Scorched earth: How Trump’s gerrymanders and the Supreme Court burned redistricting to the ground

America’s system of electoral redistricting has never been perfect for ensuring that maps are drawn to benefit voters, not politicians or parties. 

But over the past year, conservatives have radically transformed it into virtually unrecognizable terrain perhaps most closely resembling a burn scar — the term for the scorched land left behind after a wildfire.

Last year, at President Donald Trump’s urging, Texas, Missouri, and North Carolina rammed through pro-GOP congressional gerrymanders. 

Since then, several Supreme Court rulings have turbocharged that trend. They’ve given lawmakers almost totally free rein to draw districts in order to maximize partisan advantage, including by targeting minority voters — demolishing protections aimed at ensuring voters get fair maps. 

The result has been new Republican congressional gerrymanders in Florida, Louisiana, and Tennessee, and the revival of an old one in Alabama. It all has amounted to the largest rollback of voting rights since before the Civil Rights movement.

Democrats have had little choice but to try to respond in kind. But they’ve struggled to even the playing field, successfully passing their own new map in only one state, California. 

It’s a disaster for elections. And its effects will stretch far beyond the partisan makeup of Congress after the November elections. 

As the wave of gerrymanders dies down ahead of the midterms, a few things are clear: Partisan redistricting is here to stay. Protections against racial gerrymanders are gone. And the law appears to explicitly work for Republicans and against Democrats.

How it happened

It all started last summer, when Trump demanded GOP-controlled states draw more Republican-leaning congressional districts to help retain control over Congress in the 2026 midterms. Observers have widely described the ensuing rush to gerrymander as Trump’s “redistricting war” or “arms race.” 

In hindsight, it could be more accurately compared to a wildfire. It spread rapidly across the country, burning the entire redistricting landscape to the ground. Then, further fueled by the Supreme Court’s catastrophic decision to demolish the Voting Rights Act (VRA), it lurched South, undoing Black voting power.

The damage is immense. The National Republican Congressional Committee is now gloating in a memo that Democrats are “trapped on hostile terrain” in a “new reality” with a “severe structural disadvantage.” 

That GOP memo cast a particularly bright spotlight on Louisiana, Alabama, Tennessee and Florida — four GOP-controlled Southern states that, after the SCOTUS ruling, raced to enact new maps and eliminate minority voters’ ability to choose their own representatives.

To make matters worse, courts then allowed Louisiana and Alabama to take the unprecedented step of suspending primary elections that had already started in order to impose their new maps. And in Florida, the state Supreme Court allowed Republicans to use a map that brazenly violates the state’s gerrymandering ban.

SCOTUS assumes ‘good faith’ by bad actors 

If the past year gave us anything positive, it was fresh data about just how much voters across the country hate gerrymandering. 

As Republican-controlled states moved to pass new maps at Trump’s behest, polls revealed the wide gap between GOP actions and voter preferences. Only one-third of Texas voters supported the GOP gerrymander. Just 39% of Indiana voters backed a Republican redistricting plan that subsequently failed. And nearly 84% of North Carolina voters said it was “very important” to have fair maps. 

The Supreme Court also used to share voters’ disdain for partisan and racial gerrymandering. But the court’s conservative justices have shrugged their shoulders at partisan manipulation ever since their ruling in the 2019 case Rucho v. Common Cause, which concluded that federal courts should turn a blind eye to partisan gerrymanders.

This year, the court proved itself even further out of step with voters when it obliterated Section 2 of the VRA in its Louisiana v. Callais ruling: It concluded states cannot consider race in remedying discrimination in voting. States took this as a greenlight to gerrymander all Black-majority districts — many not even created under Section 2 — out of existence, supposedly in pursuit of partisan advantage.

Some states still prohibit partisan gerrymandering, but lawmakers even in those states are now emboldened to operate at a surreal level of bad faith legislating, openly announcing that they are redrawing maps for partisan advantage, knowing that no court is going to stop them. 

And yet the Supreme Court has continued to use a principle called the “presumption of legislative good faith” — the assumption that the legislature is acting lawfully and in the best interest of the voters — to overturn lower court rulings that blocked GOP gerrymanders in Texas and Alabama. And it openly chided lower courts for not blindly accepting that same assumption.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote a blistering dissent in the Alabama case. Though evidence of intentional discrimination was “crystal clear,” the Supreme Court’s conservative justices found that the district court had violated the presumption of good legislative faith. That means that “there is no realistic case in which the presumption of legislative good faith can ever be rebutted.”

Sotomayor reached an astonishing conclusion: SCOTUS would never strike down a discriminatory map drawn by Republicans because there are no circumstances that could shift their assumption that legislators are acting in good faith.  

Not only did SCOTUS create conditions for brazen partisan gerrymandering, but it also burned down the nation’s guardrails against racial gerrymandering with its Callais decision. The conservative majority ruled that lawmakers can now openly draw maps that discriminate against racial minorities as long as they are doing so for partisan advantages. 

In Callais, the court theoretically left open the possibility that a map could still be struck down if there was evidence of deliberate discrimination. But the justices quickly closed that path in June when they allowed Alabama to use its congressional map after a lower court concluded it was intentionally discriminatory.

‘Purcell’ for thee, not for me

This year, the Supreme Court also set fire to the Purcell principle, its own legal doctrine that discourages changes in election rules too close to a vote. 

In December, when the court’s conservatives overturned a district court’s decision to block the Texas gerrymander, they invoked Purcell, concluding it was too close to the March primary for anything to be done. 

In a dissent, Justice Elena Kagan argued that the Supreme Court had just handed every state an invitation to use a blatantly unconstitutional map by enacting it at the last minute.

“That cannot be the law—except of course that today it is,” Kagan wrote.

This month, the court’s conservatives also rebuked a district court for blocking Alabama’s eleventh-hour redistricting maneuver, criticizing the court for altering rules on the eve of an election. That allowed Alabama to overhaul its congressional districts so close to the election that absentee ballots had already been sent to voters. 

The implications of all the Supreme Court’s redistricting decisions this year are enormous — and not only because the court’s conservative majority has removed the obstacles to partisan and racial gerrymandering. 

Eliminating those barriers has also created a completely new redistricting landscape in which state lawmakers can redraw maps whenever they want, rather than waiting for the next decade’s new census data. That creates conditions for relentless, unending redistricting.

The impacts will continue to cascade beyond congressional maps, with state and local maps overhauled as well.

Undermining the will of voters 

Trump’s redistricting sweep has also left a path of destruction in GOP-controlled states across the nation. 

In Missouri, Republicans have effectively sacrificed voters’ century-old state constitutional right to veto legislation by holding a referendum. After the GOP-controlled legislature passed a gerrymandered congressional map in September, voters gathered and submitted more than 300,000 petition signatures to put it to a veto referendum.

Historical precedent suggests that it should have blocked the gerrymander from going into effect until after Missourians could vote on it. But Republicans thwarted the referendum effort at every turn, enabled by courts that have allowed the GOP to use the gerrymandered map in this year’s midterms. In effect, that raises a broader question about whether Missourians really do have the right to block legislation, as the state constitution claims. 

In Indiana, Republican lawmakers were divided on Trump’s plan, and the proposed map died after getting insufficient support from GOP state senators. Those senators faced a campaign of harassment and intimidation by Trump supporters, while the White House explicitly threatened to revoke federal funding for the state in retaliation. Ultimately, Trump supported primary challengers to those GOP incumbents. In most cases, he was successful, undermining the independence of Indiana’s state lawmakers.

And in Florida, where voters passed a constitutional amendment in 2010 banning partisan and racial gerrymanders, voters saw that perhaps their referendum process doesn’t mean much. Despite the ban, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) signed a GOP gerrymander into law in April. 

A circuit court judge appointed by DeSantis then upheld the map. And the Florida Supreme Court quickly agreed, clearing the way for the state to use the new map in this year’s election. The only judge to dissent was the sole state Supreme Court justice who was not appointed by DeSantis.

The damage from Trump’s redistricting war has also been felt in blue states. Democratic lawmakers and voters have been forced to reckon with their own redistricting standards, which often prevent the legislature from passing new maps. 

In November, California voters approved a plan to temporarily circumvent their state’s independent redistricting commission and enact a map designed to counter the GOP gerrymander in Texas. 

This year, Virginia voters then did the same. Despite legal challenges to the Democrat-backed redistricting referendum, the state Supreme Court allowed it to go forward. But then, after the special election, that same court invalidated the vote and the map on procedural grounds. 

Now, multiple Democratic-controlled states are already looking to 2028, assessing plans to temporarily work around their independent redistricting processes. 

Their decision — accepting partisan gerrymandering to avoid capitulating to Republicans — is just the beginning of our new political reality.