Alabama has formally asked the U.S. Supreme Court to clear the way for it to use a congressional map that it had adopted in 2023, which has one majority-black district, rather than a court-ordered map that has two such districts.
Alabama Solicitor General A. Barrett Bowdre told the justices that otherwise the state would have to “hold elections under a map that was erroneously ordered at best and unconstitutional at worst. Nothing requires that result,” Bowdre wrote. “Americans, no less in Alabama, deserve a republic free of racial sorting now, and state officials deserve an opportunity to give it to them.”
Republicans, meanwhile, continue to lead Democrats in the redistricting wars while also having gotten a very favorable ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court earlier this month, striking down race-based congressional districts through misuse of the Voting Rights Act.
At the latest count, Republicans could add 14 additional congressional seats during the fall midterms, while Democrats, through their own gerrymandering effort, could add six, with fewer than 16 seats around the country considered toss-ups or close.
Here is a breakdown of seats per party:
Republicans could also pick up additional seats in South Carolina, Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi, according to reports, after the Supreme Court narrowed the parameters of Section II of the Voting Rights Act, declaring districts drawn specifically to favor race or an ethic group to be unconstitutional.
Just days after Tennessee’s Republican-led legislature approved a new congressional map that removes the state’s only Democrat-held, majority-Black district — resulting in an all-Republican delegation — a new “Crystal Ball” redistricting analysis points to broader implications for the political landscape.
The developments come as Democrats, including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), assess the potential impact on their party’s chances of regaining control of both chambers.
On Friday, the Virginia Supreme Court struck down a Democrat-inspired gerrymandered congressional map that would have given the party four of the five seats currently held by Republicans in a state that is about as evenly divided as any in the country.
“On March 6, 2026, the General Assembly of Virginia submitted to Virginia voters a proposed constitutional amendment that authorizes partisan gerrymandering of congressional districts in the Commonwealth. We hold that the legislative process employed to advance this proposal violated Article XII, Section 1 of the Constitution of Virginia. This constitutional violation incurably taints the resulting referendum vote and nullifies its legal efficacy,” said the 4-3 ruling.
“Virginians voted by a wide margin” in 2020 “to reform the redistricting process in the Commonwealth in an effort to end partisan gerrymandering,” the ruling continued. “They adopted Article II, Section 6-A of the Constitution of Virginia to create the Virginia Redistricting Commission. Under the 2020 amendment, if this bipartisan commission could not reach a consensus, the responsibility to achieve the amendment’s ultimate goal — ridding political partisanship as much as possible from the redistricting task — would become the constitutional responsibility of the Supreme Court of Virginia.”
“In 2021, partisan disputes in the Virginia Redistricting Commission deadlocked the 16-member commission. When the task fell to us pursuant to Article II, Section 6-A, we unanimously ordered that the prior district maps be replaced with wholly new maps that commentators across a wide spectrum of political views later deemed to be free of partisan bias,” the ruling noted further.
The court said that the Democrat majority in the state legislature earlier this year then decided to put a new politically gerrymandered map to a vote of the people.
“Under the proposed new map, approximately 47% of Virginians that voted for representatives of one of the major political parties in the last congressional election would now be represented by 9% of Virginia’s delegation to the U.S. House of Representatives — while the approximately 51% of Virginians that voted for the other major political party would now be represented by 91% of Virginia’s congressional delegation,” the court wrote.
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