The Redistricting Wars

We're On The Road To Somewhere Terrible

“Seems to me fighting fire with fire leaves us all burned”

“Politics is war without bloodshed while war is politics with bloodshed.” - Mao Zedong

There is a pattern in American political history that we prefer not to see until it has already consumed us. The pattern goes like this: one side does something that would have been unthinkable a generation earlier. The other side, rather than restoring the norm, matches the move and escalates. Courts get pulled in, or captured, or simply run out of road. And then one day someone looks up and realizes that the rules everyone assumed were holding the country together have quietly ceased to exist.

We are in that moment now, and redistricting is where you can watch it happen in real time.

Last week, the Virginia Supreme Court voided a voter-approved redistricting referendum in a 4-3 ruling, striking down the amendment and upholding a lower court ruling that had declared the measure unconstitutional less than 24 hours after the special election. The technical basis was procedural: Democratic lawmakers violated the rules governing how constitutional amendments reach the ballot. Three million Virginians had voted. Their votes were nullified. The court majority found that the violation irreparably undermined the integrity of the referendum and rendered it null and void.

The same week, the consequences of the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Louisiana v. Callais began cascading through the South. In a 6-3 decision, the Court kneecapped the Voting Rights Act, the landmark civil rights law that had restricted racial gerrymandering and racial discrimination in voting for sixty years. Justice Kagan, in dissent, wrote that the ruling renders Section 2 of the VRA all but a dead letter. Alabama, Louisiana, and Tennessee rushed to adopt new maps within days of the decision, eliminating majority-minority districts that had stood for decades.

Republicans, predictably, called all of this a victory for democracy. Democrats called it the end of it. Both sides are right and wrong in ways that are more instructive than either would admit.

To understand what is happening now, you have to go back to Trumps decision to engage in mid-decade redistricting and to California’s response in November 2025, because that is where Democrats made their decisive choice.

California voters overwhelmingly approved Proposition 50, endorsing newly drawn maps that favor Democrats. The measure, pushed by Governor Gavin Newsom, “temporarily” shelved the state’s nonpartisan redistricting commission and replaced it with lines drawn by Democratic state lawmakers. The commission California voters had created in 2010 — one of the most admired independent redistricting bodies in the country — was set aside in the name of fighting fire with fire. The gains were designed to cancel out the five seats the GOP had seized in Texas.

The logic was defensible. Republicans in Texas, Florida, North Carolina, and Ohio had already blown up the norms of the redistricting process at Donald Trump’s explicit urging. They were engaged in mid-decade redistricting — something that had no modern precedent — purely to lock in congressional majorities before the 2026 midterms. The Democratic response in California was, on the merits, entirely rational.
It was also, in a way that should worry everyone, the precise logic by which every norm in American political life has ever been abandoned.

This is why I opposed Proposition 50. As a matter of principle there is no other choice. You see, this country has gone through precarious periods where we have survived one party abandoning the principles of American government and democracy - but it has never survived it peacefully when both have conceded those values. Proposition 50 was the decision to concede them.

On this issue of compromising the architecture of our democracy I proudly dissent.

When Senate Democrats eliminated the filibuster for lower court nominees in 2013, the logic was the same: Republicans were blocking judicial appointments in unprecedented numbers, so the rules had to change. Republicans extended the logic to Supreme Court nominees in 2017 and put three justices on the bench who then proceeded to gut the Voting Rights Act. Each side can draw an unbroken chain of causation back to the other’s original sin. Each side is correct. The chain leads nowhere good.

Proposition 50 was California Democrats announcing: we will fight fire with fire. Virginia was Democrats trying to do the same thing and losing on a procedural technicality, their maps thrown out and their voters’ decision voided by a court that Republicans will tell you was simply following the law, because that is what courts always say. Callais was the Supreme Court’s conservative majority dismantling the legal architecture of minority voting rights, dressed up in Alito’s bloodless procedural language, because that is what the Supreme Court says when it wants to do something it knows is historically indefensible.

Beneath all of it, something important is actually happening: we may, perversely, be approaching something like a draw. A World War I like trench warfare where both sides are indelibly stuck in the mud and blood of their fight, faintly forgetting what the fight was about to begin with as the battle for inches produces unfathomably destructive costs.

Republicans could gain as many as 14 seats from redrawn maps across six states, compared with six for Democrats. Without Virginia’s maps, redistricting efforts over the last year could give Republicans as much as a 12-seat edge. California’s Proposition 50 neutralizes perhaps five of those. Other Democratic states have limited room to maneuver. The net result, when the dust settles, may be an outcome not dramatically different from where we started — a narrow Republican House majority, more entrenched, built on a foundation of institutional wreckage.

But if you add in the toxic political environment for Republican incumbents that is currently giving Democrats a 9 point advantage you still see how they can capture both the House and Senate.

That is the redistricting wars’ most bitter irony. We may spend a hundred million dollars, void elections, gut the Voting Rights Act, and shatter norms that took decades to build — and end up roughly where we began, except with a country that trusts its institutions less, that believes the other side will stop at nothing, and that has confirmed, for anyone still uncertain, that the rules are whatever the side with power says they are. A draw. At catastrophic cost.

This is not unprecedented in American history. It is, in fact, familiar to the point of alarm.

The redistricting battles of the 1830s, less well remembered than they should be, were part of a broader political breakdown driven by the same underlying logic. Both parties in the antebellum era understood that congressional apportionment was an existential question, not a procedural one, because it determined whether slave states or free states would control the federal government. What began as ordinary political maneuvering escalated, decade by decade, into a zero-sum struggle in which every institutional guardrail was tested and found wanting.

The Missouri Compromise of 1820 was a genuine attempt to find a durable settlement which was essentially to draw a line, literally and figuratively, that would hold. It held for a generation. But the logic it encoded — that the two halves of the country had irreconcilable interests that could only be managed, never resolved — eventually consumed it. The Kansas-Nebraska Act blew it up in 1854. By 1856, a congressman had been beaten nearly to death on the floor of the Senate with a metal-tipped cane. By 1861, the country was at war.

I am not predicting civil war in a kinetic sense - as many of you know I believe we are already in one. There will be no Blue and Gray outfitted soldiers between North and South. I am saying that we have been here before, and that the arc of that story is instructive: the escalations that feel like necessary tactical responses, the norms that erode one exception at a time, the loss of any shared framework for what counts as legitimate, and then, eventually, the violence that emerges not from nowhere but from the accumulated wreckage of every failed compromise, every cynical maneuver, every time someone said they started it and did something that would have been unthinkable a year before.

Less Blue and Gray and more Blue and Red. But the rising political violence, the quest to undo elections and undermine legitimacy of opposition leaders and use misinformation campaigns and voter suppression techniques will be there. They already are.

One expert on the Callais decision put it plainly: the ruling has reignited what might otherwise be a cold war. It has given more incentives for people to throw the guardrails off. That is a precise description of where we are. Every guardrail that goes — the independent redistricting commission in California, the Virginia voters’ referendum, Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act — increases the incentive for the other side to throw off another one. There is no natural floor to this process. There is no moment at which one side looks at the ruins and says: enough.

We only demand more fire to fight the fire that is already consuming us. Perhaps rather than fighting fire with fire we should fight fire with water. But no one seems to want to put out the flames. We just want to make them bigger.

None of this is to say that Democrats were wrong to fight. California’s independent commission was a genuine achievement, and watching Republicans systematically dismantle the norms of fair representation while Democrats stood on principle and lost would have been a different kind of catastrophe. There is a real argument that unilateral disarmament in a knife fight is not righteousness — it is just losing.
But there is a difference between fighting and knowing what you are fighting for.

Democrats entered the redistricting wars with their eyes partly closed, believing that the logic of Proposition 50 — fight fire with fire — was a corrective that would restore equilibrium. What it actually did was confirm the logic of escalation as the only logic available. California said: norms are for suckers. Virginia said: we’ll try anyway. The Virginia Supreme Court said: you were right the first time. Callais said: the referees are on one team now.

The 1850s had their own version of Callais: the Dred Scott decision, in which the Supreme Court tried to resolve the slavery question by declaring it already resolved in favor of the slaveholding states. It did not resolve anything. It convinced the other side that the courts were no longer a legitimate venue for their grievances. The political violence that followed was not random. It was the logical conclusion of a system in which every institutional path to resolution had been tried and blocked.

We are not there yet. But we further fanned the flames this week. This month. This year.

Ironically, the redistricting wars will probably end in something like a draw not unlike the Missouri Compromise where we added one slave to state and one free to keep the dysfunctional balance going and avoiding the underlying issues. Republicans with a structural House advantage that Democrats partially offset with California’s maps, the South re-segregated for political purposes under the banner of constitutional law, a generation of minority voters stripped of the representation it took sixty years and immeasurable sacrifice to achieve. Republicans will call it a victory for the Constitution. Democrats will call it the end of multiracial democracy. Both descriptions will be partially accurate, which is precisely what makes them so dangerous.

What neither side will say (because it is not in the interest of either party to say it )is that we have spent the last two years burning down the institutional architecture that made democratic competition possible in the first place, in order to fight over a margin of a dozen congressional seats. A situation not unlike what we have seen many times in our 250 year history. Except now, we have traded the legitimacy of elections, the independence of redistricting commissions, the Voting Rights Act, and the principle that voters get to choose their representatives — for a draw.

You know, fire with fire and all that.

The 1850s looked like a series of tactical maneuvers too, right up until they didn’t. History tends to name those periods differently in retrospect. It calls them the road to somewhere terrible.

We know where the road we’re on goes. We have been down it before. We just can’t stop repeating history and fewer and fewer of us are even trying.

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