Updated September 9, 2025 at 2:46 PM EDT
Some longtime opponents of partisan gerrymandering are reconsidering their strategies in the wake of the controversial redistricting fights that President Trump has sparked in Texas and other states.
The advocacy group Common Cause has gone all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court with its decades-long campaign against the redrawing of voting districts to make elections less competitive and help a particular political party win.
But in recent weeks, the organization has softened its stance following Trump's call for new voting maps to help preserve the GOP's control of the U.S. House of Representatives after next year's midterm election.
A "blanket condemnation" of partisan gerrymandering "in this moment would amount to a call for unilateral political disarmament in the face of authoritarian efforts to undermine fair representation and people-powered democracy," Common Cause said in an Aug. 12 statement.
Instead, the group said, it will not condemn certain gerrymandered maps that meet the organization's new "fairness criteria," including that the map does "not further racial discrimination" and is "a targeted response proportional to the threat posed by mid-decade gerrymanders in other states."
On the same day of Common Cause's announcement, California's Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom confirmed a plan for a gerrymandered map for his state to counter new districts by Texas Republicans. "They fired the first shot — Texas," Newsom said later that month before signing the plan for a special election that asks voters to bypass the state's independent redistricting commission and allow new districts approved by Democratic lawmakers to be used through 2030. "We wouldn't be here had Texas not done what they just did, Donald Trump didn't do what he just did."
What is traditionally a once-a-decade mapmaking process immediately following the release of new census results has escalated into a mid-decade congressional redistricting war between the two major political parties.
Missouri is now the latest GOP-controlled state to start a special legislative session that's expected to result in another Republican-favoring map, which could be followed by more gerrymandered redistricting plans in other states. On Tuesday, the Missouri state House passed a map that's now on its way to the state Senate.
"We had to pivot our position to meet this current moment because we are not in normal times," says Omar Noureldin, Common Cause's senior vice president of policy and litigation strategy. "We are going to devote our resources to what we believe are the most urgent threats to fair representation. And that most urgent threat is coming from what the president is doing in Texas, maybe in Missouri, maybe in Indiana, maybe in Ohio."
How a 2019 Supreme Court ruling set the stage for this gerrymandering war
Common Cause's position shift on gerrymandering came after "robust internal debate," Noureldin says. The head of the organization's California chapter, Darius Kemp, had previously said Newsom "is wrong on redistricting," urging him not to "pick a fight that honestly, his political party cannot and will not win."
But Noureldin says Common Cause ultimately saw any future chance to make this country's representative democracy fairer at stake. In addition to this mid-decade redistricting push, Noureldin notes that Trump has been making other moves to "entrench unaccountable power by weakening democratic checks" — including deploying National Guard troops to Washington, D.C., proposing to end birthright citizenship, undermining the independence of the courts and using disinformation to weaken trust in U.S. elections.
"This redistricting fight fits right in," Noureldin adds. "It's about locking in control of government, no matter what voters want."
The ground for this unprecedented redistricting arms race, advocates against gerrymandering say, was laid in large part by the Supreme Court. In its 2019 decision for the case known as Rucho v. Common Cause, the high court's conservative majority ruled that partisan gerrymandering is not reviewable by federal courts.
"Had this been handled years ago, we wouldn't have been quite in this place," says Celina Stewart, CEO of the League of Women Voters, which helped bring the Rucho case to the Supreme Court. "What we tried to do at that time is show them how important it was for the court to set a standard when partisan gerrymandering goes too far. And they declined to do that. And so I feel like now we are having a moment of reckoning because of that decision."
The League has continued to oppose partisan gerrymandering, which, in an August statement responding to Newsom, it called "a threat to democracy, regardless of who does it." While the League condemned Texas' new gerrymandered map, which now faces multiple lawsuits, its California chapter has announced it will not take a position on that state's special election ballot measure.
"That train has left the station," Stewart says. "So now the question becomes: If this is going to happen, how do we ensure that voters and people are protected?"
The League is refocusing its strategy on urging states that take up redistricting before next year's midterms not to harm racial and ethnic minorities, younger voters and agricultural communities, Stewart adds, "because those are the groups who most likely are going to be cracked and packed across the country."
After a Democratic push failed in 2022, Congress has passed no new national redistricting standards
Both the League and Common Cause still agree that the country needs new national redistricting standards that get rid of the patchwork of policies that vary state by state.
National bans on partisan gerrymandering and mid-decade redistricting were part of voting rights bills that Democrats in Congress couldn't pass during the Biden administration after trying and failing to overcome Republican opposition in a closely divided Senate.
"We're basically still in the same fight," says Greta Bedekovics, who worked on the bill as a policy adviser on the Senate Committee on Rules and Administration for Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota. "And I think when you look back on what the Freedom to Vote Act has, looking at how far our democracy has fallen in the last four years, that many of the solutions that were needed then, we need far larger Band-Aids and triages now — that's really sad to think about."
Bedekovics is now the associate director of democracy policy at the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank that had long supported states creating independent, bipartisan redistricting commissions as a way to avoid gerrymandering.
In August, however, the think tank issued a call for states to suspend their redistricting commissions until Congress passes federal standards requiring that "the statewide proportion of districts in each redistricting plan correspond as closely as possible to the statewide partisan preference of voters."
"In this unprecedented moment, we're very much re-evaluating what policies we've endorsed in the past and what we see as a way forward," says Bedekovics. "I think if you talk to a lot of election experts, this is not somewhere anybody thought that we'd find ourselves four years ago or five years ago when Congress tried to pass federal redistricting standards. But I think it's really important that we recognize which policies are going to meet this moment."
A call for "big structural fixes" to congressional elections to stop spiraling "towards the bottom"
David Daley, a redistricting expert and senior fellow at FairVote, an advocacy group that supports nonpartisan mapmaking, argues this moment calls for major structural changes to how members of Congress are elected.
Daley is among the advocates who support replacing the winner-take-all approach for U.S. House elections with a proportional representation system in which multiple members represent each district. It's a kind of rethinking that Daley says Democrats, who have been generally leading a one-sided push for redistricting reform among the major political parties, have no choice but to consider.
"Democrats are standing in the middle of a really complicated intersection right now," explains Daley, author of Antidemocratic: Inside the Far Right's 50-Year Plot to Control American Elections. "They have fewer states where they can retaliate for partisan gerrymandering. They have the likelihood that the Supreme Court could limit Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act and eliminate Black Democratic seats in the South. And they also have the demographic and population shifts coming after the 2030 census that seem likely to move seats from blue states down to red states."
Republicans, on the other hand, have "redistricted themselves into a position in which they cannot lose in so many states that they have very little reason to try to fix this on behalf of voters," Daley adds, pointing to REDMAP, or the "REDistricting Majority Project," a plan that Republicans began in 2010 to dominate redistricting by focusing on state legislative races that determine which party gets to redraw congressional district lines.
This long-term strategy is continuing to pay off for the GOP. It now controls both legislative chambers and the governor's office of 23 states while the Democratic Party controls 15 state government trifectas.
"Democrats have been trying to play catch-up to REDMAP and Republican gerrymandering for about 15 years now, and it doesn't look like they're going to catch them any time soon," Daley says.
In July, Democratic Rep. Don Beyer of Virginia reintroduced a long-running proposal for a proportional representation system in the House. With only about a handful of Democratic co-sponsors, the bill is not expected to become law in this Republican-controlled Congress.
Still, its advocates say that it could help temper both the threats of gerrymandering and political extremism.
"Until we look really seriously at these problems and try to imagine the big structural fixes that can get us back on the right track," Daley adds, "we are going to spiral towards the bottom and stay there."
Edited by Benjamin Swasey
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