The South’s New Maps Are A Disgrace. But Also, Possibly, A Massive Self-Own.

The South is racing to disenfranchise Black voters in the wake of Callais. But overreaching could spell GOP electoral doom.

Credit: YouTube/New York Post

There are major inflection points in U.S. history, when decades of progress, hard-won and paid for with great sacrifice, finally emerge triumphant—or teeter on collapse.

This is one of those points.

Less than two weeks ago, the Supreme Court stuck a legal dagger into our democracy with its ruling in Louisiana v. Callais. Yesterday, through its “shadow docket,” it drove that dagger deeper through our body politic, greenlighting states across the South to quickly eliminate most, if not all, Black-majority districts before the 2026 midterms.

As I wrote in an earlier piece, Callais is not an aberration. It is, rather, the culmination of a decades-long campaign by Chief Justice John Roberts to gut voting rights for racial minorities. It’s also the latest blow in a long and painful history, running from the cotton fields of the Black Belt to the statehouses of the old Confederacy. Through its cold reasoning, Callais posed the ultimate question for our nation: Will Black Americans and other minorities ever have genuine political power in a multi-racial, pluralistic democracy? Or will that power be gerrymandered back into irrelevance by the same forces that have sought to suppress it for 150 years?

The Court went with the latter. And its actions this week are more than just written opinions. They tell a story about the geography of slavery and segregation that shaped where Black communities live today. They are a shameful response to the hard legislative fights of the 1960s that produced the Voting Rights Act (VRA). And they are codas to decades of litigation that followed, as states found new ways to draw lines around Black political power.

The stakes today are immediate and concrete. Hanging in the balance is control of the House of Representatives, the chamber where Trump’s regressive agenda either lives or dies, and where the first meaningful checks on his authoritarian assertions of power could emerge. Winning the House back in November is the most direct path to restoring accountability in Washington.

That is precisely why Republicans, with a wink from their allies on the Court, are moving so fast and so aggressively. And that is why, despite everything, this fight is not over. Make no mistake, the situation is gravely serious, and it has been made far worse in recent days. But it is not without hope. Indeed, in their rush to do their very worst, the GOP may have badly overreached and could pay a heavy price in November.

The Court chose a side

In Callais, the Court’s conservative supermajority gutted the last meaningful enforcement mechanism of the VRA, the historic 1965 voting rights law that transformed political representation for Black Americans across the South. The practical effect is that Republican-controlled state legislatures can now dismantle majority-minority congressional districts drawn under court order, and there is virtually no federal remedy left to stop them.

Within hours of the ruling, Republican governors and legislative leaders across the South began moving to redraw maps they’d previously been forced to draw fairly. Tennessee called an emergency special session and eliminated its only majority-Black congressional district. Florida’s legislature approved new maps within hours of the ruling, with DeSantis signing them into law days later. Alabama ran to the Supreme Court and, as of today, won permission to scrap maps the Court itself had ordered three years ago—with just one week to go before the state’s primary. Louisiana even suspended a primary that was already underway. And Mississippi is in motion.

This was not a spontaneous response to a surprise ruling. The redistricting offensive was the brainchild of White House Deputy Chief of Staff James Blair and Republican mapmaker Adam Kincaid, launched in the summer of 2025 and coordinated with the National Republican Redistricting Trust over which states to target and in what order. When the ruling came down, the machinery was already in place.

The explicit goal, stated plainly by the politicians doing it, is to hold the House. Last October, when the GOP forced through redistricting, North Carolina Republican state Sen. Ralph Hise described the motivation as “simple and singular: draw a new map that will bring an additional Republican seat to the congressional delegation.” Tennessee’s House Speaker Cameron Sexton said the Callais decision “indicated states can redistrict based off partisan politics.”

Federal officials have now joined the fray. The day after Callais came down, Missouri Sen. Eric Schmitt sent a letter to the Justice Department asking it to identify and challenge VRA districts nationwide. Harmeet Dhillon, who oversees civil rights at the DOJ, responded on social media: “Senator — we are ON IT.” Schmitt even singled out California, a state whose congressional map was driven by partisan, not racial, considerations and has no VRA districts. As voting rights attorney Marc Elias of Democracy Docket noted, “VRA districts” have become an excuse for Republicans to investigate any place where minority voters live and exercise political power.

In other words, the Court’s ruling didn’t just open the door for state legislatures; it created, in Elias’s view, a “legal and cultural permission structure” to attack minority representation wherever it exists.

Justice Samuel Alito took pains in his Callais opinion to say the Court was affirming the constitutionality of the VRA. But as Elias observed, those words were drowned out by the message everyone in the political world actually heard: that aggressive dismantling of majority-minority districts would face no meaningful judicial resistance. That is what Schmitt heard, it is what Dhillon heard, and it is what Republican legislators across the South heard. And they have moved rapidly to do exactly that.

The map that history drew

To fully understand why maps matter and how they can be exploited, journey back in time to the post-Civil War American South. Congressional district lines across the Southern U.S. look the way they do—jagged, stretched, reaching across counties in shapes that seem to defy logic—because of where Black Americans were allowed to live and where they were not.

The Black Belt is a swath of land stretching across central Alabama and Mississippi, named originally for its dark, fertile soil. It’s the same soil that made it the heart of the antebellum cotton economy, and along with that economy, the center of American slavery. After emancipation, the formerly enslaved stayed in the Black Belt in large numbers, mostly because they had nowhere else to go. Sharecropping replaced slavery in practice, if not in name. And Jim Crow laws replaced the plantation. The Black Belt today remains among the most racially segregated and economically impoverished regions in America, not by accident but as the accumulated result of deliberate policy choices made over generations to keep Black communities isolated and politically powerless.

This history is why redistricting in the South has always been inseparable from race, despite the Court’s current insistence on color blindness. Congressional districts in the South are drawn on top of communities that were themselves shaped by racial exclusion. That means there has never been any racially-neutral option. A line drawn one way gives Black voters a genuine voice. Drawn another way, dispersing that community across surrounding districts dominated by white Republican voters, it reduces that voice to a whisper.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was Congress’s answer to a century of lines being drawn the wrong way. It required that maps give Black voters a real opportunity to elect representatives of their choice. Those maps became the target of Republicans and their friends on the Supreme Court for decades, and Callais has now made them almost impossible to defend.

“Those ballots are discarded.”

Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry didn’t waste any time. When the Callais ruling came down on April 29, he saw his opening to redraw maps that had, under court order, given Black Louisianans something close to proportional representation in Congress for the first time in state history.

Black residents make up roughly a third of Louisiana’s population. Under the existing maps, they held two of the state’s six congressional seats. Landry wants that reduced to one by getting rid of a district hard-won through years of VRA litigation. It runs in a long diagonal corridor along the Red River from Baton Rouge in the southeast through Lafayette and Alexandria to Shreveport in the northwest. That is approximately 250 miles, and it connects Black communities that shared a political interest even if they didn’t share a county line. A federal court had ordered it drawn precisely because, without it, Black voting power in Louisiana would be diluted to near irrelevance.

And analysts warn Landry may try to go even further, potentially targeting the New Orleans-based District 2 as well, which could eliminate Black congressional representation in Louisiana entirely.

Representative Cleo Fields represents Louisiana’s majority-Black 6th District. Fields is not just a congressman; he is a living piece of Louisiana civil rights history. He first won his congressional seat in 1992, lost it when the Supreme Court struck down his district as a racial gerrymander in 1995, and spent the next three decades watching the legal battles over his community’s representation play out in courtrooms across the country. When the court-ordered map finally restored his district in 2024, it felt to many Louisiana voters like a promise finally kept.

By the morning after the Callais ruling, that promise looked broken once again. Gov. Landry had issued an executive order suspending the state’s May 16 congressional primary that was already underway. More than 42,000 absentee ballots had already been returned, and overseas and military ballots had been mailed out weeks earlier. None of those votes would count. Landry suspended the election anyway.

When asked about his actions on 60 Minutes, Landry was unapologetic. Correspondent Cecilia Vega pressed him on the tens of thousands of ballots already returned when he pulled the plug on the election. “Oh, those ballots are discarded,” Landry said, “and those voters will vote again in November.” When Vega observed that he said it like it wasn’t a big deal, Landry shrugged it off. “Well, it’s not my fault,” he said. “If anybody has a grievance, take it to the United States Supreme Court.”

The reaction within Louisiana was immediate. Fields filed suit. So did the League of Women Voters and the NAACP. When the Louisiana Senate held its committee hearing on the new maps, hundreds of people descended on the state capitol, filling the hearing room and several overflow rooms. The NAACP’s Louisiana state conference president was physically restrained by sergeants-at-arms as he tried to push inside. The hearing ran for more than eight hours. One after another, pastors, civil rights advocates, and ordinary residents rose to testify — carrying, as one reporter described it, “generations of memory. Memory of poll taxes and literacy tests. Memory of districts carved apart to weaken Black voting strength.” During the hearing, Republican Sen. Jay Morris told the audience to “shut up”, with the Louisiana Democratic Party claiming the remark was directed at its Black executive director and included a racial epithet Morris has denied using. A banner in the crowd outside read, “We Ain’t Going Back.”

The “mother of all changes”

Alabama’s Republican-controlled legislature had spent decades drawing its congressional maps with one consistent goal: contain Black political power. To this end, long tentacle-shaped spines reached out from the Black Belt into Birmingham, Montgomery and the area north of Mobile, scooping up Black voters and packing them into a single majority-Black district. The other six seats were left safely white and Republican.

In 2023, the Supreme Court itself ordered Alabama to stop. In Allen v. Milligan, the justices ruled 5 to 4—with Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh joining the three liberal justices—that the maps violated the VRA and that a second majority-Black district had to be drawn. It seemed, briefly, like the VRA’s Secton 2 might yet survive.

Alabama’s response was to stall. The legislature drew a new map that critics and eventually a federal court said barely changed anything. The state then argued that any court-ordered changes were coming too close to upcoming elections, and that changing district lines that late would throw elections into chaos, confusing voters and upending candidate races. The Supreme Court had warned against such chaos in a 2006 ruling called Purcell, and Alabama leaned on that precedent hard.

The strategy worked. Alabama ran an entire additional election cycle under maps the Supreme Court had already found discriminatory. But what happened next gave away the game. Alabama’s case went back to a federal district court, which held a full 11-day trial. Fifty-one witnesses testified. The litigants submitted nearly 800 exhibits. At the end of it, the district court concluded, in its own words, “with great reluctance and dismay and even greater restraint,” that Alabama had not merely failed to fix its maps, but had intentionally violated the Fourteenth Amendment. Alabama was going to have to fix its map after all.

So when Callais dropped, Alabama saw its chance. It filed an emergency motion asking the Supreme Court to allow it to revert to maps that looked a lot like its original gerrymander. And on Monday, the High Court shrugged and permitted it, instructing the state to go back to what it had before. The district court’s exhaustive, 268-page opinion was wiped out by the Supreme Court in a single paragraph on the “shadow docket,” once again with no reasoning provided.

The audacity of the timing is stunning. Alabama’s primary is May 19, just one week from today. Early voting has already begun. The state that spent years arguing that election changes that come too close to a vote would cause undue chaos was now arguing for and ultimately won the right to throw its entire congressional map into the air with just days to go. As former U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance put it, “Alabama had argued that any changes sought in February ahead of a June primary came too close to the election and violated Purcell. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court just made the mother of all changes in Alabama one week before the primary.”

The chaos Alabama spent years claiming to want to prevent is exactly the chaos it just caused, this time with the Supreme Court’s blessing. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote in dissent from the order making Callais immediately effective that “as always, the Court has a choice.” The majority chose this. It unshackled itself from its own doctrinal constraints and, as Jackson put it, “dived into the fray.”

Legal scholar Chris Geidner noted another major issue. The Supreme Court’s Purcell doctrine—the very precedent Alabama weaponized for years to block fairer maps—was designed not just to prevent voter confusion but to prevent the “consequent incentive to remain away from the polls” that such confusion creates. The Court discarded that doctrine the moment it became inconvenient to Republican interests.

There is one small legal door still open in Alabama. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, dissenting for the three Democratic appointees, noted that the district court’s Fourteenth Amendment finding and its conclusion that Alabama intentionally discriminated were not necessarily swept away by today’s order. The lower court may still act on it. Whether it does, and whether the Supreme Court allows it to stand, is the next chapter in this fight.

It is notable that Justices Roberts and Kavanaugh, the two justices who provided the decisive votes in Milligan three years ago to rule Alabama’s maps were in violation of the VRA, joined the majority yesterday that effectively reversed that decision without saying so. Whatever principle guided their votes in 2023 did not survive contact with a Republican Party that wanted something different in 2026.

The wrong maps for the world today

There is something telling about what Republican legislatures across the South are doing right now. It is defiant in the same way someone doubles down on a losing hand, insisting that if they just redraw one more time, pack one more Black community into one more elongated corridor, the changing world outside the statehouse window will stop changing.

It won’t.

Take Memphis, the city Tennessee Republicans just carved into three pieces. It is a majority-Black city shaped by the Great Migration, by decades of redlining, and by the same forces of deliberate segregation discussed earlier. The Black community there did not arrive by accident. They built that city, literally and culturally, across generations and under conditions designed to exclude them from economic and political life. And in the span of a three-day special session, Republicans drew lines specifically to ensure that the Black community there cannot elect a representative who reflects it.

In Louisiana, Black residents make up roughly a third of the population and have for generations. That is not a political calculation or a result of internal migration. It is simply who lives there. The court-ordered maps that gave those residents two congressional seats out of six were not some gift or favor. They were an attempt, however imperfect, to make representation match reality. What Landry’s legislature is now drawing is a map that says reality doesn’t matter: “You live here, you have always lived here, but your political power will be allocated as though you don’t.”

This is not just morally wrong but strategically foolish, given demographic trends. Georgia became a majority-minority state in 2022. Florida and Louisiana are projected to follow within the decade. The electorate these Republicans are drawing maps for—predominantly white, reliably Republican, and calibrated to the 2024 election results—has been shrinking every year in every Southern state as a share of the population.

The old white Southern political order understood this too, at some level. That is why it spent a century reaching for ever more extreme methods of exclusion, including poll taxes, literacy tests, white primaries, and finally the sophisticated geometric cracking and packing of the post-VRA era. Each escalation was a response to the same underlying reality: The people whose power the system was designed to protect were becoming a smaller and smaller fraction of the people actually living there.

Today’s fight is a variation on that same pattern. The tools are different: computer-drawn maps instead of literacy tests, judicial rulings instead of lynch mobs. But the underlying logic is identical. A political coalition that cannot win a fair fight is once again using the instruments of power to make the fight unfair.

The carnage from Callais

The speed of what happened after Callais dropped is worth recounting. Within days, Republican legislatures across the South were in special session. Within a week, the first new map had been signed into law. Within two weeks, the Supreme Court had blessed Alabama’s reversal. What had taken civil rights advocates decades to build was being dismantled in real time, faster than most people could follow.

The most striking scenes came from Nashville, Tennessee. On May 7, Republican lawmakers prepared to vote on a map that would carve Memphis into three pieces and guarantee a 9-0 Republican congressional delegation in a state where nearly a third of residents are Black. In one memorable moment, Democratic state Sen. Charlane Oliver stood on her desk on the Senate floor and held a banner above her head. It read: “No Jim Crow 2.0.” Other Democratic senators linked arms in front of the chamber. Protesters chanted until state troopers were ordered to clear the room. As demonstrators who had traveled hours from Memphis were herded out, some Republican legislators smiled and laughed. One Republican state representative even arrived at the statehouse wearing a Trump 2024 flag as a cape.

Outside the chamber, Memphis civil rights attorney Walter Bailey, who had been involved in the legal defense of Martin Luther King Jr., offered a warning, saying the map “would be the largest attack in Tennessee’s modern history on the rights of voters, particularly Black voters in the majority-Black city, that we’ve seen.” The map passed anyway, and Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee signed it the same day.

In Florida, DeSantis signed new maps into law days after Callais dropped, pushing the theoretical Republican advantage in the state’s congressional delegation from 20-8 to a projected 24-4. The South Carolina GOP has its sights on the district of Rep. James Clyburn, the longest-serving Black member of Congress, who has been representing his community as a Democrat since 1993. An effort to redraw the maps in that state to eliminate Clyburn was blocked today by a handful of GOP state senators while the state awaits word on whether the governor will call a special session. Even Virginia, where voters had approved an independent redistricting process, saw that effort blocked last week by its state Supreme Court in a ruling voting rights advocates called a stretch of state law.

Independent analysts project that the full wave of post-Callais redistricting could produce the largest drop in Black congressional representation since 1877. That’s the Congress that convened at the end of Reconstruction, when the brief experiment in multiracial Southern democracy was crushed by violence, fraud and the withdrawal of federal protection.

Nonpartisan election reform organization Issue One estimated that before Callais, Republican gerrymandering in Texas, North Carolina, Missouri, Ohio, and Florida was already projected to net the GOP up to 13 seats. Post-Callais, Democracy Docket projects the full wave of redraws in the South could push total Republican gains to 16-18 seats. In a chamber where Republicans currently hold a three-seat majority, that math was supposed to be decisive.

That math, however, was built on electoral quicksand.

The dummymander’s dilemma

History has a way of punishing those who mistake a moment for a permanent condition.

The white political leaders who designed the post-Reconstruction order believed they had solved their problem. By stripping Black Americans of the vote through terror, fraud, and eventually the political machinery of Jim Crow, they ensured that a changing demographic reality would not translate into Black political power at the ballot box.

For decades, it worked. But the people didn’t go away. They organized. They marched. They litigated. They registered. And when the Voting Rights Act finally gave those efforts federal backing in 1965, the whole apparatus of exclusion began to crack, not because the demographics had changed, but because the law had finally caught up to the demographics that had always been there.

History is rhyming once again. Republican legislatures are drawing maps that treat a demographic reality as a problem to be engineered away. Once more, they are betting that geometry can do what poll taxes and literacy tests once did. But they are making that bet at a moment when the population they are trying to suppress is at its largest and more organized and more motivated than it has been in recent history.

There is a further compounding irony in the specific maps they have drawn. In their rush to lock in gains before November, Republican mapmakers did something redistricting experts easily recognize: they got greedy. They drew maps based on the most favorable Republican environment in recent memory, namely, the year 2024, a strong Trump year. They are treating those comfortable margins as permanent features of the landscape rather than a snapshot of a single election. In so doing, they have managed to convert a series of safe Republican seats into potentially competitive ones. In a wave election, that distinction is the difference between a red fortress and a blue wipeout.

There is a term for this in redistricting circles: the dummymander—a gerrymander so aggressive it becomes self-destructive.

The concept is simple. Every time you crack a Democratic community and spread its voters across surrounding Republican districts, you dilute Democratic power. But you also dilute your own margins. A seat that was R+20 becomes R+12. A seat that was untouchable becomes merely safe. In a normal political environment, those thinned-out margins don’t matter much. But in a wave election, where the party in power is taking on water from every direction, thinner margins are where races flip.

In Tennessee, for example, the nonpartisan Dave’s Redistricting analysis found that the new map, drawn to guarantee Republicans a 9-0 sweep, converted six of nine districts into seats with margins below twelve points. Under the old map, only two districts were that close. Lisa Quigley, former chief of staff to Nashville Democratic Rep. Jim Cooper, ran the numbers and concluded, “Five of the new seats could be in the hunt. In a year where Democrats could perform really well; these Republicans could end up creating a map with more chances for the party to compete. Plus they lose a lot of the incumbency advantage.”

Florida is where the GOP’s risk is most acute. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries didn’t wait for the maps to be challenged before calling the plan “The DeSantis Dummymander.” University of Florida political science professor Michael McDonald was more measured but arrived at a similar place: the new map probably nets Republicans two or three seats in a normal environment. “But it could backfire gloriously,” he added, “if it’s just a bloodbath everywhere” for Republicans.

The bloodbath, at least in miniature, has already begun. In special elections held in Florida this year in districts Trump carried in 2024, Democrats outperformed his margins by an average of nine points and flipped both a state House and a state Senate seat. One of those flipped seats was in Palm Beach County, Trump’s own backyard. Notably, the DeSantis map was drawn after those terrible results were already in, meaning the mapmakers looked at what was happening in real Florida elections in real time, and still drew the maps based on 2024 assumptions.

That bet looks increasingly dangerous demographically. Florida’s GOP-friendly maps rely heavily on Hispanic South Florida voters remaining as Republican as they were in 2024. Sam Wang, director of the Princeton Gerrymandering Project, put it plainly: “That whole southern region of Florida has considerable Hispanic communities that an aggressive gerrymander relies on sticking with Republicans as they did in 2024. And that is by no means a done deal.” The special election results suggest it is already coming undone, faster than Republicans anticipated.

None of this means the gerrymanders will fail completely. What is more likely, in a strong Democratic environment, is that projected gains dramatically underperform. Instead of netting nine seats in Florida and Texas combined, Republicans might net four or five. Instead of a 9-0 sweep in Tennessee, they might hold six or seven. In a House where the current Republican majority is just three seats, that gap between projected and actual could prove decisive.

Trump’s approval rating sits at roughly 40 percent. That’s the same place it was in 2018, when his party lost 41 seats in a blue wave election. The maps drawn before that wave did not save Republicans then. And the maps drawn for 2026 are more aggressive, cover more states, and rest on shakier demographic assumptions. The structural exposure, if the blue wave materializes as expected, is larger than it was then, not smaller.

VoteHub, a nonpartisan election forecasting outlet, still puts Democratic odds of winning the House at 85 percent, even after Callais. When a party is losing the national approval battle this badly, drawing different lines does not make it win the whole country. It simply means more of its lines are drawn in the wrong place when the blue wave comes in.

The dummymanders in the South make the Democratic mission for November clear: channel voter anger into enthusiasm and turnout that rivals or bests the 2018 midterm. Should that happen, all the carefully drawn maps of the South will be of no avail, and the long moral arc of history will bend toward justice once again.

There shines the beacon of hope, if we can make it out in this fog, shining defiantly through the same dread darkness we have waded through time and again.