Fair-minded people can disagree about the rules of the road for redistricting. Should states be constrained by norms, or only by formal rules? Can states devise their own redistricting rules and processes, or should the federal government impose a single set of guidelines? Should maps be drawn to maximize proportional party representation, or to promote competitive elections, or to reflect existing community boundaries — or are they rightly the spoils of the majority party?
We have, for example, recently criticized Virginia for a particularly appalling gerrymander that involved a rapid about-face, sold deceptively to its voters, away from a recently adopted process, seeking maximal Democratic partisan advantage in a purple state only recently governed by Republicans, and drawing absurdly shaped districts aiming to put one corner of the state — the one adjacent to the already bloated national capital — in charge of the rest of the state’s voters.
One thing that ought to be true, however, is that both parties should have to operate under the same rules. Another, freshly clarified by the Supreme Court in Louisiana v. Callais, is that districts should not be drawn into unnatural shapes in order to segregate racial-minority enclaves. A third is that redistricting is downstream of the Census, which due to the pandemic and other reasons was fatally flawed in 2020, leaving states such as Texas and Florida underrepresented for an entire decade.
This is the crucial context to understand the current decade’s redistricting wars. Democrats, who dominated the gerrymandering game for decades, discovered that partisan gerrymanders were a bad thing only after the 2010 election cycle gave Republicans a decisive edge in state legislatures for the first time in memory. But the liberal reading of the Voting Rights Act, combined with the status of black voters as identifiably reliable Democrats, created an unlevel playing field: Democrats could claim in public to oppose the drawing of partisan maps, while claiming in court that maps had to protect the Democrats’ partisan interests in Republican-run states by preserving majority-minority districts.
That’s the main lever by which Democrats kept alive mid-decade disputes over maps, especially in states with Republican legislatures such as Texas, Louisiana, Florida, Alabama, and North Carolina. Different litigation tactics were deployed for similar ends in New York and Wisconsin.
As the Supreme Court began to show increasing signs of skepticism of this two-step, Ron DeSantis decided to bet on beating it in court. In 2022, he fought the legislature to eliminate a bizarre, lizard-shaped district in north Florida that existed solely as a racial gerrymander. To do so, he had to steam into the teeth not only of existing Voting Rights Act jurisprudence but also a Florida constitutional amendment that provided more explicitly for majority-minority districts.
A savvy, detail-oriented lawyer, DeSantis has often taken aggressive legal stances, but when he does so, he thinks through his strategy and arguments. As a result, he has won far more of his administration’s major legal battles than he has lost, even when the commentariat was predicting certain defeat. He won this one, too: in 2025, the Florida Supreme Court agreed that the Florida amendment must give way to the equal protection clause’s guarantees of race-blind government action. In Callais, the Supreme Court went the same way.
Just days before Callais was decided, DeSantis doubled his bet, proposing a map that would eliminate more oddly shaped, race-driven anomalies in the southern half of the state, redrawing the maps to varying degrees for Tampa, Orlando, and the Palm Beach–Miami corridor. The Florida legislature passed the new map just hours after Callais was handed down, and DeSantis is expected to sign it into law any day. With Florida’s primaries not held until August 18, that leaves sufficient time for the new map to go into effect this year.
Florida isn’t the only one. Texas, which drew the most press attention for its 2025 redistricting, likewise aimed to draw the maps it would have drawn in 2021–22 had it not been constrained by the old racial gerrymandering rules. Louisiana now aims to redraw its map for the same reasons.
The new Florida map still faces two state constitutional limitations: the requirement of compactly shaped districts and the ban on redistricting for partisan gain. The former requirement ought to be easily met; while the new map is not perfectly compact, it is an improvement in that regard on the existing map and looks positively symmetrical compared with the comically convoluted maps in states such as Virginia, Illinois, and Maryland. Unlike Virginia’s map, the Florida map distributes political power evenly across the state’s multiple regions and major cities.
The legal battle over the ban on districts “drawn with the intent to favor or disfavor a political party or an incumbent” will be more challenging, given that the new map is widely expected to aid Republicans by three or four more seats. DeSantis argues that the map simply eliminates district boundaries that were artificially drawn for invidious reasons. Unlike the Virginia Democrats, DeSantis is following a line of argument he has pursued openly for the past five years. Given his track record, we would not bet against him. If nothing else, the rapid passage of the new map shows that, even in his eighth and final year in office, the term-limited governor is as consequential a figure as ever.
Democrats will cry crocodile tears at all this, but they have pursued war to the knife on redistricting everywhere they could, by every means they could — and are now reaping the consequences of using litigation to divide American voters by race.