The coast-to-coast battle to gain an edge in November’s elections through partisan gerrymandering is racing to its conclusion – with Republicans poised to finish with as many as 10 seats ahead of Democrats through redistricting alone.

The GOP kicked off the fight last year in Texas, changing boundaries for US House districts in the hopes of improving the party’s chances of surviving a blue wave this fall, with Democrats responding in turn. The US Supreme Court’s blockbuster decision last month to gut one of the remaining pillars of the 1965 Voting Rights Act further supercharged redistricting efforts across the South, prompting several Republican-controlled states to move election dates and eliminate districts with sizable Black populations.

The moves could be a major boon in efforts to protect House Speaker Mike Johnson’s razor-thin majority ahead of the midterm elections. But regardless of the outcome in November, the mid-decade redistricting battle has likely altered American politics permanently – fueling a growing appetite to redraw lines for partisan advantage every election cycle, rather than every decade after the census, as is traditional.

“There is no normal,” said Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Marymount’s law school who runs the “All About Redistricting” website. He pointed to the high court’s string of election-related rulings in recent years, including a 2019 opinion declaring that federal courts could not police partisan gerrymanders, as helping pave the way for the extreme actions now taking hold.

“The Supreme Court has effectively announced that the adults have left the room,” he said. “What you see is what you get when you reward bad behavior, which is a lot more bad behavior.”

With primaries well underway around the country, both parties now have run out of battlegrounds on which to wage new redistricting fights this year. But they are gearing up for even more aggressive gerrymanders in the 2028 election cycle.

Here’s a look at where the redistricting battle stands:

Republicans have a slim majority in the US House, 218-212, counting newly independent California Rep. Kevin Kiley, who still caucuses with the GOP despite leaving the party amid a tough reelection race in the wake of redistricting. The party faces a difficult path in retaining its hold on the chamber after November’s elections, given that the president’s party typically loses power in the midterms.

Facing that history, Texas Republicans kicked off the mid-decade redistricting campaign last year at President Donald Trump’s behest. Roughly 10 months later, Republicans have changed boundaries in six states that target 14 Democratic-held districts.

Louisiana’s GOP-controlled legislature is still at work on a map that takes aim at a Democratic district, but it is expected to win the approval of lawmakers and its Republican Gov. Jeff Landry. Landry took the extraordinary step of postponing the state’s primary elections for the House to respond to the US Supreme Court’s ruling, which struck down the state’s congressional map.

Republican officials in Alabama also changed their election calendar, setting a new special primary election for four US House seats on August 11 in their quest to target one of two Democrats in the state’s seven-member House delegation.

(A court ruling Tuesday blocked Alabama’s new map. But state officials have filed an emergency appeal with the US Supreme Court, asking the justices to revive their plan.)

Should they succeed both in Louisiana and Alabama, Republicans would end up with 10 more seats that favor their party through redistricting than Democrats have drawn.

Despite their edge in the gerrymandering battles, redistricting alone might not save the GOP paper-thin majority in the House. Trump’s approval rating in CNN’s Poll of Polls stands at just 36%, among the lowest of his career – adding to the headwinds his party faces.

“Republicans have added about 10 seats that will have moved the median district even further to the right,” said Adam Kincaid, president of the National Republican Redistricting Trust, a key player in this cycle’s map-drawing. “It certainly will help hold the majority in the fall.”

Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini said the redistricting push has proved worthwhile by helping to reduce the number of competitive districts the GOP must aggressively defend in November.

“Even if Democrats are still favored to win,” he said, “it’ll be a very narrow seat margin.”

Justin Chermol, a spokesman for House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries, said Democrats have the momentum heading into the midterms and Republicans “at best” will net “two or three seats as a result of their gerrymandering scheme, aided by the Supreme Court gutting the Voting Rights Act.”

“During Donald Trump’s first midterm election, we won 40. Democrats only need to flip a fraction of that amount in November,” Chermol said. “We will take back the House in a few months.”

Some state-level Republicans have balked at the national pressure to change their boundaries.

On Tuesday – as early voting in the state’s primary election got underway – the GOP-controlled state Senate in deep-red South Carolina bucked Trump and refused to approve a map that would have targeted the sole Democrat in the state’s delegation, 17-term Rep. Jim Clyburn, an influential figure in national politics.

Some Republican lawmakers said it was just too late to act, given that more than 25,000 South Carolinians already had cast ballots that morning.

“Neither my conscience nor common sense will allow me to stop an election that has already begun,” said GOP state Sen. Richard Cash, reversing his earlier support for the plan.

The resistance among some South Carolina Republicans, however, had brewed for weeks. In an impassioned floor speech earlier this month, Republican state Senate Majority Leader Shane Massey warned that seeking a clean GOP sweep of the state’s seven seats would put Republican incumbents at risk by adding too many additional Democratic voters to their districts.

Massey, who said he fielded calls from Trump seeking a new map, also argued there was a benefit to South Carolina having at least one Democrat in Washington. “Regardless of who the president is, regardless of who’s in charge, there has to be somebody in South Carolina who can make a phone call and somebody at the White House will answer it,” he said.

The saga in South Carolina echoed last year’s dramatic outcome in Indiana, where Republicans in the state Senate rejected Trump’s demands to produce two more US House seats friendly to the GOP.

The president scored payback in this month’s Republican primary election, toppling five Indiana state senators who defied him. But any revenge that Washington Republicans might seek against those who rebelled in the South Carolina Senate might have to be served cold. Senators in the Palmetto State are not for up reelection until 2028.

Overall, redistricting has yielded just six more seats friendly to Democrats.

But it’s not for lack of trying.

In response to Texas, Democrats in California persuaded voters to set aside an independent redistricting process and approve a map with five additional Democratic-friendly districts. A court ruling in Utah, meanwhile, paved the way for a Democratic-friendly district in Salt Lake City.

But the party’s bruising, multimillion-dollar effort to gain seats in Virginia failed. Voters backed an initiative earlier this year aimed at helping Democrats win four additional US House seats from the state, only to have the state Supreme Court block it.

However, Elaine Kamarck, a senior fellow at Brookings Institution and longtime Democratic National Committee member, argues that Republicans may have overreached in their redistricting push in some places, such as heavily Latino districts in Texas.

Trump “did do well among Hispanics in 2024,” but that was before his administration’s aggressive deportation actions, she said. “The polling shows Hispanics are not crazy about Trump anymore.”

Even as the window closes on further action that could affect November’s midterms, both parties are preparing to move aggressively on maps that will shape future elections.

Next month, Georgia Republicans will hold a legislative session to seek additional House seats in the 2028 election.

And in Mississippi, GOP Gov. Tate Reeves has pledged to target the state’s sole Democrat, Rep. Bennie Thompson. Thompson, who has served more than three decades in the House, gained national attention and Trump’s enmity as chairman of the House select committee that investigated the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol.

Democrats also plan their own blitz – although it will require them to dismantle independent redistricting systems in some of the states they control.

Jeffries recently told CNN that his fellow Democrats in New York, New Jersey, Washington state, Colorado, Oregon, Maryland and Illinois must act “aggressively” to respond to the GOP’s gerrymandering campaign. Additionally, half a dozen more states could be on the table if Democrats can win key state races this November.

In heavily Democratic Maryland, the state Senate President Bill Ferguson recently reversed his earlier resistance to a map that would target the sole Republican in the state’s congressional delegation.

Ferguson said he now is weighing a special legislative session after the state’s June 23 primary election to craft a ballot initiative on redistricting, in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision further weakening the Voting Rights Act. The ballot measure would be put before voters in November. “Maryland must respond as the ground shifts under us,” he said in a statement.

And Democrats have indicated a willingness to pursue redistricting campaigns in states that already have drawn new lines this year, including California, if the party retains its hold on the governorship there.

“There is no federal law that requires congressional districts to be contiguous,” Levitt noted. “If California wanted to, it could put pockets of deep-red San Bernadino County in with San Francisco or deep-red northern Mendocino County in with West Hollywood.”

When it comes to partisan gerrymanders, “there’s a lot more room for things to get worse,” he said.

This story has been updated to add additional details.

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