Redistricting battles have mostly ended. Here’s how they could determine the balance of power in the US House
The US Capitol is seen at sunrise in Washington, DC, on October 18, 2023.
Jose Luis Magana/AP
Multiple Supreme Court showdowns. Closed-door negotiations. And millions of dollars in litigation.
After months of legal and legislative skirmishes around the country, much of the redistricting drama of the 2024 election cycle is behind us. And it has ended pretty close to where it began: Just a handful of seats could determine which party controls the US House of Representatives, where Republicans now hold a threadbare majority.
In North Carolina, newly empowered GOP state legislators took an aggressive approach with their map-drawing, crafting lines that are expected to allow their party to flip at least three seats now held by Democrats. But, in recently concluded redistricting in New York, Democrats, who had final say over the map, adopted a more modest position – essentially turning just one Republican-held seat a deeper shade of blue.
In the South, Democrats are expected to gain two seats as a result of Voting Rights Act rulings out of Alabama and Louisiana. But a protracted battle over the congressional map in another Southern state, Georgia, has not changed the partisan balance of the state’s US House delegation heading into November.
“It’s amazing that with all of the states where we’ve had things going on and with all the different lawsuits, we are really only talking about a small number of districts that are guaranteed to change hands as a result of this entire shuffle,” said Nick Seabrook, a political scientist at the University of North Florida and the author of the 2022 book “One Person, One Vote: A Surprising History of Gerrymandering in America.”
Adam Kincaid, the president and executive director of the National Republican Redistricting Trust, sees a “tick to the right” under the new landscape, with the likely net addition of two more House seats that former President Donald Trump would have carried in 2020. But he cautioned that it was still a “tight map” and a “tight electorate.”
“From top to bottom, the country is a 50-50 country right now,” Kincaid said.
(Although Republicans control the House by a narrow margin, under the map used in the 2022 midterm elections, 17 of those GOP lawmakers were elected in communities that backed President Joe Biden in 2020.)
Democrats, meanwhile, say they emerged in a stronger position after wielding the nearly 60-year-old Voting Rights Act to prevail in legal fights in deep-red Alabama and Louisiana. Federal judges ordered lawmakers in those states to give Black residents more opportunities to elect House candidates of their choice.
“Alabama and Louisiana are just two states once thought to be unreachable in the fight for fairness that have quickly become more representative” as a result of the legal actions, John Bisognano, president of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, said in a statement. “I’m confident the House map will remain highly competitive going into 2024.”
Here’s a state-by-state look at the recent redistricting disputes and where they stand:
Louisiana
Facing a court-ordered deadline, the Republican-controlled state Legislature in January approved a map with a second Black-majority district that is expected to be in effect for this year’s elections.
The action, viewed as a win for Democrats, endangers the seat now held by Republican Rep. Garret Graves.
How congressional district lines have shifted in Louisiana
How Louisiana’s districts voted in 2020, by presidential vote margin, in percentage points
The implementation of the new map follows a protracted legal battle over the state’s congressional district lines.
Although Black people make up roughly a third of the state’s population, Louisiana has just one Black lawmaker – who is also the lone Democrat – in its six-member US House delegation.
A federal judge threw out the state’s Republican-drawn map in 2022, saying it likely violated the Voting Rights Act. Republican officials in the state appealed to the US Supreme Court, which put the lower-court ruling on hold until it decided the Alabama case, which it did in June this year.
Once the high court had weighed in on the Alabama case, the legal skirmishes again lurched to life in Louisiana.
A federal court had given the GOP-controlled state Legislature until the end of January to draw a new map, after deciding that the lower court had ruled correctly that the state lawmakers’ map improperly diluted the voting power of Louisiana’s Black residents.
If the Legislature had not acted by that deadline, the lower court could have proceeded to a full trial to resolve the map in time for this year’s elections. A dozen non-Black voters filed a legal challenge to the Legislature’s map, arguing it was an illegal racial gerrymander, and a three-judge panel agreed.
That set off a fresh appeal to the US Supreme Court, which on May 15 paused the panel’s ruling in an order that will likely allow the Legislature’s map to be used in this year’s elections.
New York
Republicans flipped four US House seats in New York in the 2022 midterm elections, victories that helped secure their party’s majority in the chamber.
Then, a ruling by the state’s highest court appeared to jeopardize those gains by potentially making it easier for Democrats to pick up as many as six GOP-held seats.
In the end, however, the Democratic state lawmakers, who hold ultimate control of the redistricting process, settled on a map that made only modest adjustments to the status quo lines.
First, a bit of history: A state court judge oversaw the process of drawing the map used in the 2022 elections following a long legal battle and the inability of New York’s bipartisan Independent Redistricting Commission to agree on new lines. But Democrats scored a court victory last summer when a state appellate court ruled that the redistricting commission should redraw the map.
Republicans appealed that decision, and oral arguments were held in November before New York’s Court of Appeals, the state’s highest court.
留言