For more than four decades, the Ninth Congressional District of Tennessee stood as a bulwark, ensuring that the Black voters who compose a majority of the city of Memphis could choose their representative in Washington. With a nod from the Supreme Court, the state’s ruling Republicans took barely a week to wipe that district off the map.
Tennessee yesterday enacted legislation that splits much of Memphis among three separate districts, diluting the votes of Black residents and all but guaranteeing Republicans an additional House seat. The move was the first, and surely not the last, GOP legislative response to the Supreme Court’s decision last week gutting enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. Across the South, Republicans are rushing to redraw congressional districts that, because of the Court’s 6–3 ruling in Louisiana v. Callais, they believe they are no longer required to reserve for nonwhite voters, who predominantly cast ballots for Democrats.
Voting-rights advocates expected GOP-led states to use the ruling to escalate a nationwide gerrymandering race. But the speed and blunt force of the Republican response has been astonishing. Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry invoked emergency powers usually meant for natural disasters to suspend a primary election that was already under way to give lawmakers time to redistrict. Alabama Republicans held votes during a tornado watch while a storm flooded the state capitol to allow for new primary elections if federal courts clear the state’s path to redistrict. South Carolina legislators also took an initial step toward gerrymandering the district of Representative James Clyburn, one of the nation’s most prominent Black leaders.
Collectively, the moves could increase the GOP’s chances of retaining its narrow House majority in this fall’s midterm elections. Republicans received another major judicial boost this morning, when Virginia’s highest court struck down a statewide referendum designed by Democrats to give them as many as four additional House seats.
The Virginia decision will help Republicans in the short term, but the Callais ruling, written by Justice Samuel Alito and joined by the Supreme Court’s five other conservative members, could benefit the GOP and reshape congressional representation in the South for years to come. “This feels like the echoes of the ‘southern strategy’ of the ’60s,” Anneshia Hardy, the executive director of the advocacy group Alabama Values, told us. “This is diluting Black political power.” When the Court issued its ruling last week, Hardy had just finished speaking at an event at the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery. She got back to her car and wept.
In Louisiana, more than 42,000 voters had already cast ballots in the state’s May 16 primaries when Landry halted the elections for U.S. House races. The move prompted chaos and confusion, election officials told us. Years of attacks on the integrity of elections have already sowed distrust among voters in the system, making the difficult task of election administration all the more challenging. Among election workers, “it’s crushing for morale,” David Becker, the executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation & Research, told us. He equated Landry’s move to ripping a tablecloth off an already set table.
To complicate matters further, Landry postponed only the House primaries. He did not call off the state’s highly competitive Senate primary, leading to worries that turnout for that race will plummet. In southern Louisiana’s Lafayette Parish, Registrar of Voters Charlene Meaux-Menard told us that many of the parish’s 160,000 voters are baffled about why three polling locations are open for voting, because they thought the entire election was canceled. The Republican visited the sites and wrote on Facebook that the election was still on: “The voters are confused—besides us—having to do this new process,” she said. “They’re thinking the election is not happening at all.”
In Tangipahoa Parish, an hour east of Baton Rouge, Andi Matheu, the registrar of voters, told us that her biggest challenge is getting the message out to 80,000 voters that an election is under way. She said many people seem to be reading only news headlines but not the information in the stories. “The headline says ‘Election Suspended,’ and that’s not true,” she said, exasperated. “Then it’s like a bad game of Telephone—somebody tells somebody else, who tells somebody else. And by the time it gets to the fifth person, we’re never going to have elections again in Louisiana.”
While election officials in Louisiana are scrambling, Republicans in the GOP-controlled legislature are now deciding whether to carve up one or both of the House districts in New Orleans and Baton Rouge that Black Democrats currently represent. Either way, their choice will likely contribute to a steep decline in Black representation in Congress.
By the time the Callais decision came down last week, Florida Republicans were already voting on a newly gerrymandered map that presumed the Court would weaken Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Tennessee Republicans were ready too. On Wednesday, they introduced a map slicing up state Democrats’ lone remaining stronghold in Memphis and its suburbs. The proposal cleared both chambers of the legislature yesterday, overcoming loud protests that included a tense confrontation between a Democratic lawmaker and state troopers. (The lawmaker’s brother was arrested). “They destroyed the votes of one community for their own political partisan gain,” Democratic State Senator London Lamar told us. “They knew that they would take away the Black vote, and it’s just downright disgusting and egregious.”
Kermit Moore, the president of the Memphis chapter of the NAACP, described his reaction as “anger and disgust.” “This mid-decade power grab by the Republicans is unlawful, unethical, and is taking the power away from a community that had the chance to vote and elect their own representative,” he told us. (For nearly 20 years, Memphis has voted to send a white progressive, Steve Cohen, to Congress. “That doesn’t matter,” Moore said when we brought this up. “Blacks had a choice in who represented them, and Steve Cohen has been that choice.”)
Although the Supreme Court has already blessed Louisiana’s move to immediately redraw its congressional districts, the legality of the GOP’s gerrymandering push elsewhere is not as clear-cut. The Alito decision directly invalidated only Louisiana’s map. “These other states are using” the Callais decision “as pretext to do what they wanted to do anyway,” Omar Noureldin, a former Justice Department official who now leads the litigation team at the watchdog group Common Cause, told us. Democrats and voting-rights advocates are holding out a slim hope of challenging Tennessee’s map, but the burden for proving intentional racial discrimination under the new standards established in Callais will be exceedingly difficult to meet. “I’m not optimistic,” Noureldin said. In Florida, voters in 2010 approved a constitutional amendment explicitly outlawing partisan gerrymandering, but Democrats remain skeptical that the state’s entirely Republican-appointed supreme court will toss out its new map.
The legal outlook is different in Alabama, which even after Callais remains under a federal court order not to redraw its congressional districts until the 2030 Census. The state is trying to get the injunction lifted, but that directive, along with impending primaries on May 19, initially caused Governor Kay Ivey to hold off on calling the legislature back for a special session. She soon changed her mind, and GOP lawmakers approved bills that would set a new election for House races if the Supreme Court rules in its favor.
Whether South Carolina redraws its map might depend on internal GOP politics as much as the courts. Republican leaders were hesitant to act until recently, in part because targeting Clyburn’s seat could put GOP-held districts at risk in a Democratic-wave election. But following the Callais decision, President Trump has ramped up his pressure on red states to gerrymander as aggressively as possible—even if they have to scrap primary elections that have already occurred. “If they have to vote twice, so be it,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.
The president’s bullhorn became louder two days later, when most of the candidates he backed in Indiana state-Senate primaries defeated incumbent Republicans who had defied Trump by voting down a gerrymandering proposal in December. “There was no intent to redraw congressional district lines in South Carolina. Then the pressure came from up above to do that, and all of a sudden, we were off to the races,” Gilda Cobb-Hunter, a Democrat and the longest-serving member of South Carolina’s state House of Representatives, told us. Still, Cobb-Hunter said she wasn’t sure that Republicans would ultimately vote to redistrict, nor that they would definitely gain a seat if they did. “I’m just not convinced that what they think is going to happen will actually happen,” she said.
Whether or not Republicans succeed in redistricting South Carolina, they have over the past week retaken a decisive lead in the nationwide gerrymandering battle. Democrats had briefly evened the score in Virginia, but the nullification of their election victory combined with the post-Callais GOP moves in the South will make their bid to retake the House more difficult. If they are disappointed by the aggressiveness of the Republican response to the Supreme Court’s ruling, they do not claim to be surprised. Nor does Hardy, the Alabama advocate. “This is not un-American. This is very much so American,” she told us. “This is a textbook example of how power operates in this country.”