrats claimed in California essentially head to Texas anyway at decade’s end. Anything New York might do by 2028 will go to Florida.
Are Democrats thinking about this? I asked Pelosi. “Apportionment? I’m just thinking about now. I’ve got November 4th. OK? I’ll get by November 4th and get by next year. And then you’re going to see something quite remarkable happen.”
Such fanciful thinking is no match for math. There will never ever be enough seats in Illinois, Maryland, or New York to compensate for states where Republicans dominate and paint delegations entirely, or nearly entirely, red. That means that the road to the House in 2026 requires a clean sweep by Democrats of competitive districts in some tough territory: Iowa, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, New York (outside the city), Virginia, and Arizona.
Come 2032? Even if California later moves to permanently suspend its commission, for Democrats to overcome an exodus from Minnesota, Oregon, and Rhode Island to states where Republicans draw the lines and adeptly “pack and crack” Democrats (stuffing as many Democrats as possible into a handful of seats they win easily, then dispersing the rest in numbers insufficient to win) might be asking too much. Might Democrats move to suspend commissions in Colorado, Washington, and New Jersey? In Michigan, if they win a trifecta? Would voters in states that earned hard-won reforms hand power back to the Democrats?
“We have been trying to act on this, and they’re the ones who insist on a race to the bottom,” said Raskin. “Our people just feel like we can’t engage in unilateral political disarmament, and we also understand that they control a lot more state legislatures than we do.”
All is not lost. There will be fierce efforts to fight back. In Kansas City, the same week that lawmakers passed that new gerrymandered map that cracked the city in thirds, I spent a Saturday morning in a church basement packed with volunteers learning how to collect signatures for a statewide ballot initiative that would effectively veto the legislature’s rigged map. “We are a lot of pissed off white people,” said the woman next to me. Maybe in some state, a Republican Supreme Court justice will prove to be as brave as Ohio’s Maureen O’Connor.
The long-term struggle to secure something closer to a representative democracy, however, will require a different strategy. The time has come to fight fire with water. Any fix must be a national one that’s fair everywhere. The best way to end gerrymandering—and the extremism and polarization that runs hand in hand—would be for the nation to adopt a more proportional House of Representatives.
Here’s how it would work. Every state would have the same number of members as they do now. But instead of electing them from single-member districts—easily gerrymandered so that the district lines determine winners and losers—a nonpartisan commission would draw larger, multimember districts of three, four, and five members, who would be elected with a proportional form of ranked-choice voting. Every district, everywhere, would elect Democrats, Republicans, and maybe even independents. (Nothing would change in states with only one or two members.) Every voter would cast a ballot that matters. Urban Republicans, rural Democrats, and independents everywhere would know that someone from their district represented them. Congress could make this change simply by passing a law; a really strong version called the Fair Representation Act is regularly introduced by Raskin and fellow Representative Don Beyer of Virginia.
“I want to advocate the reforms that could get us through this, the For the People Act, ranked-choice voting and multimember districts,” said Raskin. “But at the same time, we have to be utterly engaged in the process of figuring out how to win within the gerrymandered rules…. We are eventually going to need structural reform to get out of this nightmare. But in order to get there, we are going to have to play like home run champs to get through the system as it exists.”
Like any national reform in a polarized era, or anything that requires getting through the Senate filibuster, this would be a heavy lift. It won’t happen before the 2026 midterms, or even the 2030 census. But before you insist this could never pass, the beauty of a more proportional plan is that it solves everyone’s problems with the current system. Trump and Republicans howl that the Massachusetts delegation is unfair because it produces a 9–0 Democratic map when Trump won around 36 percent of the vote in 2024. Democrats have similar complaints about Tennessee and Oklahoma. A proportional system addresses both concerns. Independents, who often outnumber at least one major party in a state, feel shut out of primaries and have no say in selecting general election candidates. Their voices would matter.
Minority voters, fearful that the Voting Rights Act will be gutted so that they cannot win representation, would maintain their voice. Republicans in California would not be punished for the sins of Republicans in Texas. Democrats in Florida would not be underrepresented to compensate for gerrymanders in Maryland. In 2024, only 37 of 435 U.S. House election results were within 5 percentage points. Others had the choice made for them—often in a low-turnout closed primary that selects someone far to the left or the right of the district itself. All those voters who feel as if no one is listening to them are right. No one needs to listen to them. A proportional House would put voters, not district lines, in charge again.
Congress could transform our politics in this way via statute. No constitutional amendment is required. We are not limited to a system of winner-takes-all districts, drawn by politicians. And while proportional systems are used in modern democracies around the world, it also fits squarely into the American tradition of full and fair representation. Congress passed a law mandating single-member districts in 1967. Nothing else stands in the way. Reform might not be easy, but it is possible.
Back in Kansas City, where banks and developers perfected redlining to keep Blacks who migrated here after the Civil War out of their communities, Troost Avenue became a racial divide known as the Troost Wall. Now, in 2025, Troost is a dividing line again, this time between two of the three new districts that cleave this city apart, old poison in a new bottle. Troost intersects with Independence Avenue, and as I head toward that one point where all three new districts come together, a fascinating melting pot emerges: multiple markets dedicated to Middle Eastern, African, Mexican, and Somali foods.
As I approach the intersection of Independence and Gladstone avenues, the new 6th District is to my north. That’s the one that stretches along the entire top half of the state, several hundred miles to the Illinois border. The new 4th is to my left. It attaches a small slice of the city onto a much larger swath of rural, southwest Missouri. To my right is the 5th, which zigzags its way up to the college town of Columbia, then veers southeast toward Jefferson City.
At the very place where all three districts coalesce sits the Independence Boulevard Christian Church. Three homeless people sit on the front steps. I walk through the parking lot toward a side door, crossing in and out of the districts, and look inside. The church’s gargantuan bottom floor houses a major food kitchen in Kansas City. Every Monday night, hundreds of hot meals are served. Hygiene kits are stacked high. There are shelves of children’s books for families. Pamphlets offer advice for dealing with immigration authorities in several different languages. Here, the hard work of caring for one other—of acting out the rituals of compassion and civic faith that we need to sustain a democracy—goes on; precisely where that democracy is being carved beyond recognition, sliced and diced for partisan gain.
