WASHINGTON — U.S. Rep. Cleo Fields, D-Baton Rouge, likely won’t be the only House member affected by the Supreme Court’s decision last week to effectively eliminate his minority-majority congressional district.
h v Callais was rendered as the November midterm elections are getting underway. Republicans are trying to keep their bare House majority. Democrats think they have a shot to pick up the six seats necessary to take the levers of power in the House.
A 6-3 Supreme Court majority found that the Voting Rights Act of 1965, under which minority voters have challenged electoral maps for decades, allows districts to favor a particular party but not a particular race unless intentional discrimination is proven.
Black voters have backed Democratic candidates with 80% to 90% pluralities since 1960.
“With this decision, states no longer have to ensure that communities of color have a constitutional right to a congressional district in which they make up a majority of the vote,” Amy Walter wrote in The Cook Political Report, based in Washington.
Many states have already begun primary elections for the midterm Congressional contests.
In his initial reaction upon hearing about the Supreme Court decision, President Donald Trump said state legislatures should lean into redrawing congressional maps and eke out a few more districts that would elect a GOP candidate.
House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-Benton, wants Republican legislatures to go back to work as he tries to hold onto a GOP majority.
“All states that have unconstitutional maps should look at that very carefully and I think they should do it before the midterms,” Johnson told reporters Thursday.
going into November’s midterm elections, Trump earlier this year pushed Republican-led states to redistrict and add more GOP congresspersons. Some Democratic-led states responded by doing the same.
The initial round of redistricting tit-for-tat left Democrats and Republicans flipping about the same number of seats. That doesn’t yet count Florida, where the legislature is considering new maps that turn four Democratic seats — two of which are from minority-majority districts that would be eliminated — into safe Republican ones.
The and Sabato’s Crystal Ball — two respected political handicappers — estimated seven districts could change parties due to the Callais ruling. National Public Radio counted 15 House districts.
, two Atlanta-based voting rights groups, calculated 19 seats directly tied to the Voting Rights Act, but 27 seats could go Republican over time.
“It certainly appears possible, perhaps even likely, that these Republican states will be able to draw out all or some of their Democratic-held seats, if not in 2026 than 2028,” said Kyle Kondik, managing editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Just how many depends on how fast GOP-dominated states move to redraw their congressional maps to add more Republican-leaning seats.
Other Republican states will be watching the progress and outcome of the inevitable lawsuits that will be filed over Gov. Jeff Landry’s suspension of the elections for Louisian’s six House seats.
Some states seem on the verge of going for it: Alabama, South Carolina and Tennessee.
U.S. Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Alabama, urged the state attorney general to throw out a federal district court order not to change until 2030 the maps that helped elect two Black Democrats in the state’s eight-member delegation.
“In a country where only 20 House seats are truly competitive, two more Republicans from Alabama could mean the difference between gridlock and advancing Trump’s agenda,” Tuberville, who is running for governor, . “Alabama, which voted for Trump by 65% in 2024, by all rights should send an entirely Republican delegation to Washington.”
That percentage is statewide. Birmingham and Montgomery voters favored Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential candidate in 2024.
Johnson and House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-Jefferson and second-in-command as long as the GOP majority holds, know all too well the difficulties of navigating a one or two or three seat majority. A small number of GOP representatives can — and have — used their votes as leverage to get concessions in legislation Republican leadership wants and Democratic members oppose. In some cases, depending on attendance, even a single Republican objecting will kill legislation on party line votes.
“This ruling strengthens equal protection for all voters, and gives people in h and across the country greater confidence that maps will be drawn fairly and not racially motivated,” Scalise said.