The Supreme Court has now made it easy to gerrymander Black people, Latinos, Asians—really, any racial minority.
In the 1980s, the Supreme Court ruled that you can’t gerrymander racial minorities, spreading them across many districts so that they lose their voting power. Makes sense.
This led to the creation of majority-minority districts, districts. Recently, Black voters in Louisiana sued the state, saying that there are enough Black people to justify two majority Black districts. They won Louisiana, added a second Black district, then got sued again by white people saying that race shouldn’t be a factor at all in drawing districts.
Today, the Supreme Court issued their ruling on the case. It struck down the second Black Louisiana district as an unconstitutional racial gerrymander, but then went even further. Since the 1980s, if Black voters thought that they were being gerrymandered, they just had to show three things:
That black voters are large enough in the state and live close enough together to justify their own district
That they’re politically aligned, like they vote as a block
That white voters, the majority, are politically aligned enough to outmatch the Black vote.
This framework has been used successfully to stop racial gerrymandering for the past 40 years. But today, thanks to the Supreme Court, if Black people want to challenge a racial gerrymander, they must also consider the following:
That the South has made great strides in ending racial discrimination.
That because Black people usually vote Democratic, they have to prove the gerrymandering is because of their race, not their party preference.
That anyone suing over racial gerrymandering should be able to use computers to draw a better map.
This is a high bar for showing discrimination. Here’s what’s going to happen.
Southern states will redraw their maps, eliminating majority and minority districts. And when that happens, Black people, Latinos, and other minority groups will have difficulty undoing it because they will have to prove a massive amount. Look, we don’t know how much this is going to affect the 2026 midterms, but it will definitely help eliminate majority-minority districts before 2028, certainly in the South—you know, the place that Samuel Alito thinks has ended racism.
Ben Sheehan is a political commentator and digital creator. He specializes in civics education, which is showcased in his latest book, What Does the Constitution Actually Say?: A Non-Boring Guide to How Our Democracy Is Supposed to Work. Check out his Substack, Politics Made Easy.
