WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump has urged Republican legislatures to take the rare step of redrawing congressional election maps halfway through the traditional 10-year cycle, launching a gerrymandering arms race that has spread to state capitols across America.
The fight started in Texas, but now Republican-run states of Florida, Indiana, Ohio and maybe Missouri also are gearing up to redraw election maps and send more GOP members to the House. In response, Democrats launched their own mid-cycle redistricting efforts in states like California, New York, Illinois, Maryland, New Jersey and Colorado.
But Louisiana will sit out the scrum for the time being while the state litigates its redistricting before the U.S. Supreme Court.
“To the best of my knowledge, there are no plans to call a special session before our brief is due in a few weeks — we would continue to be stuck between the same rock and a hard place,” said Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill. “I have said all along, the Supreme Court needs to give clarity to Legislatures. That’s who has the constitutional duty to draw maps, not federal judges.”
As chair of the Louisiana House and Governmental Affairs Committee, state Rep. Gerald “Beau” Beaullieu IV, R-New Iberia, would be in charge of any effort to draw new election maps in Louisiana.
“We are leaning on the Attorney General to lead us in these discussions, since there is an ongoing lawsuit,” he said Thursday.
While the Louisiana Constitution and related laws include redistricting instructions for lower-level offices, it remains ambiguous on the rules for drawing the maps to elect members of Congress every two years.
But the biggest holdup is the Louisiana v. Callais lawsuit, in which the U.S. Supreme Court is set to hear arguments next year. The case challenges the congressional maps drafted by the Louisiana Legislature’s Republican supermajority in 2024, which created a second majority-Black district.
“They would be ethically stupid to try and do something in Louisiana, given that the second Black district was created by court order and is the subject of a Supreme Court case,” said Michael Li, a redistricting expert with the Brennan Center for Justice in New York. “Until the current litigation is resolved, (mid-cycle redistricting) would be like the mother of all fights.”
A high-stakes clash
If states do change their maps mid-cycle, it could change the balance of power in Congress.
With 219 Republicans, 212 Democrats and four vacant seats, the GOP has held a narrow majority since the 2022 midterm elections. That majority has put two LSU alumni in two of the nation's most powerful positions: Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, a Republican from the Shreveport suburb of Benton, and House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, a Republican from the New Orleans suburb of Jefferson.
Historically, voters tend to elect a new majority in Congress midway through a president’s four-year term if both branches are dominated by the same party.
Larry Sabato’s Center for Politics at the University of Virginia surmised in a report this week that the redistricting seems to focus on seats won by more moderate candidates in districts won by the other party’s presidential candidate. Adding more partisan voters to those districts could mean more ideological candidates on the ballot.
“It’s possible that the median House seat could move further right of the nation if Republicans come out of this looming redistricting fight ahead,” the report stated.
Drawing election maps was once done by hand and made more brutal by the raw politics of electoral survival. The hardball politics remain, but progress in technology and databasing allows map makers to more quickly identify how voters probably will cast their ballots, then organize precincts to create a safe seat for one party or the other.
The U.S. Constitution mandates that every person is counted every 10 years to determine how many members of the House each state will send to Washington. The next national census is not scheduled until 2030.
A political brawl
Trump began the bare-knuckled political melee by pressing Texas to tinker with its congressional districts to add enough GOP voters to ensure five more Republicans will go to Washington in 2027.
About 50 Texas Democrats fled the state to keep the Legislature from having a two-thirds quorum necessary to conduct business. But they are subject to a $500 a day fine.
Attorney General Ken Paxton on Thursday asked an Illinois court to send the Texans back to Austin.
And in an interview Friday with NBC, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said he would keep calling special sessions until the congressional redistricting was completed. The current special session is set to adjourn August 19. But qualifying for the midterms is in December and the primary election in Texas is March 3.
Florida officially announced Thursday that Republicans hope to redraw three districts in their favor.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom has a plan to redistrict that populous blue state, as do the governors of New York and Illinois.