Last Week in Redistricting
Last week was a doozy of a week in redistricting news. Here's a quick rundown of the highlights.
Texas started this mess, so let’s start this rundown with Texas.1
Texas Hold’Em
When we last left our heroes/villains (depending on your vantage point) from Texas, the Texas legislature had passed a map that was expected to shift five districts from Democratic to Republican control. Depending on who you ask, they did this for one of two reasons. Distinguishing between those reasons is key to understanding what comes next.
On July 7, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) sent a letter to Texas demanding that four districts be altered because they were, according to the DOJ, “unconstitutional ‘coalition districts’” drawn by using “race base considerations.” See below for a clip from that letter. Note that there’s no mention of partisanship there—just race.
A few days later, President Trump called for the Texas state legislature to redistrict in order to flip five seats from Democratic to Republican. The President reiterated that call in August when he claimed the Republicans were “entitled” to five additional Republican seats because he won the state convincingly in 2016, 2020, and 2024. Note the language here, too—partisanship, not race.
So, we have two explanations offered—partisanship (in Trump’s rhetoric) and race (in the DOJ letter). At its core, that is the legal disagreement at play .
The plaintiffs marshaled a challenge to these maps, alleging that the newly passed maps unfairly and illegally diluted minority votes. They relied on lots of evidence to support their claims, but two major ones were the DOJ letter—which they claimed was evidence that these districts were targeted because of race, and a series of expert reports that demonstrated, through a variety of statistical techniques, that race was the key driving force for the new maps, and that minority voters were denied the opportunity to elect a candidate of their choice.2
The defendants, for their part, argued that the new maps were not motivated by race at all, but by partisanship.3 They wanted to get more Republicans in office. Full-stop. Their evidence was, like the plaintiffs’, multifaceted, but the crux was a series of expert witnesses of their own who argued, through a variety of statistical demonstrations, that the best explanation for the resulting maps is partisanship, not race, and that minority voters in the affected districts did not speak with a singular voice.4
Now to last week.
On Wednesday, November 18, a three judge panel ruled that the new maps—the ones that would have given the Republicans five additional seats—are unconstitutional because they target minority voters and dilute their votes. Here’s the TL;DR part of the order:
The rationale is spelled out in 160 pages, but the key line of argument is that these lines were drawn because of race (not partisanship). Here’s one clip where the majority uses Governor Abbott’s words against him:
And, here’s a fairly succinct summary (at least in the context of legal opinions) of the majority’s take on Dr. Moon Duchin’s expert testimony:
Race, not partisanship.
This was a 2-1 decision but the dissent by Judge Jerry Smith was a doozy. Judge Smith used the phrase “I dissent” more than a dozen times across more than 100 pages and concludes with an 11 item “non-exhaustive list of misleading, deceptive, or false statements Judge Brown (A Trump appointed judge who wrote the majority opinion) put forward.” The dissent also includes 17 mentions of George Soros and notes that “If…there were a Nobel Prize for Fiction, Judge Brown’s opinion would be a prime candidate.”
Ignoring, for a second, the more…let’s say unusual parts of the dissent, the crux of Judge Smith’s argument is, exactly what we would expect. The new maps were drawn because of partisanship, not race. In the words of Judge Smith: “The most obvious reason for mid-cycle redistricting, of course, is partisan gain.’ That is the core of this case, and I will repeat it ad nauseam. Judge Brown won’t tell you that. I just did.”
After the dust settled from the dissent, the defendants’ filed an appeal to the United States Supreme Court. Justice Alito quickly ruled that the lower court ruling wouldn’t stand. Candidate filing, which was already underway in Texas, could continue under the old maps for now. The U.S. Supreme Court will soon (the plaintiffs have until 5:00 pm Monday to file a response) rule whether Texas’ mid-decade redistricting will stand.
And, somehow, that wasn’t even the only redistricting news this week.
Now to North Carolina.
North Carolina had two redistricting related items last week.
First, a federal court in Winston Salem heard a challenge of the new maps (passed in 2025, to be used in 2026).5 The now familiar race v. partisanship debate was at the forefront, but so was, what Will Doran at WRAL described as a “new legal theory” arguing that “the new map punishes voters for voicing political views the state legislature doesn’t agree with, bu taking away their representation in Congress and ensuring that the state has no more competitive congressional seats.”
Last week, there was also an important decision (Williams v. Hall) about gerrymandering in North Carolina, but it wasn’t about the new maps It was about the old maps (passed in 2023, used in 2024).
The old maps were already being challenged with plaintiffs arguing—you guessed it—they were unconstitutional racial gerrymanders. The defendants argued—you guessed it—that they drew these lines for partisan gain and the maps had nothing to do with race.
Ultimately, a three judge panel6 ruled unanimously with the defendants, and allowed the old maps to stay.
But, what does that mean for the “new maps?” In short, we don’t know. As I told Sarah Michels at Carolina Public Press, it certainly doesn’t seem like good news for the plaintiffs. But, it is entirely possible that the court might look at the new maps in a different light—particularly since the new maps fractured the black vote even more than the previous maps.
Some Other Redistricting Items From This Week
Politico had a fascinating poll gauging public opinion on redistricting. Their conclusion: partisans gonna partisan (but they feel kinda bad about it). More formally, they find that Democrats think that the Democrats should respond to the current redistricting mess by gerrymandering in favor of Democrats. Republicans think that Republicans should gerrymander in favor of Republicans.
But, they also find that, when asked more general questions about how maps should be drawn, Americans of both parties believe that lines should be drawn by an “independent, politically neutral process.” Just 7 percent of those surveyed believe that political maps should be “drawn by state legislatures, without approval by voters”, which is, exactly how they are drawn in North Carolina.
South Carolina legislator Jordan Pace unveiled a map that he said he plans to propose in a future legislative session session. The proposed map would target the 6th district, currently held by African American Democrat Jim Clyburn (the one in pink). Although smart South Carolina journalists remind us that Senate leadership in South Carolina has said they don’t want to take on mid-decade redistricting, this is, as election law expert Nicholas Stephanopoulos noted, “a glimpse of our post-Callais future if the Court nullifies or neuters the VRA — no congressional representation at all for South Carolina’s Black voters.”
If there’s one thing I know about Texans, it’s that they think they are the biggest, loudest, most important state in the country, so calling them out first should be considered a Lone Star complement of the highest order.
Plaintiffs need to demonstrate that the 3 part test known as the Gingles criteria are met. This comes from a case called Thornburg v. Gingles—a(nother) case out of North Carolina. This is critical to understanding racial dilution claims. I’ll write a post on that case at some point before too long.
The reason the defendants’ are embracing the partisan explanation (“we did it to get more Republicans”) and avoiding mentions of race the way a celiac avoids a fresh baguette, is because of a case from North Carolina called Rucho v. Common Cause. In Rucho, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that, although they may not be wild about partisan gerrymandering, they don’t believe it’s any of the federal courts’ business—leaving state courts as the only legal avenue for partisan gerrymandering claims.
The Callais case, which the U.S. Supreme Court recently heard, could change all of this and make racial vote dilution claims under Section II of the Voting Rights Act, difficult, if not impossible to litigate successfully. The specifics of how Callais could affect representation are unknown, but it is possible that Callais could virtually eliminate black congressional representation in the United States South as it would remove some of the few remaining guardrails that make racial gerrymandering and maps that dilute minority voting power unconstitutional.
A 3-judge panel that included Judge Richard Myers. If that name rings a bell, it might be because he’s the judge who ruled against Jefferson Griffin in the Riggs/Griffin election that would never end.
I’ve written about the specifics of North Carolina’s mid-decade redistricting in a piece for The Assembly and in a post here. I won’t rehash it here, except to remind everyone that North Carolina’s mid-decade redistricting is limited to two districts (1 and 3) and that the arguments from each side (race v. partisanship) are similar to the Texas case.