*** 5/13/26 - Ed Kilgore - What Republicans Got Out of Their Gerrymandering Blitz..............
Buzz Sawyer
What Republicans Got Out of
Their Gerrymandering Blitz
By Ed Kilgore, political columnist for Intelligencer since 2015
Two weeks have passed since the U.S. Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act, pouring rocket fuel on Donald Trump’s pre-midterms partisan gerrymandering blitz. Republican legislators across the South immediately started racing to extinguish majority-Black congressional districts before the midterm elections. Now it looks like we can see the beginning of the end of the blitz and assess the damage to voting rights and the benefit to the GOP. In the past 24 hours, Republicans in four southern states have made decisions on the scope and timing of their post-Callais gerrymanders.
In Alabama, the proposed new congressional map wipes out one majority-Black district but leaves another intact for the moment.
The same is true in Louisiana; the Baton Rouge–based district at the center of the dispute in Callais is slated for extinction, but a New Orleans–based majority-Black district will apparently survive.
The South Carolina senate decided against extending its current legislative session to extinguish its one majority-Black congressional seat (held by the venerable Jim Clyburn). But then (apparently at the behest of his friend the president of the United States) Governor Henry McMaster reportedly decided to call a special session to carry out the gerrymander anyway.
Meanwhile, Mississippi governor Tate Reeves decided not to overturn earlier primary results in order to blow up his state’s one majority-Black district and run off Congressmen Bennie Thompson. But he vowed to conduct a gerrymander prior to next year’s state-legislative elections and end “Bennie G. Thompson’s reign of terror.”
Tennessee has already finished up an especially speedy gerrymander that extinguished the state’s one majority-Black congressional district.
And despite some caterwauling from MAGA types, Georgia governor Brian Kemp ruled out redrawing his state’s maps for the midterms but has now decided to call a June special session to conduct a gerrymander for 2028.
If this is the extent of the Republicans’ post-Callais gerrymandering before the 2026 elections, the decision’s net damage to Democrats is one seat each in Louisiana, Alabama, Tennessee, and South Carolina. Including the recent Florida GOP gerrymander and the Virginia Supreme Court decision overturning a voter-approved Democratic gerrymander, that means Republicans will roll into the midterms with 12 U.S. House seats in their sights, all of which Democrats thought they would control as recently as two weeks ago.
2026 redistricting battles may drag out in some areas. There will likely be litigation over most of these late gerrymanders, though it’s pretty clear southern Republicans simply walked through a door that the U.S. Supreme Court threw open. In a case unrelated to Callais, the Missouri Supreme Court just rejected a challenge to that state’s earlier GOP gerrymander, which was aimed at purging Black Democratic congressman Emanuel Cleaver of Kansas City. Virginia Democrats are pursuing last-gasp legal challenges to their State Supreme Court’s coup, but none of them look promising.
Southern Republicans’ efforts to wipe out or at least minimize Black Democratic representation in Congress and in state legislatures will certainly increase before the 2028 elections. Democrats are already planning to retaliate after this year’s midterms in every state where they have the power to control redistricting. This race to the bottom might, and probably should, encourage the national parties to invest heavily in state-legislative races this fall in places where either party could win or lose a governing trifecta, along with the power to gerrymander. But unless Democrats mount a serious comeback in the former Confederate states, the Black representation that so many people fought and died to secure is now very likely to slide back down toward Jim Crow levels. That, along with the destruction of Roe v. Wade, will be Justice Samuel Alito’s enduring legacy.
This post has been updated.