Outgunned in the national redistricting war, Democrats are launching a multipronged legal battle to try and prevent GOP gains ahead of next year’s midterms.
It stands to be a grueling, lengthy and costly process for Democrats to counter President Donald Trump’s effort to draw new congressional maps that boost Republicans as they look to grow their slim majority next year. But with limited options to redraw maps in blue states outside Gov. Gavin Newsom’s effort in California, the courtroom presents the party’s best hope of countering Trump’s aggressive strategy.
The specifics differ from state to state, but taken together they will demonstrate some of Democrats’ long-held strategies in redistricting cases, namely arguing Republicans are suppressing voters of color and engaging in partisan gerrymandering with their proposed maps.
The courtroom challenges are largely organized by the National Redistricting Foundation, the legal arm of the National Democratic Redisctricting Committee — led by former Attorney General Eric Holder. The group declined to share how much it is prepared to spend on these cases, citing ongoing litigation, but is making an early and concentrated push with the tacit backing of Barack Obama, who headlined a fundraiser for the groups in August.
Legal challenges are “the final backstop,” said John Bisognano, president of the NDRC. “The courts are an underappreciated tool for fighting back to preserve our democracy.”
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While the courts offer a glimmer of hope for Democrats seeking to thwart the Republican efforts, rulings in their favor are no sure thing.
“The path through the courts has always been an uphill battle,” said Justin Levitt, a law professor at Loyola Marymount who specializes in election law. “Litigation is slow and cumbersome and not anybody’s first best option ever.”
Past redistricting cases have been split for Democrats, especially after a 2019 Supreme Court ruling that limited the role federal courts play in partisan gerrymandering cases. That has left Voting Rights Act claims as their best chance in federal court, even as the Supreme Court is set to hear a case this fall that could gut key provisions of the landmark civil rights era legislation.
Perhaps nowhere are Democrats more familiar with the twists and turns of a prolonged legal battle than Ohio, where the prior map-making process was volleyed back and forth between the state legislature and courts for years. Ohio Democrats are gearing up for the likelihood of another fight as the state legislature begins the process of writing new maps, and they’re watching to see if the GOP reaches for three new seats – a configuration Democrats believe stands to violate requirements around how tightly the boundaries of districts can be drawn.
“Our legal team here will be monitoring the redistricting process very, very carefully, as we did the last cycle,” said Jocelyn Rosnick, policy director at the ACLU of Ohio. The organization will likely join any suit against Ohio’s effort as it did in 2021.
But this time around, Democrats are facing a more conservative composition of the state Supreme Court that could impede their success: Republicans have consolidated power on the court since the 2021 map challenge, and now hold six out of the seven seats.
An even steeper uphill battle in the courts has Democrats and fair voting groups considering another option in Ohio: mounting a referendum campaign to repeal whatever map Republicans in the state legislature settle on. That too would be an expensive and difficult undertaking, but the national attention on redistricting — and the Democratic party’s desperation to counter the GOP — would provide a boost.
See here for the latest on the Texas redistricting litigation. I can’t comment on what might happen in other states, but at least there are some ways to throw sand in the gears that doesn’t depend on what the Fifth Circuit and the corrupt group of SCOTUS muckety-mucks do. The best outcome here that I think has a plausible chance is for the district court to put an injunction on the use of the new map until they can go through the full litigation process and come to a decision. Which, as we have observed, has taken over four years and still counting for the 2021 maps. Just being denied the use of the new map for this election would be a big deal. That assumes that the higher courts would leave such a restriction in place. Recent history strongly suggests that they would not. But maybe, just maybe, this situation, in which the state is making the exact opposite arguments about the districts it’s defending as it had just made in the original case, is sufficiently weird that they’d rather not screw with it. I make that at best a one in five shot, but at least it’s not zero. Unless I’m really deluding myself, which could be the case. But that’s how I see it, for now. Ask me again after the hearing in October.