MAGA’s State-by-State Plot to Butcher Democracy

Four years later, in a racial gerrymandering case from Alabama, Allen v. Milligan (formerly Merrill v. Milligan), Roberts and Brett Kavanaugh worked together to invite the Voting Rights Act case they really wanted. Roberts and Kavanaugh sided with the liberals to order an Alabama map that created two Black opportunity districts, while patiently teeing up the challenge they desired to Section Two of the VRA. It’s a patient two-step Roberts has long mastered to get his desired results, while maintaining his unearned reputation as an institutionalist. In a brief concurrence, Kavanaugh suggested that he wanted to consider the bigger question and find that the nation no longer needed to take race into account at all. But, he noted, he could not, because that had not been part of the arguments. It did not take long for Louisiana to notice this exaggerated wink—or for the court to order Louisiana v. Callais reargued around those larger constitutional issues. Depending on the nature of the decision and the speed with which it arrives, it’s possible that state legislatures across the South could remap next year, erase once-protected majority-Black seats once and for all, and make both partisan and racial gerrymanders all but impossible to challenge.

Congress did take up John Roberts’s challenge. It ran aground, precisely as the chief justice must have known it would.

When Democrats claimed a Washington trifecta in 2021, their top congressional priority was a collection of clean-government reforms called the For the People Act. It would have overhauled campaign finance, protected voting rights, and ended partisan gerrymandering (both after the census and in the middle of the decade). Democrats couldn’t get it done. New reporting suggests they came far closer than anyone believed.

“It’s two things,” one prominent member told me. “How close we got, which most people don’t know.… How transformative it was. How responsive to the threats at this moment. All of it.” This member continued: “We got so tantalizingly close. Were it not for Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema …”

Every Democrat but one in the House backed HR1. Every Republican lined up to oppose it. (“A lot of people on our side didn’t appreciate how big this was,” the member told me. “But someone who did was Mitch McConnell.”) Without any Senate Republican support, it couldn’t survive the filibuster. Democrats needed Manchin and Sinema’s support to reform the filibuster so that the bill could pass the Senate with a simple majority instead of needing to clear the cloture hurdle of 60 votes; otherwise, a minority of a minority would kill far-reaching reforms to safeguard democracy.

In public, Manchin said consistently that he would not touch the filibuster. But behind closed doors, Democrats believed they had convinced him. Congressional leaders framed the filibuster reform as a return to its original conception, not a permanent minority veto, and they fed Manchin’s considerable ego: He would be the one who fixed the Senate. He would be the leader who made it work again. He would be the Robert Byrd of his generation. After months of hand-holding, Manchin understood the stakes and seemed to signal he would go along.

But under intense pressure from the White House to enact President Joe Biden’s signature Build Back Better program, an embittered Manchin broke away from the party and said he would vote no, effectively killing the stimulus package. All the progress that had been made on voting rights disappeared. Biden had lost Manchin entirely. Manchin declined to comment. “Of all of Manchin’s transgressions against the democracy,” said Raskin, “this might be the most severe sin of them all.”

The For the People Act was dead. Could Democrats have broken the bill apart and worked to get a handful of Senate Republicans onboard for a stand-alone gerrymandering bill? Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi scoffed at that idea. “And you think the Republicans would give us 60 votes for that?” she asked me. “Which one would they give us? Independent commissions?” She ran through a number of reforms. “They would not go for that…. They’re not interested in any of that.”

Perhaps not. But another trifecta window—with Democrats controlling the White House, Senate, and House—closed without electoral reform. It’s hard to imagine when the next might arrive.

If you think the 2026 maps present challenges, however, just wait. A potentially devastating reapportionment looms after the 2030 census. If Democrats were once out-strategized on redistricting because they believed demographics were destiny, well, now redistricting and demographics are aligned against them. Population shifts could send a dozen House seats from blue states to red ones. A Brennan Center study, based on Census Bureau projections, suggests that California could lose four seats, New York two, and Oregon, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Minnesota, Rhode Island, and Wisconsin one each. Texas and Florida would each pick up four. North Carolina, Idaho, Utah, and Arizona would gain one each.

As those House seats shift, Electoral College power moves with them. Kamala Harris would have won in 2024 had she held the Midwestern “blue wall” along with Nebraska’s “blue dot.” In 2032, that won’t add up to 270 electoral votes.

Which is to say: If Democrats lack control of enough states to gerrymander their way out of their gerrymandering problem in 2026, it will be even harder come 2032. The bonus five seats Democrats claimed in California essentially head to Texas anyway at decade’s end. Anything New York might do by 2028 will go to Florida.

Are Democrats thinking about this? I asked Pelosi. “Apportionment? I’m just thinking about now. I’ve got November 4th. OK? I’ll get by November 4th and get by next year. And then you’re going to see something quite remarkable happen.”

Such fanciful thinking is no match for math. There will never ever be enough seats in Illinois, Maryland, or New York to compensate for states where Republicans dominate and paint delegations entirely, or nearly entirely, red. That means that the road to the House in 2026 requires a clean sweep by Democrats of competitive districts in some tough territory: Iowa, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, New York (outside the city), Virginia, and Arizona.

Come 2032? Even if California later moves to permanently suspend its commission, for Democrats to overcome an exodus from Minnesota, Oregon, and Rhode Island to states where Republicans draw the lines and adeptly “pack and crack” Democrats (stuffing as many Democrats as possible into a handful of seats they win easily, then dispersing the rest in numbers insufficient to win) might be asking too much. Might Democrats move to suspend commissions in Colorado, Washington, and New Jersey? In Michigan, if they win a trifecta? Would voters in states that earned hard-won reforms hand power back to the Democrats?

“We have been trying to act on this, and they’re the ones who insist on a race to the bottom,” said Raskin. “Our people just feel like we can’t engage in unilateral political disarmament, and we also understand that they control a lot more state legislatures than we do.”

All is not lost. There will be fierce efforts to fight back. In Kansas City, the same week that lawmakers passed that new gerrymandered map that cracked the city in thirds, I spent a Saturday morning in a church basement packed with volunteers learning how to collect signatures for a statewide ballot initiative that would effectively veto the legislature’s rigged map. “We are a lot of pissed off white people,” said the woman next to me. Maybe in some state, a Republican Supreme Court justice will prove to be as brave as Ohio’s Maureen O’Connor.

The long-term struggle to secure something closer to a representative democracy, however, will require a different strategy. The time has come to fight fire with water. Any fix must be a national one that’s fair everywhere. The best way to end gerrymandering—and the extremism and polarization that runs hand in hand—would be for the nation to adopt a more proportional House of Representatives. 

Here’s how it would work. Every state would have the same number of members as they do now. But instead of electing them from single-member districts—easily gerrymandered so that the district lines determine winners and losers—a nonpartisan commission would draw larger, multimember districts of three, four, and five members, who would be elected with a proportional form of ranked-choice voting. Every district, everywhere, would elect Democrats, Republicans, and maybe even independents. (Nothing would change in states with only one or two members.) Every voter would cast a ballot that matters. Urban Republicans, rural Democrats, and independents everywhere would know that someone from their district represented them. Congress could make this change simply by passing a law; a really strong version called the Fair Representation Act is regularly introduced by Raskin and fellow Representative Don Beyer of Virginia.

“I want to advocate the reforms that could get us through this, the For the People Act, ranked-choice voting and multimember districts,” said Raskin. “But at the same time, we have to be utterly engaged in the process of figuring out how to win within the gerrymandered rules…. We are eventually going to need structural reform to get out of this nightmare. But in order to get there, we are going to have to play like home run champs to get through the system as it exists.”

Like any national reform in a polarized era, or anything that requires getting through the Senate filibuster, this would be a heavy lift. It won’t happen before the 2026 midterms, or even the 2030 census. But before you insist this could never pass, the beauty of a more proportional plan is that it solves everyone’s problems with the current system. Trump and Republicans howl that the Massachusetts delegation is unfair because it produces a 9–0 Democratic map when Trump won around 36 percent of the vote in 2024. Democrats have similar complaints about Tennessee and Oklahoma. A proportional system addresses both concerns. Independents, who often outnumber at least one major party in a state, feel shut out of primaries and have no say in selecting general election candidates. Their voices would matter. 

Minority voters, fearful that the Voting Rights Act will be gutted so that they cannot win representation, would maintain their voice. Republicans in California would not be punished for the sins of Republicans in Texas. Democrats in Florida would not be underrepresented to compensate for gerrymanders in Maryland. In 2024, only 37 of 435 U.S. House election results were within 5 percentage points. Others had the choice made for them—often in a low-turnout closed primary that selects someone far to the left or the right of the district itself. All those voters who feel as if no one is listening to them are right. No one needs to listen to them. A proportional House would put voters, not district lines, in charge again.

Congress could transform our politics in this way via statute. No constitutional amendment is required. We are not limited to a system of winner-takes-all districts, drawn by politicians. And while proportional systems are used in modern democracies around the world, it also fits squarely into the American tradition of full and fair representation. Congress passed a law mandating single-member districts in 1967. Nothing else stands in the way. Reform might not be easy, but it is possible. 

Back in Kansas City, where banks and developers perfected redlining to keep Blacks who migrated here after the Civil War out of their communities, Troost Avenue became a racial divide known as the Troost Wall. Now, in 2025, Troost is a dividing line again, this time between two of the three new districts that cleave this city apart, old poison in a new bottle. Troost intersects with Independence Avenue, and as I head toward that one point where all three new districts come together, a fascinating melting pot emerges: multiple markets dedicated to Middle Eastern, African, Mexican, and Somali foods.

As I approach the intersection of Independence and Gladstone avenues, the new 6th District is to my north. That’s the one that stretches along the entire top half of the state, several hundred miles to the Illinois border. The new 4th is to my left. It attaches a small slice of the city onto a much larger swath of rural, southwest Missouri. To my right is the 5th, which zigzags its way up to the college town of Columbia, then veers southeast toward Jefferson City.

At the very place where all three districts coalesce sits the Independence Boulevard Christian Church. Three homeless people sit on the front steps. I walk through the parking lot toward a side door, crossing in and out of the districts, and look inside. The church’s gargantuan bottom floor houses a major food kitchen in Kansas City. Every Monday night, hundreds of hot meals are served. Hygiene kits are stacked high. There are shelves of children’s books for families. Pamphlets offer advice for dealing with immigration authorities in several different languages. Here, the hard work of caring for one other—of acting out the rituals of compassion and civic faith that we need to sustain a democracy—goes on; precisely where that democracy is being carved beyond recognition, sliced and diced for partisan gain.