American states traditionally redraw their congressional districts every 10 years. Recently, states have begun redrawing districts mid-cycle to give a political advantage to a particular party. Texas, California, and most recently Virginia and Florida, have all recently undergone high-profile redistricting fights, and the recent Supreme Court Case, Louisiana v. Callais, has set off a new redistricting “arms race.”

We spoke with Benjamin Schneer, associate professor of public policy at Harvard Kennedy School, about gerrymandering in the United States, Louisiana v. Callais, and what these changes mean for voting districts in Louisiana and nationally. A lightly edited version of our conversation is below.  

Q: What is redistricting, and how often, traditionally, do states redistrict?  

Our congressional districts in the United States need to be equal population [across districts, so that every district has the same number of people]. Over time, people move and populations change in terms of their geographic distributions. In the United States, we have a census every 10 years, where they do a count of the population and enumerate the population. Once we have a census, we redraw state legislative districts and congressional districts to make sure that the population in the districts is equal within each state.  

Because the House of Representatives is meant to be a body that is somewhat proportional in its representation, there are times where, if a big population moves from one state to another state, the number of seats is reapportioned. That’s another reason to redraw districts: to add or take away a district.  

Q: What is gerrymandering? And why is it in the news right now?

How districts are drawn has a big impact on political representation and on the political power of the parties. And gerrymandering, generally, is when districts are drawn to advantage or disadvantage a particular group or party when they wouldn’t have that advantage otherwise.

There’s a lot of attention on redistricting and gerrymandering for several reasons.

The first reason is that in the summer of 2025, at the behest of President Trump, the state legislature in Texas redrew their congressional districts mid-decade. And this is unusual. Normally, districts are drawn right after the census. In Texas, they had just enacted a new map right after the census in 2020…the explicit goal of redrawing the map was to add five Republican seats in Congress from Texas.  

Looking forward to the 2026 midterm, which could potentially be close, any partisan advantage will help to maintain a majority in the House. What was maybe unanticipated is that this set off a “race to the bottom,” where many other states took this precedent set by Texas as a signal that they, too, should redraw their maps mid-decade.  

Q: What happened once Texas redrew its districts in 2025?  

California responded by suspending their independent commission, which had been in control of drawing district maps, and redrawing a map that added Democratic seats in California.

A number of other states have followed, including Virginia and Florida. Even though Florida is a majority Republican state in the 2024 election, there were still eight Democratic seats under the old map in Florida. The new map aims to cut four of those seats.  

We’re essentially moving to this world where whichever party has a majority will get closer and closer to winning all the seats in the state. It’s both a much more majoritarian and biased translation of votes into seats. It’s departing from anything resembling proportionality.

Virginia has also just passed a map aiming to eliminate all but one Republican seat in the state. And then Florida passed a map that is also going to eliminate, potentially, four Democratic seats.

The other big recent news is that the Supreme Court just released what seems to be a landmark decision, a case coming out of Louisiana called Callais.

Q: How does the Supreme Court case, Louisiana v. Callais, connect to redistricting?

My reading—and I think many other people’s reading of this case—is that this makes it extraordinarily difficult to bring Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act claims against a district map for vote dilution.  

The Voting Rights Act has been in force since 1965, and Section 2 was specifically meant to protect the ability of minority voters to get some political representation in legislatures and in Congress by preventing maps that diminish their voting power.

Essentially, this decision [Callais v. Louisiana] is going make it very difficult for race to be a factor in the drawing of maps, really weaponizing the 14th Amendment against the VRA. By requiring plaintiffs to prove intentional racial discrimination rather than just a discriminatory effect, the Court has basically neutralized the law. This goes directly against the intent of the original Voting Rights Act, which was explicitly designed to protect the ability of minority groups to have political power and secure fair political representation.

The other key element is that states will use this decision to justify additional re-drawing of their congressional and legislative district maps. Nothing in the decision says they need to re-draw their maps, but it will be used to justify drawing more extreme gerrymanders since they are likely to be upheld in court now.  

Ben Schneer headshot.
“It’s both a much more majoritarian and biased translation of votes into seats. It’s departing from anything resembling proportionality.”
Ben Schneer

Q: What’s the history of gerrymandering in the United States? How is this moment different?

Gerrymandering, drawing a map for a political or partisan advantage, goes back to even before the founding of the country.

But we are in a unique moment right now because the gerrymanders drawn and the approach taken is more extreme and more aggressive.  

I, along with a co-author, Max Palmer at Boston University, have been thinking about this question. One way of framing this is that there's an older era of gerrymandering, and now we are in a new era enabled by a series of court decisions from the John Roberts Supreme Court. We’re in this new world of court-sanctioned partisan redistricting.  

Q: What defines this new era of redistricting?

These Supreme Court decisions along with abundant fine-grained data on voter registration and past votes allow for maps that are really fine-tuned to give a party a large advantage.  

Until maybe 10 or 15 years ago, the courts thought that the idea of partisan gerrymandering was generally bad, even if they weren’t able to come to a decision about how to adjudicate it and to identify what is and is not a partisan gerrymander.  

But now we’ve now shifted to a world where gerrymandering for partisan advantage, to advance the political power of a particular party, is seen as a legitimate redistricting criterion, along with other traditional criteria like compactness or contiguity.

Q: What’s the impact of that shift?  

With many of the legal claims that will come, and that have come, in the past couple of years, if a state can make the case that the reason they drew a particular map was for partisan advantage, that’s a legitimate end now and can be used to protect against claims that a map is, for example, racially discriminatory. If a state can just argue, “no, actually, this is just done to gain political power, adding more Republican or more Democratic seats,” it’s very hard to see a way in which courts will rule against a map, even when it diminishes minority representation in practice.

It’s just a totally different world. There’s a pretty distinct break with the past. And we’re going to see that continue to play out over the next few years with the combination of this mid-decade redistricting and this recent Supreme Court decision.

Q: What will redistricting mean for each party, and “majority-minority districts” across the country?  

Immediately in Louisiana, one majority minority seat is going to be redrawn after Callais. That’s also going to go from a Democratic to a Republican seat. There’s going to be litigation across the South about redrawing maps when primary voting for the 2026 election has already begun or is about to. The landscape is evolving quickly, but right now several other states are calling special sessions to redraw maps to eliminate majority-minority districts including Alabama, Tennessee, and Mississippi. Then other states such as Georgia will likely redraw before 2028.

They may or may not be able to, but by 2028, these maps will all likely be redrawn, and there will just be a further shift that has implications for the number of Republican and Democratic seats in these states, as well as the number of seats where the preferences of minority populations are actually being represented.  

From now until the 2026 election, it’s plausible that five or more current majority minority districts will be redrawn and eliminated.

Q: Will the gerrymandering in Virginia and Florida impact the 2026 midterms? Who will “win” the redistricting battle?

On the one hand, the parties are essentially competing to gerrymander as much as possible. Up until this point, I think you can make the case that these efforts have canceled each other out, roughly speaking.

With this recent Supreme Court decision, I think the consensus is that additional net Republican seats will ultimately be added through this entire mid-decade redistricting exercise. Just to be clear about the scale of this, more than a quarter of all congressional seats have already been redrawn mid-decade as part of this back and forth.

Ultimately, I think it will net out to be a several seat advantage for Republicans. So then the question is, in 2026, how close will the election be? There's a longstanding pattern where the party of the president tends to lose seats in the midterm election. We're probably on track for some shift towards Democrats in 2026. The question is just how big that swing is going to be.

In one version of the world, the swing is so big that all of this jockeying for a additional seats here or there just gets totally washed out anyway by a wave towards Democrats. On the other hand, there's the other possibility that there is a more modest swing towards Democrats, and in that scenario, control of the House could be very close, and one seat here or there could make a difference.  

Q: What are the risks of gerrymandering?

There’s a risk to how people feel about democracy. We know that voters intuitively like fairness, the sense that their vote matters, and the sense that there's a somewhat proportional translation of votes into seats. And extreme gerrymandering goes against all of that. Voters may feel that it starts to undermine the legitimacy of their government.

The instances where I think this is most acute are instances where, similar to what happened in Wisconsin a few years ago, a majority of voters vote for one party, and then the other party maintains a really large majority in the state legislature, essentially minority rule from a political party perspective.

I think voters intuitively feel there is something maybe antidemocratic about that, this idea that a party in power maybe can't lose it. And that does cut at one element of what a democracy is. In a democracy, a party in power does needs to have a chance of losing it. So there is a risk that the current wave of gerrymandering will not only upset voters but also undermine their faith in how well our system of government functions.

Q: What other risks are there?

There's also a risk from the perspective of the gerrymanderers, which is that in order to draw extreme gerrymanders, you sometimes have to draw maps in such a way that the margins by which you win all these seats are increasingly thin. And so even if your party may win the next election, you may worry that if preferences continue to change and, say, there's a really big wave against your party, that you may end up losing more seats than if you had not gerrymandered.

This is what’s known as a dummymander, the idea that a party overreaches and draws a map that's too aggressive. If the tide turns against them in the future, they may get totally wiped out. And so that that can also happen, eventually.  

Now the other problem with all this as applied to the current moment, though, is that we may see just ongoing redrawing of the maps. If we are in a world where you can adjust the map before every election, then the risk of a dummymander starts to be reduced. A party might just calibrate year to year based on predictions about what will happen in the next election.  

Q: How long will extreme gerrymandering persist in the United States?  

Through 2028, we’re probably we're going to be in this race to the bottom, where all these states will be redrawing maps.

Right now, it’s a very clear partisan calculus where essentially neither side will back down, and the incentive is just to squeeze out as many seats as possible. And it is possible to draw maps in California and in Illinois with zero Republican seats. And so there's still juice to squeeze out of these oranges. Things may get quite bizarre in terms of the types of maps that could be drawn with some strange and unnatural political outcomes.

That would be the true race to the bottom scenario. Then the question is, at some point, do voters just get fed up to the point that there's support for real reform? For a long time, people have talked about reforms to partisan gerrymandering. In 2021-2022, there was a bill before the House, the We the People Act, that proposed comprehensive election reforms. But there was just not the appetite among members of Congress to entertain that.

At some point, if this really reaches a fever pitch, maybe it will be possible to revisit this topic in Congress and enact more comprehensive reform. But I'm not optimistic in the short run on that front.

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Photograph by Evelyn Hockstein/The Washington Post/Getty Images. 

Caption: Demonstrators at a 2019 rally at the Supreme Court during gerrymandering cases Lamone v. Benisek and Rucho v. Common Cause.

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