National Redistricting Battle Shifts to Statehouses and City Councils After Supreme Court Ruling

After a flurry of congressional redistricting ahead of the midterm elections, a new phase of the national battle for partisan control is set to begin, potentially affecting representation on issues ranging from tax rates and social safety net programs to teacher salaries, housing regulations, and local road repairs. Georgia's Republican-led Legislature will convene on June 17 for a special session focused on redistricting for the 2028 elections.

The agenda includes new voting districts not only for Congress but also for the state House and Senate, and possibly even the state's utility regulatory commission. This marks the first time since a recent U.S.

Supreme Court ruling weakened minority voting protections that a state legislature will attempt to redraw its own districts. Mississippi Republicans and New York Democrats could also undertake legislative redistricting before their 2027 and 2028 elections, respectively.

It remains unclear how many legislatures will follow, and whether the mid-decade redistricting wave will extend to county commissions, city councils, and school boards that make decisions affecting people's daily lives. The impact could be widespread.

"The stakes here are not political, they are deeply human," said Joe Kennedy III, founder of the Groundwork Project, a nonprofit supporting local civil rights and democracy organizations. Voting district boundaries are typically redrawn once a decade after each U.S.

census to account for population changes. However, last summer, President Donald Trump urged Texas Republicans to redraw congressional districts to try to win additional seats in the midterm elections.

Other states followed with their own partisan gerrymandering. Then a 6-3 Supreme Court ruling in late April jumpstarted even more redistricting.

The court struck down a majority-Black congressional district in Louisiana as an illegal racial gerrymander, providing grounds for Republicans in other states to reshape districts with large minority populations that have elected Democrats. In Georgia, a federal judge ruled in 2023 that some congressional, state Senate, and state House districts were drawn in a racially discriminatory manner.

The Legislature quickly approved revised maps with new majority-Black districts, though they resulted in little change to Republican majorities in the 2024 elections. Governor Brian Kemp has called lawmakers into special session to again redraw districts in light of the Supreme Court's decision in the Louisiana case.

This could allow Republicans to undo the court-ordered changes made in 2023 and potentially redraw other Democratic-held minority districts to the GOP's advantage. Republicans have yet to unveil details of their plans, but Democratic state Rep.

Tanya Miller, who is running for attorney general, denounced the upcoming redistricting as a means of "rigging maps to maintain power." Several months before the Supreme Court ruling, a report by Fair Fight Action and Black Voters Matter forecast that Republicans in 10 Southern states could eliminate 191 Democratic-held legislative seats, including 140 districts with Black or Hispanic majorities, if the Supreme Court gutted federal Voting Rights Act protections for minorities. "If anything, our report was an understatement," Cliff Albright, co-founder and executive director of Black Voters Matter, recently told The Associated Press.

"What's at stake is the future of this democracy." Other analysts do not expect that many seats to be redistricted, but they do expect the Supreme Court's decision to ripple through states. "We're going to potentially see a lot of frenzied efforts at every level, including at the local level, to try out undoing district maps and configurations that have performed quite well in providing improved representation for communities of color," said Kareem Crayton, vice president of the Washington office of the Brennan Center for Justice.

The precedent from the recent Supreme Court decision is already being applied in several states. In light of the ruling, a federal appeals court is allowing Alabama to use a state Senate map approved by Republican lawmakers in this year's election instead of one imposed by a federal judge who found the state had diluted the voting power of Black residents.

The change affects two state Senate districts in the Montgomery area. The Supreme Court has sent legislative redistricting cases filed on behalf of Black voters in Mississippi and Native Americans in North Dakota back to lower courts for further consideration in light of its Louisiana decision.

The Washington attorney general has asked the Supreme Court to do the same for legislative redistricting cases involving Hispanic voters in that state. About half the states have provisions in their constitutions prohibiting mid-decade redistricting of state legislative seats, said Justin Levitt, a law professor at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles who runs the "All About Redistricting" website.

But even in states where it's allowed, lawmakers may have fewer reasons to redraw their own districts than those for Congress, Levitt said. Politicians who promoted congressional redistricting for the 2026 midterms often justified it as a way to counter gerrymandering in other states and win as many seats as possible for their party.

They had extra motivation because a swing of only a few seats nationally in the November elections could affect control of the closely divided U.S. House.

By contrast, most state legislative chambers already are dominated by one party. "There's a lot less incentive, if you already control the state legislature by 10 or 12 seats, to eke out an incremental one or two at the expense of really ticking off your own party membership, or at the expense of maybe risking losing seats in a broader way," Levitt said.

The Supreme Court decision making it more difficult to prove Voting Rights Act violations has already affected some local governments. Plaintiffs have voluntarily dismissed a challenge to commission districts in Meriwether County, Georgia.

A federal court has accepted new legal briefs in a challenge to Board of Supervisors districts in DeSoto County, Mississippi. And Indiana's attorney general has asked a federal appeals court to take note of the Louisiana case when deciding a challenge to how judges are selected in Lake County.

Over roughly the past four decades, data from the University of Michigan shows that cities, counties, and school boards have been involved in more than three-fifths of the 466 lawsuits alleging violations of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which forbids providing minorities less opportunity than other voters to elect the representatives of their choice. But that does not necessarily mean local governments will rush to redistrict as a result of a weakened Voting Rights Act.

The Supreme Court decision cleared the way for officials to justify redistricting based on partisan ambitions, but many local offices are officially nonpartisan.