An Update on the Wild Redistricting Situation

Missouri Governor Mike Kehoe (R) announces a special legislative session for the state to become the next to redraw the state’s Congressional maps in a trend of voluntary redistricting.

A couple months ago, I wrote an article about mid-decade redistricting in the United States which I labeled as partisan gerrymandering warfare. At the time, the situation was far more simple: California, a Democrat-run state, was mulling over a proposition to redraw its congressional maps with the intent of adding five Democratic House of Representatives seats (which has now passed) in response to the passage of new, equally gerrymandered maps in Texas, a Republican-run state that added five new Republican seats. In this prior article, I placed blame on both the Democratic and Republican Parties for widespread efforts to disenfranchise voters purely for political reasons, and hinted to the possibility of more states, both Democratic and Republican, joining in on efforts to redraw their Congressional maps. To say that this has occurred in the following months would be an understatement.

As of November 8, 2025, five states have enacted new Congressional maps, while eight more are at some step in the process of doing so. While Texas and California still headline the redistricting efforts by their respective parties, states all across the country have gotten involved, and with the exceptions of Ohio and Utah, these efforts have been entirely voluntary. Not only has this broken precedent redistricting, a process meant to take place only at the turn of every decade, altogether, it has also, for better or worse (it’s worse), changed the way that we need to approach House of Representatives elections going forward. It has long been the consensus that national elections have become steadily polarized over the past few decades, but this takes things to a whole new level: elections in the House being decided by which party can better their maps may be becoming the new norm. As many as 30 of the 435 current House seats could realistically change party hands due to partisan gerrymandering, even before considering the numerous additional states that have hinted at looking into efforts to redraw their maps. If this is now what is occurring during voluntary mid-decade redistricting cycles, I shudder to fathom what will go down in 2030 at the next turn of the decade.

That may have been a bit too much context compared to my usual standards. Let’s just take a look at this (extremely messy) situation.

A Quick Update on the Situation

As mentioned earlier, there are currently a total of thirteen states actively involved in mid-decade redistricting (five have already enacted new maps, most of the remaining eight are highly likely to do so in the coming months), with more possible to follow. While I’m not going to go into particular detail about each state-specific situation, there are some key commonalities between them worthy of note. For one, the vast majority of states who have voluntarily initiated efforts to redraw their Congressional maps are controlled by Republicans. This is primarily because their redistricting processes are controlled by their legislatures, allowing states such as Missouri, Indiana, and North Carolina, in addition to Texas, to quickly alter their maps without facing political or legal retribution. Meanwhile, many of the largest Democrat-controlled states rely on Independent or Bipartisan Commissions unaffiliated with the politics of the respective state when altering their maps. As such, states such as New York and Colorado, who are considering redistricting efforts of their own in response to those by Republican states, face a number of legal hurdles that make it nearly impossible for them to adopt new maps before the 2026 election cycle. California, which also has an Independent Redistricting Commission, was only able to circumvent these constraints by orchestrating a statewide referendum, and even then, its revised maps are only valid until 2030, when control over redistricting will be returned to the commission. It’s clear why Republicans started this mess: their future prospects through a new norm of mid-decade redistricting are far greater than those of Democrats.

Like almost anything else currently going on in American politics (just a tiny bit of author bias here), this redistricting war is facing a number of lawsuits and political debates on both sides of the spectrum instrumental to shaping its future. Almost every voluntary redistricting effort is currently facing a lawsuit, including both Texas and California, but only few are likely to have an impact on the overall situation. Even of the ones that could have an impact, most only concern a single seat, such as a referendum that could block Missouri’s new map that added a Republican district or a ruling in Utah that could determine whether or not Democrats will gain a seat in the state. However, there is one major exception to this that could redefine the definition of partisan gerrymandering altogether. The Supreme Court is currently weighing a decision over whether or not to gut section two of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which explicitly prohibits gerrymandering specifically targeted against minority voters (specifically Black voters). Should the court rule to remove Voting Rights Act protections, Republicans could stand to gain as many as 12 seats in Southern states, which would substantially affect elections going forward. Such a ruling may come too late to affect the 2026 cycle, but would spell the ultimate death of Civil Rights era protections in a general worrying trend of removal of gerrymandering constraints.

What Does This Mean for 2026?

While the partisan redistricting war has expanded in the past few months and now spells true future consequences for the nature of House of Representatives elections, I maintain my position from my previous article that its immediate effects on the 2026 election cycle will be minimal. Sure, on the balance, Republicans may experience a net gain of 2 or 3 seats, but in the grand scheme of things, the outcome of the 2026 House elections will still be almost entirely dependent on the national environment, which looks very bleak for the party following the major Democratic victory in the 2025 off-year elections (which you can read more about in a separate article of mine here). In my next round of House election predictions (which has been delayed to the winter due to the uncertainty surrounding this redistricting madness), I will almost certainly be giving the Democrats the projected edge.

All of this brings me back to the primary question of my previous article: what is the point of all of this? In a petty attempt to undemocratically maintain their full control of the executive branch, which most likely will not work anyways, Republicans set in motion processes that could ruin the redistricting system for generations. Democrats, who had the opportunity to stand on business and defend the democratic traditions that they preach as the core of their political positions, instead chose to escalate the situation, goading Republican states, who have a natural advantage within the world of redistricting, to redraw their own maps. While I still believe that the blood of this conflict lies on the hands of Republicans due to their initiation of it, Democrats have stoked the flame, resulting in an un-American breach of voting power for tens of millions across the country, Democrats and Republicans alike. With the potential gutting of the Voting Rights Act, this disenfranchisement now threatens to extend to entire racial and ethnic groups, reversing decades of progress that the United States supposedly prides itself upon.

At the end of my previous article, I posed to both Democratic and Republican lawmakers the question of whether or not partisan gerrymandering warfare was worth it. As they have since (regrettably) decided that the answer to this question is an emphatic yes, I now ask them this: when does it all end? Will 2026 be looked back upon as a testament to the strength of American democracy in the face of those who seek to undermine it, or will it mark the beginning of the end for ideals that “we the people” have cherished for centuries? Personally, I find it difficult to see things getting better under the openly antagonistic political environment fostered by Republican President Donald Trump, but should his party lose the House in 2026 as I expect them to, I hope that through some form of bipartisanship, redistricting will be returned to the population-based, once-a-decade process that it was always meant to be. For now, the fate of our country’s future rests where it always has: in the hands of the people willing to fight for it.