Supreme Court Clears Alabama's 2023 Congressional Map for 2026 Primaries, Giving GOP Opening to Reclaim Figures' Seat

The Supreme Court on Monday cleared Alabama to use its 2023 Republican-drawn congressional map in the 2026 midterm elections, vacating a lower-court order that had imposed a court-supervised replacement and giving the GOP an opening to reclaim a U.S. House seat that Democrat Shomari Figures captured under the previous boundaries. The 6-3 order, with Justice Sonia Sotomayor writing a dissent joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, sends the Voting Rights Act dispute back to a three-judge district court for fresh review under the framework established last month in Louisiana v. Callais.

The practical effect is immediate. Alabama's primary elections were scheduled for May 19, just one day after the ruling, and the state had been preparing dual ballot scenarios for weeks. Secretary of State Wes Allen confirmed Monday afternoon that the state will use the 2023 map, which contains only one majority-Black congressional district instead of the two required under the lower court's order. Figures, who won the new 2nd District in 2024 after a panel of federal judges redrew Alabama's lines to comply with Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, said in a statement that the high court had "taken a wrecking ball to the equal-protection promises of the Voting Rights Act, days before voters head to the polls."

The central legal question is how Section 2, which prohibits voting practices that result in racial vote dilution, applies after Callais. In that April ruling, the Supreme Court struck down a Louisiana congressional map that had created a second majority-Black district, holding that the legislature had relied too heavily on race in drawing the lines. Monday's order does not resolve the Alabama litigation but instructs the lower court to reconsider its earlier finding that the 2023 map intentionally discriminated against Black voters. Justice Sotomayor's dissent argued that the Callais framework concerns only the use of race to draw districts and does not foreclose claims that a legislature intentionally diluted minority voting power in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. "Although the Voting Rights Act violation is gone, a lower court could still find intentional discrimination," she wrote.

For Republicans, the ruling is a windfall in a year when the party defends a narrow House majority. The Cook Political Report, in a memo issued Monday evening, shifted Alabama's 2nd District from "toss-up" to "likely Republican" and noted that the change effectively eliminates one of Democrats' clearest paths to a midterm pickup. National Democratic groups, including the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the National Redistricting Foundation, said they would pursue a Fourteenth Amendment case before the August primary runoffs, but legal scholars cautioned that any new injunction is unlikely to take effect before November.

The Alabama case is the second of three high-profile redistricting matters reshaping the 2026 map in the past month. The court's earlier Callais decision opened the door to challenges of Black-opportunity districts in Louisiana, South Carolina and Georgia, while a separate Texas case over coalition districts is set for argument in October. Election lawyer Marc Elias, who represents the Alabama plaintiffs in a parallel federal suit, told reporters that Monday's order "will be remembered as the moment the Roberts Court formally retreated from the affirmative project of the Voting Rights Act," while Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall hailed the decision as "a vindication of the Legislature's authority to draw districts without judicial micromanagement."