Louisiana, Alabama, South Carolina and Mississippi Race to Redraw Maps After SCOTUS Ruling

With Tennessee Governor Bill Lee's signature on a Memphis-shredding congressional map Thursday, Republican-led states across the South have launched a coordinated, fast-moving effort to redraw their U.S. House maps before the November midterms — a sprint enabled by the U.S. Supreme Court's April 29 ruling in Louisiana v. Callais, which sharply weakened federal oversight of districts drawn along racial lines. Within nine days of the decision, special sessions were underway or scheduled in Alabama, Louisiana, South Carolina and Mississippi, with Florida and Texas also weighing whether to revisit their existing maps before the filing deadline.

Louisiana moved first. The state legislature convened in Baton Rouge on May 2 and passed a new map by May 5 that collapses the majority-Black 6th District drawn under court order in 2024 and replaces it with a configuration giving Republicans a 5-1 edge. Governor Jeff Landry signed the map Tuesday and the state Election Commission delayed the May 16 congressional primary by six weeks to allow the change to take effect. Alabama Governor Kay Ivey called her own special session on May 1, with lawmakers in Montgomery debating a map this week that would dissolve the court-ordered 2nd District represented by Democratic Rep. Shomari Figures, whose seat had been created after a 2023 federal-court order found Alabama's earlier map racially gerrymandered.

South Carolina Republicans are taking a quieter route, but a more sweeping one. House Speaker Murrell Smith on Tuesday introduced a redistricting bill that would carve up the Charleston-anchored 1st District represented by Rep. Nancy Mace and the Columbia-based 6th District held by Democratic Rep. Jim Clyburn, the longtime House Majority Whip. Internal party documents reviewed by reporters show the South Carolina map is designed to deliver a 7-0 Republican delegation, eliminating the state's only Democratic-held seat. Mississippi's legislature is expected to convene in special session next week to consider a map that would similarly dilute the Jackson-based 2nd District, currently represented by Democratic Rep. Bennie Thompson.

The coordinated push has scrambled the math for control of the U.S. House. Republicans currently hold a 222-213 majority, and political handicappers including Cook Political Report and Inside Elections estimate the new Southern maps could net the GOP between four and seven additional seats. "This is not redistricting in the traditional sense — it's a mid-cycle partisan power grab made possible by a single Supreme Court decision," said Michael Li, senior counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice, which has filed lawsuits challenging the Louisiana and Tennessee maps. National Republican Redistricting Trust president Adam Kincaid countered in a statement that the new maps "finally remove the heavy hand of federal courts that imposed race-based districts on Southern voters."

Democrats are responding on multiple fronts. Senate Majority Whip Elizabeth Warren and Senator Raphael Warnock introduced legislation Wednesday to codify the pre-Callais Voting Rights Act standards — a bill with no realistic path through the Republican-controlled Senate but which Democratic strategists view as a 2026 messaging vehicle. Governors Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan and Tony Evers of Wisconsin have separately raised the prospect of retaliatory mid-decade redistricting in Democratic-led states, though both face independent redistricting commissions that limit their ability to act unilaterally. The Department of Justice, under Attorney General Pam Bondi, has so far declined to take any position on the new Southern maps, a sharp departure from the Biden-era practice of intervening in redistricting cases on the side of voting-rights plaintiffs.