When the Supreme Court ordered last year that the case of Louisiana v. Callais be re-argued, it raised a potential nightmare scenario: If the court ruled the Voting Rights Act is unconstitutional when applied to redistricting or otherwise gutted it, it could enable Southern states to decimate Black voters’ power, eliminating up to 19 House seats currently held by Black Democrats ahead of the 2026 midterms.
But that scenario rested on a decision gutting the Voting Rights Act coming soon after the court heard the re-argument on Oct. 15. And it didn’t happen — at least, it hasn’t yet. A decision hasn’t been released, and at this point, the earliest it could come is late March. That will be too late for almost all Southern states to redraw their maps if the court rules as expected and guts the Voting Rights Act.
“We’re at the point where it’s functionally impossible for most Southern states to redraw their maps, unless they do something extraordinary like move or redo primaries,” said Michael Li, a redistricting expert at the Brennan Center for Justice, a progressive nonprofit.
It’s a simple matter of calendars. In some states, primaries have already happened. In others, deadlines to finalize and print ballots and then send them out to military and overseas voters are coming up fast.
North Carolina and Texas held their primary elections on March 3. Mississippi will hold its primaries on March 10. Alabama, Louisiana, and Georgia will begin mailing ballots to military and overseas voters in the first week of April for their May primaries. South Carolina will also need to send out mail ballots by the end of April for its June primaries. That leaves just Florida and Tennessee, with August primaries, as possibly able to redistrict if a decision comes out by the end of March. Any later, though, and it becomes increasingly hard to see a path forward.
Some of these states could theoretically move their primaries and filing deadlines into the late summer or September, but that is a costly process that usually only occurs under court order.
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Republicans had hoped that the court would strike down or gut the use of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which forbids “a denial or abridgment of the right … to vote” that would leave minority voters with “less opportunity … to participate in the political processes and to elect representatives of their choice,” in redistricting.
Such a decision would have allowed states to redraw their maps to crack Black-majority districts and redistribute them across multiple districts in order to eliminate them and create new GOP and white-majority seats.
Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry, a Republican, had even called the legislature into special session for redistricting last October in case the court ruled quickly.
Had the court moved fast enough that nine relevant states had time to redistrict, it could have allowed Southern states — Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee and Texas — to eliminate up to 19 House seats with Black majorities or pluralities that are also all held by Democrats, according to a report by Fair Fight Action, a progressive voting rights group based in Georgia.
This would have not only wiped out Black political power in the South, but also made it increasingly hard for Democrats to win back control of the House in the midterm elections.
Republicans currently hold a razor-thin four-seat majority in the House: Democrats merely need to win three seats to take control. The swing of 19 safe Democratic seats into the GOP column — even if some of those seats wound up as swing districts when the environment favors Democrats — would be a huge obstacle to retaking the majority.
That scenario is, in all likelihood, off the table for now. But the court will rule at some point this year, and if it strikes down or severely guts the Voting Rights Act, midcycle redistricting will be on the table ahead of both the 2027 state elections in Mississippi and Louisiana and the 2028 congressional elections.
“It’s likely that it will happen ahead of the 2028 elections because we’ve seen that the White House wants to maximize its partisan advantage,” said Amir Badat, Southern states director for Fair Fight Action. “And it wants to do so by diminishing the political power of Black voters and other voters of color across the country.”