It flipped in a few hours. Before the morning of April 29, 2026, few people doubted that the Democrats would retake the House, given President Trump's tanking approval rating. Then that morning, the Supreme Court released its decision in Louisiana v. Callais, which diluted what remained of the Voting Rights Act. Louisiana immediately suspended its primaries to begin redrawing its maps to give Republicans an advantage and turn its two majority-Black districts into one. Tennessee advanced a map that would break up the state's only majority-Black district, and southern states that had already held primaries declared their intentions to redraw their maps in the near future. The apparent demise of the Voting Rights Act and its immediate effects come after almost a year of extraordinary off-cycle attempts to gerrymander maps around the country. Begun last summer when the White House asked Texas to squeeze more GOP seats from its map, the redistricting tit-for-tat seemed to have been...
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