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The fallout from the Supreme Court gutting Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act in Louisiana v. Callais is in full swing, as red states are locked in a mad dash to implement new congressional maps that will secure more seats, sacrificing minority voters in nearly every circumstance. Lower courts are equally busy, with legal challenges being brought left and right by both Republicans and Democrats to stymie each other’s power grabs and limit the damage in midterm elections that are now just six months away. Strap in, as we use this week’s newsletter to unpack the state of play in the U.S. gerrymandering wars.

Typically, states create new congressional maps every 10 years, in line with the national decennial census. However, last summer, President Donald Trump upended this practice when he urged Texas to redistrict mid-decade in order to net Republicans more congressional seats, an attempt to mitigate Democrats’ expected sweep in the 2026 midterm elections. Texas enacted a new map that gave Republicans five new House seats, but California responded with its own tit-for-tat gerrymander which also netted the country’s largest Democratic state an additional five Democratic seats. Other Republican-leaning states, including Ohio, Utah, and North Carolina, jumped in to follow suit.

Then last month, there was another shock to the system. The U.S. Supreme Court released its decision in Callais, and overnight the national redistricting effort leveled up, as states were no longer bound to create districts that prioritized minority voters. Literally within hours Florida’s Republican-controlled Legislature passed a new congressional map that would net Republicans four additional seats. We’re now about two weeks out from Callais becoming public, and more states are jumping into the fire, though as we noted in this newsletter last week, this is a fight to the bottom that hurts voters and American democracy.

Nevertheless, redistricting is happening whether we like it or not. It may well determine the balance of power in Washington this year and onward, making it one of the most politically salient issues today. To help everyone understand and track what is happening with redistricting and where, here are the latest legal battles over congressional maps we are keeping an eye on:

After Virginia’s Supreme Court late last week rejected Democrats’ new electoral map, one that would have flipped four Republican-held U.S. House seats to Democrats, Attorney General Jay Jones asked the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene. The emergency application argues that the Virginia’s Supreme Court’s 4–3 decision amounted to “judicial defiance” of the will of the state’s voters, who voted in favor of a mid-decade congressional redistricting effort last year. The question at the heart of this legal challenge has to do with the timing of the referendum posed to voters, with the Virginia Constitution preventing amendments unless there is an intervening election between the first and second votes on a proposed amendment that is introduced and passed in the Legislature.

As Slate’s Alexis Romero explained, the Virginia Legislature voted on Democrats’ new congressional map and then introduced it to voters right before last year’s November election, then after voters approved it, the Legislature again voted on the measure in February. But the state’s Supreme Court ruled that the 2025 election had already begun when the Legislature passed the amendment the first time, because the first early voters had already cast their ballots. By that standard, Virginia’s Legislature did not put a full election between its first proposed amendment vote in October and its second in February, since some mail-in ballots were received before Democrats unveiled their new map.

Jones’ last-ditch effort to get the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene is risky. The court only has the final word on federal law and does not traditionally weigh in on state Supreme Courts’ decisions. Virginia is asking a conservative majority court to upend this practice, which could come back to bite Democrats all over the country in any number of potential voting cases. Given the court’s 2023 ruling, though, in Moore v. Harper—and given the partisan stakes—SCOTUS is unlikely to act, meaning Virginia’s Democratic gerrymander is all but dead.

Within 24 hours of the Supreme Court releasing its decision in........

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