Gerrymandering is accelerating across the country with Republicans aggressively redrawing congressional districts to increase their political power. Republicans are set on dismantling fair representation, with a huge focus on majority Black districts in the South. Not only are minority communities at risk of losing the ability to elect preferred representatives, but their access to a fair democratic process could be a thing of the past.
Additionally, SCOTUS’ recent rulings, like allowing racial gerrymandering in states, indicate their unwillingness to protect the Voting Rights Act.
Jen Rubin discusses the impending threat to fair representation with Ari Berman.
Ari Berman is Mother Jones’ national voting rights correspondent. He’s the author of the new book Minority Rule: The Right-Wing Attack on the Will of the People—and the Fight to Resist It, as well as Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America.
Jen Rubin: Hi, this is Jen Rubin, Editor-in-Chief of the Contrarian. We’re delighted to have back Ari Berman, who is the voting rights correspondent for Mother Jones. Welcome, Ari!
Ari Berman: Hey, Jen, great to see you again, thanks.
Jen Rubin: There are so many cases now of re-redistricting. We thought it would be helpful to take a little trip around the country. We all know that in California, Prop 50 is on the ballot next Tuesday, and if that goes through, how many potential seats could Democrats pick up there?
Ari Berman: They could potentially pick up 5 seats. Now, it’s not a sure thing. Some of these are still swing districts, so it’s not like a guaranteed 5 seats, but I think they feel pretty comfortable about 3 seats, and then maybe up to 5, and that was designed to offset Texas’s map. Which was passed in response to Donald Trump’s insane pressure campaign there, and so the idea is California would offset Texas. Now, it’s not that simple, because a lot of other states have jumped into the fray since then, but that was the initial design.
Jen Rubin: Let’s take Texas. How confident are Republicans in those five states? They drew the lines using some figures that may come back to haunt them. They’re looking at Hispanic turnout, to be as favorable for them as it was in 2024. And from polling information, we know that Donald Trump support among Hispanic voters has dropped precipitously. Could those 5 seats in Texas turn out to be fewer than 5 seats?
Ari Berman: Yeah, it’s possible. I mean, similar to California, where they probably drew 3 seats that are going to go Republican no matter what, and then 2 of them could be more like toss-ups, because there’s 2 seats that were drawn in South Texas to try to oust Hispanic Democrats, but those Hispanic Democrats could hold on. There are also known quantities down there, so as Trump continues to lag with Hispanics, it’s possible that that map is not going to be as much of a sure thing as they thought it was, although they’re still going to end up with more seats than they otherwise would have had if they didn’t do this whole thing. And the amazing thing about this whole conversation, Jen, is that usually redistricting is motivated by state politics, right? And this has been entirely motivated by national politics. We’ve never had a situation where the President of the United States has demanded that states redistrict to give his party more seats. If you had taken a poll of Texas Republicans, just like if you had taken a poll of Missouri or North Carolina or other Republicans, they did not want to do this. This was entirely based on what the President was demanding, and of course they fell in line, but I think it’s always worth pointing out that context.
Jen Rubin: Absolutely, and it’s also worth pointing out that none of this would be going on if not for our Supreme Court, which essentially threw the door wide open on gerrymandering, saying that you could do political gerrymanding kind of at will, and we’ll get to the latest on the Supreme Court on that front. You mentioned Missouri and North Carolina. What’s going on in those two states?
Ari Berman: So those are two states that have passed new gerrymanders after Texas. They have explicitly targeted Black Democrats in both states. Missouri went after Emmanuel Cleaver, Black Democrat from the Kansas City area, and North Carolina went after Don Davis, a Black Democrat from eastern North Carolina, who represents the Black Belt, the historically black area of the state. So, it’s very similar in what they’re doing. They’re specifically going after one Democrat in each place, and they’re specifically going after a Black Democrat in each state. So, right now, without California, Republicans are up 7 seats, potentially, in the race for the House. Now, if California comes in, that margin will be less, but right now, we have a situation where Republicans have done this in three states, giving them up to 7 seats. They have other states to follow. Democrats have yet to pass a map that has given them one new seat. So, it’s possible this will change after November 4th, or November 5th, whenever the election day actually is. But right now, Republicans are up significantly in this redistricting arms race.
Jen Rubin: Now, because those two states, Missouri and North Carolina, so explicitly went after a Black congressman, one in each, is it possible that courts might invalidate those, either under state law or federal law?
Ari Berman: It’s possible, yeah. I mean, I feel better about the opportunity in Missouri, because they have multiple ways to block it, both through the courts. They’re also trying to get a number of signatures to get it on the ballot, so the voters could weigh in on this, and this whole process in Missouri has been very unpopular. Even in red states, all the polling shows that voters don’t like this effort. It’s very different than California. California asks the voters to weigh in on it, so it’s much more democratic in terms of how they’ve done it. Whereas in Texas, Missouri, North Carolina, there was no input from the voters, and if you had put it to a vote, it would have failed in all three of these states, I’m pretty confident, based on the polling that I’ve seen. So Missouri, they have a plan to block it. North Carolina, they’re gonna try to block it under the Voting Rights Act, and the question is, will the federal courts enforce the Voting Rights Act? They have not been very aggressive about enforcing the Voting Rights Act in recent years, and they’re preparing to further gut that provision of the Voting Rights Act, so I don’t think people feel very confident about it. The North Carolina Supreme Court has also become rapidly partisan in a Republican direction. So, yeah, they’re gonna fight it, but I would say the odds are higher of it being blocked in Missouri than in North Carolina right now.
Jen Rubin: Okay, let’s take a couple other states. There’s now some noise that, after all, Indiana may go forward with redistricting. They push back. The vice president went there, so that’s up in the air. And now, on the other side of the ledger, Virginia is looking at redoing its map. What’s happening in those two states?
Ari Berman: Well, Indiana has really been the focal point of the Stop the Steal gerrymandering addition, because Trump had Indiana Republicans to the White House, J.D. Vance went there twice explicitly to talk about redistricting. There hasn’t been a lot of support for it among Republicans in the Indiana Senate. They have said they don’t have the votes, but there’s just an all-out pressure campaign on them right now to fold. If I had to bet, I would bet on them folding because no state has stood up to Trump. And that’s really been the big difference here in terms of Trump’s effort to try to overturn the election in 2020. He ran into a lot of Republican resistance compared to Trump’s effort to try to re-gerrymander the states. Republicans don’t agree with Trump on this, but they’ve basically gone in line with him for a variety of different reasons, particularly fear of being primaried or having the president go after them. So, I would bet that Indiana would fold, but it’s not a certainty. It could change an hour after we have this conversation. Virginia is kind of doing something similar to North Carolina. Sorry, I mean, sorry, let me say this again. Virginia is doing something similar to what California is doing, which is they are convening a special session to basically pass a map. They have to do it twice, so it’s more complicated. They have to do it this year, then they have to do it next year, then they have to have the voters approve it all in very short order, so it’s unclear if this is going to work. But I think Democrats are excited because a lot of people have been wondering, and I probably get asked this question more than any other, is what are Democrats doing beyond California? Why is California the only state where Democrats seem to be responding? And so, I think the hope is that if Virginia gets involved, that will both tangibly give Democrats more seats, they could maybe get 2 or 3 more districts there, but also it may inspire other Democratic states to step up here and fight fire with fire, because it’s largely been, outside of California, asymmetric warfare in terms of how this fight has played out.
Jen Rubin: Most of the people in Virginia that I’ve spoken to say probably two seats is the most Democrats could hope to pick up. Do you agree with that? And how many would potentially be picked up in Indiana by Republicans?
Ari Berman: 2 in Indiana. But they would basically wipe out all the Democrats. So it would go from a 7-2 map to a 9-0 map. So that is pretty extreme, because they haven’t done that anywhere else. Even Missouri, North Carolina, Texas, I mean, it wasn’t for lack of trying, but they just didn’t have the ability. But to just wipe out every single Democrat, there’s no Democrats in the state anymore. That would be pretty shocking, and it would be a congressional map that’s much, much redder than the state itself. And in terms of Virginia, yeah, we haven’t really seen many plans, so it’s kind of hard to say exactly. But yeah, I mean, Virginia is still closer to a 50-50 state, so I think it would be hard to be maximally aggressive without putting some Democrats at risk here. And again, this is a tricky process they’re going through, but I think the hope is that Republicans have gone to really extreme lengths in normalizing something that was extremely abnormal. Mid-decade redistricting absent a court order, was virtually unheard of outside of Texas doing it in 2003 under the pressure of then-House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, something that I know you and I both remember, because we’re old enough to remember this. But it pretty much never happened. And then Trump just normalized it in state after state, so I think Democrats have to look for creative solutions here to be able to counteract this. And so far, outside of California and Virginia, there have not been other democratic states that have yet to step up. I know Illinois is considering it, some other states are considering it. I just saw the Maryland Senate ruled it out, so I think that was disappointing to national Democrats. But there’s still, regardless of how you do the math, Jen. Republicans are going to be up at the end of the day in a gerrymandering arms race. I mean, they just control more seats, they’re more ruthless about power. The question is, can Democrats get close to parity? So, like, they’re never going to be ahead, but can it be a margin where they’re behind 5 seats instead of 10 seats? That can make a lot of difference in terms of taking back the House.
Jen Rubin: Absolutely. There has been some talk in Illinois, but there’s, on the other side, some concern that if they do that, they may lose, a seat that’s currently represented by a Black representative, or a majority-minority district. What’s the difficulty in Illinois? Could they do this without harming the people that they are, frankly, very interested in maintaining representation for.
Ari Berman: Yeah, I mean, it’s tricky in Illinois because they already have a significantly democratic delegation. They’ve already pushed the boundaries in terms of what they can pick up. I just saw, however, that the Illinois delegation unanimously supported a new map, which they had not done previously. So I think there’s some movement on that front, and some of the vulnerable Democrats, including Lauren Underwood and others, have come out in support of it. It’s hitting some roadblocks in the legislature, so we’ll see if the members of Congress coming out for it will change the dynamics in the legislature. Yeah, there’s unknowns here, because you draw a map, but then you also have to have the elections. Right? And in every state, the more that you try to maximize your gains, you’ll potentially leave yourself open to some unknowns, and so there’s… incumbents generally don’t want to change their districts. But that said, I mean we’re seeing in Missouri, in North Carolina, they’ve gone through all this trouble to get one new district. Just one! So, I mean, you see that one clearly, people are looking at the race for the House, and they’re saying, okay, it could be a landslide, it could be like 2018, where Democrats pick up 40 seats, or it could not be. It could be much more like 2022, for example, where you pick up 10 seats, or 15 seats, and then every seat really does matter. And so Illinois might not seem like a big deal to say we got one new Democratic seat, but at the end of the day, it might actually be a big deal.
Jen Rubin: So, that’s a, frankly, a pretty comprehensive tour of what’s going on, but we want to make the caveat that literally any day, another state may step forward, Democrat or Republican, to try to tip that balance. Meanwhile, something’s going on at the Supreme Court that could make all of this, frankly, look like child’s play, and that is Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. That’s the remaining read that’s still left in the Voting Rights Act after Shelby County wiped out Section 5, and that essentially has allowed, states, to create districts that properly represent minority interest, so that you can create a district. And in fact, this started off in Louisiana, where there was approval for a second Black-represented district. The Supreme Court now has reheard the case, and they and the administration sound like they’re very interested in wiping out, frankly, what’s left of the Voting Rights Act.
Jen Rubin: What’s your assessment of what could happen there? And if it does, what does that mean for representation of Black Americans throughout the country, and particularly in the South?
Ari Berman: Yeah, the oral arguments which were… took place recently were very concerning, because the six conservative justices, in different ways, they weren’t necessarily all on the same page, but in different ways, seemed to have a united goal of, if not killing the remaining section of the Voting Rights Act, at least narrowing it, or weakening it to the point where it wouldn’t have any teeth left, which would sort of be the same as killing it, except they could argue that they hadn’t actually killed it. Which might be actually worse in terms of trying to preserve the legitimacy of the court, but still striking a death blow or a near-deathblow against the Voting Rights Act. But if you look at what it would mean practically, there have been a number of studies of this, one by Fair Fight and Black Voters Matter. They said that it could shift up to 19 seats to Republicans, that’s probably the high end, but I mean, even if you take a conservative estimate, it could shift a half dozen, a dozen… we don’t know how aggressive Republican states will be, but this is happening at the worst possible time, because we’re already in an era of maximalist Republican gerrymandering, when Republicans are trying to squeeze as many seats out as possible. The only districts they haven’t touched so far are those majority-minority districts that are protected by the Voting Rights Act. Without that protection, they could then dismantle majority Black districts throughout the South, possibly in other places, too. There was a study that said that you could lose 30% of the members of the Congressional Black Caucus, and I think it would just turbocharge not just partisan gerrymandering, but racial gerrymandering. It would be very hard, if not impossible to stop gerrymandering in the federal courts, and it would allow you to do the most egregious things that the Voting Rights Act was designed to stop. So I think it’s both potentially cataclysmic from a political perspective, certainly from a voting rights and civil rights perspective, and now we’re just waiting to see what the conservative justices will do. I think the only glimmer of hope from the argument, it wasn’t that they were supportive of the Voting Rights Act, but they didn’t seem to be on the same page about what they wanted to do. And even Louisiana and the Supreme Court and the Justice Department wasn’t necessarily on the same page. And so, maybe there’s just too much confusion about it, maybe they somehow punt or decide this narrowly in a way that the Voting Rights Act survives another day, but I mean it’s clear that the days for the Voting Rights Act are numbered with this current court we have, which of course raises the question of, what do we do about the Supreme Court more broadly? Because I don’t think that the Voting Rights Act is going to survive in any reasonable way, this current court.
Jen Rubin: two things to keep in mind. First of all, I might not call these justices conservative, and back in the day, like 5 years ago, conservative justices used to be textualists. They used to move incrementally, but I understand the reference to them. We could call them MAGA justices, or radical right justices. I just want to underscore something you just said, alright? We could be looking at a map that looks like pre-1968.
Ari Berman: Yep. 1965 maps.
Jen Rubin: Where there was essentially no black representatives from the South.
Ari Berman: That would be a step back of 60, 70 years in social, economic, political progress in this country. It’s hard to think of something that would be a more dramatic reversal of
Jen Rubin: Civil rights, and racial equality than that.
Ari Berman: You’re right, I mean, you’re quite literally going back to the Jim Crow era. I mean, you’re going back to the era in Alabama and Louisiana and Mississippi and all of these states that had disenfranchised Black voters for so many years. where there were no Black representatives. And it’s an inverse, because back then, there were no Republicans, because it was controlled by segregationist Democrats. Now you’re going to move to a situation where there’s no Democrats, there’s no Black representatives, even though in some states, Mississippi is 40% Black, you look at Alabama, Louisiana, these kind of states, they have Black populations of 30% or more. That is why the Supreme Court just recently ruled that Alabama should create a second-majority Black district. And they just recently upheld the map from Louisiana that created a second majority Black district. So, the staggering thing here is that some of the increase in representation for : Black Americans in the South was because of this current Supreme Court. And so, I don’t see how they square this, with what they just did a few years ago. It’s not like we’re asking them to take what the Warren Court did, or some other court that existed 40 or 50 years ago. We’re saying the Roberts Court, just in 2023, said Alabama should create a second majority Black district. In 2024, they allowed Louisiana’s map creating a second majority Black district, which was created by the state of Louisiana. It wasn’t created by liberals in New York or California. It was created by the Republican legislature and governor in Louisiana to create a second-majority Black district. So basically, you’re just saying we want to hold the Supreme Court to its own word of two years ago, of a year ago, in terms of upholding the Voting Rights Act, and basically saying that If you can draw a reasonably configured district that allows people of color to elect their candidates of choice, you should do so. It’s still going to be the case that in Alabama, Louisiana, and all these other states, white Republicans are the overwhelming majority of representatives. That is not changing, but you’re saying that there should be something approaching fair representation in these states, and that… that is what… that is what has occurred in certain places, and now we’re saying you’re going to go from that, from saying that there should be reasonably fair representation, to then saying there should be no representation, and you’re going to turn the clock back 50 or 60 years. The only caveat to this, Jen, is that these Democrats and these Black voters are still going to exist, right? So they’re still gonna have to go somewhere, and if Republicans dismantle these majority-minority districts, that could somehow potentially lead, depending on how the maps were drawn, that could lead to more competitive districts in some of these places. Now, we’ll see if that actually happens, but it’s possible to envision a world in which you create more competitive districts by virtue of dismantling some of these districts, but I think that that’s unlikely to happen with Republicans in charge.
Jen Rubin: I think that underscores just how radical this Court is, how inclined they are to follow, frankly, the radical lead of the administration, and not even their own recent precedent. So it is extremely alarming, and I think it’s fair to say that it’s also an incredible power grab. The Constitution gives Congress the right to implement the post-Civil War amendments, gives Congress the right to try to, amend the racial injustice and racial stain that has afflicted this country. And the court is saying, no, we get to decide after all, which is not exactly constitutional originalism, by this Court. So it’s really a remarkable, remarkable turnaround in many ways. And certainly fuel for the fire for those of us who say the Supreme Court needs to be radically reformed, but we will see.
Jen Rubin: As always, Ari, thank you so much for the depressing tour around the United States and up to the Supreme Court. We will, see how it all works out. But thanks so much, we’ll look forward to having you back soon.
Ari Berman: Thanks, Jen. Great to talk to you again.
