Republican state legislators, governors, state supreme court justices, and U.S. Supreme Court justices have combined over the last week to effectively hand up to 10 U.S. House seats to the GOP. That’s not just bad for the Democrats, although it most definitely is that. It’s bad for democracy. This can’t be accepted as normal.
Early last week, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed into law a gerrymander so that Republicans could win as many as four additional seats. Three days later, Tennessee Republicans seized on the U.S. Supreme Court’s Louisiana v. Callais ruling to eliminate the lone majority-Black congressional district in the state. On Friday, four Virginia state Supreme Court justices, three appointed by the state’s legislature when both houses were controlled by Republicans, invalidated a ballot measure that could have resulted in four additional seats for Democrats through redistricting. Later that day, Louisiana Republicans, also taking advantage of Callais, presented new maps that will almost certainly result in the defeat of one Democratic member of Congress there. Five days; 10 seats; zero votes from members of the public.
Adding immediate context only makes it worse. Florida voters approved a ballot measure in 2010 that explicitly bans partisan gerrymandering. The all-Republican Florida Supreme Court is almost certainly going to let the redistricting stand anyway. In contrast, a clear majority of voters in Virginia, more than 1.6 million people in total, backed the redistricting that four judges wiped away. Voting had already started in Louisiana but has now been suspended. The South, a region with a long history of discriminating against Black Americans, is now rushing to eject from Congress Black members elected by Black citizens.
Then broaden the picture further. We have an authoritarian president who ignores laws and core democratic values. He knows that the party in the White House often loses a ton of House seats. He knows that trend is particularly likely to continue if the president is unpopular, as Trump is now. And he knows that a Democratic House might force him to actually follow the law. So instead of taking steps to become more popular or accepting defeat, he ordered Republican officials to start gerrymandering districts to ensure a party totally under his thumb keeps control of the House. And the plan is working. Republicans have won themselves on net from six to eight additional seats in these gerrymandering fights.
A lot of nonpartisan analysts and even a few Democrats are trying to downplay these redistricting gains by Republicans. Some argue that Trump is so unpopular that Democrats will still win the House. Others even claim that the redistricting will result in Democrats winning more seats than they would have otherwise because Republicans have spread out their voters too much.
Perhaps. But some estimates suggest that the Democrats will need to win the national popular vote by at least four percentage points to carry the House. That’s a lot. Remember that Trump’s 2024 victory, which was covered by many pundits as some dramatic shift in American politics, was by 1.5 percent over Kamala Harris. It would be terrible if Republicans lost the popular vote 48 percent to 52 percent but remained in control of the House. Or if Republicans won 226 seats or below—meaning their majority was retained only because of the Trump-ordered redistricting.
I don’t mean terrible in a Democratic sense, but in a democratic sense. Trump would have escaped accountability (electoral defeat) and a check on his power (a Democratic-controlled House) by rigging the election rules. And that rigging would have been an entirely partisan project, with GOP state legislatures and governors driving the process while judges appointed by Republicans somehow always determined that the law aligned with the GOP’s preferred outcome. Democrats would be essentially punished for having created independent redistricting commissions in Virginia and other states over the last decade.
But let’s say that Democrats win the House in November. Trump would get the punishment and constraints that he deserves. But that wouldn’t make what’s happened over the last year, particularly over the last week, less of a democratic crisis. We have a Supreme Court whose rulings, such as Callais, almost always align with the Republican Party’s priorities. We have a Republican Party that is constantly trying to shield itself from voter accountability. And where that party is popular, such as the states in the South, it wants to completely silence the political voices of anyone who opposes it. We have a political system that allows and really encourages parties to constantly change district lines and other procedural rules to gain electoral advantage. That system also gives judges virtually unchecked power to overrule the decisions of officials and the public.
And because Republicans have gutted majority-Black districts, the new Democratic majority would almost certainly have fewer Black members and fewer members elected largely by Black voters. This gerrymandering fight is essentially forcing the Democrats to spend more time campaigning for the votes of upper-income white suburbanites and less courting African Americans, who on average have lower incomes.
What do we do with this reality? There are increasingly far-fetched proposals, such as moving up the mandatory retirement age for Virginia’s Supreme Court judges, that could address the GOP gerrymandering advantage in 2026. A Virginia Democrat told my colleague Greg Sargent that the party isn’t going down that path. I wasn’t wild about that idea, but I concede that in the short term Democratic Party officials have to violate democratic norms because Republicans are.
But the permanent solutions are much harder. Creating a Supreme Court that isn’t totally biased toward the Republicans will require a Democratic trifecta that either adds justices or severely curtails the court’s powers. A Democratic trifecta that enacts proportional representation is necessary to permanently weaken today’s Republican Party. The authoritarian tendencies of GOP states in the South can’t be addressed by elections alone—since Republicans will win most of those. There may need to be general strikes and other labor action, and ultimately, LGBTQ people, African Americans, professors, and others whose rights are endangered by Southern legislatures may need to move north. To have news organizations, business groups, and other parts of our civil society who will directly state that the Republicans are the ones eroding democracy will almost certainly require the creation of a completely new civil society, because our current nonpartisan organizations seem to prefer continued democratic decline over being accused of “taking a side.”
First, though, we need to recognize the severity of our problems. Reassuring ourselves that the last week or year wasn’t that bad if the Democrats win the House is the same mistake that U.S. democrats (yes, small-d) made in largely moving on from Trump’s 2020 contesting of the election because Joe Biden won and was inaugurated. Or after Democrats did pretty well in the 2022 elections and everyone wrongly assumed Trump wouldn’t run and win in 2024. We have a democratic crisis. That can’t be solved by Democrats winning every election. They can’t—and it wouldn’t really be a democracy if they did.
We need a total change of our electoral and political structures so that a political party led by an authoritarian won’t have the chance to win 10 seats in a week without any member of the public voting and the chance to win an election while finishing four percentage points behind in the popular vote. That won’t be easy, but the last week is the latest illustration that such massive changes are the only way to make America democratic again.
