The Court's Ruling Unleashed a Torrent of Race-Based Pro-White Gerrymandering [View all]

Today on TAP: In the heart of the Old South, compact majority-Black districts are being supplanted by elongated majority-white ones.

https://prospect.org/2026/05/12/supreme-court-voting-rights-race-based-pro-white-gerrymandering-south/


Protesters hold signs during a rally against a special session of the state legislature to redraw U.S. congressional maps, May 5, 2026, in Nashville, Tennessee. Credit: George Walker IV/AP Photo

The Republican Supreme Court justices’ ruling to end what the right calls race-based gerrymandering has immediately resulted in a spate of race-based gerrymandering. Alabama, Louisiana, Tennessee, and probably Mississippi and South Carolina as well are all creating elongated and weirdly shaped race-based districts that break up clusters of Black residents so that white residents can constitute a majority. Out of all the 50 states, these five are the ones where the lines of race most neatly overlap the lines of partisan affiliation.

Nothing even remotely like a gerrymander was required to carve the districts that centered on these states’ major cities. Tennessee’s Memphis district, Louisiana’s New Orleans district, and Alabama’s Birmingham district were compact; they deviated from the Court’s diktat banning race-based districts not because they were gerrymandered but because they were majority-Black. Breaking them up into slices of the city linked to slices of the suburbs and the countryside, however, does indeed require race-based gerrymandering, which the Republican justices understood very well. We can debate whether they simply prefer whites over Blacks; what’s beyond debate is that they prefer Republicans over Democrats.

That was evident when John Roberts, then in private practice, worked for the Republican effort to claim a victory in Florida in the 2000 presidential election. It was evident when Roberts, then working in Ronald Reagan’s Justice Department, argued that the administration should work to weaken the Voting Rights Act, then up for renewal. And that was evident when Roberts’s mentor, Chief Justice William Rehnquist, when in private practice in the early 1960s, challenged Black voters at the polls in Phoenix, asking them to produce credentials or to state what portions of the Constitution said. (During congressional confirmation hearings for Rehnquist decades later, witnesses, most prominently San Francisco attorney James Brosnahan, testified to Rehnquist’s attempts to stop Blacks from voting.)

While the Court has now sanctified an ongoing orgy of partisan redistricting, that orgy was already well under way, ever since President Trump demanded that Texas create five new Republican districts. Partisan gerrymandering has been with us for centuries, but it’s only in the past few decades that computers have enabled legislators to redistrict with enough mathematical exactitude that they can be fairly assured of the electoral outcomes. (Of course, the mathematical exactitude doesn’t extend to the performance of the pols and parties that benefit from the redistricting; as Trump is currently illustrating, the malignant buffoonery of a president can eclipse many a gerrymander-created bounce.)

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