Is the Supreme Court going to doom the Dems? We did the math.

Gutting Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act will make it much harder for Democrats to win the House, but not impossible.

Protesters gather outside the Supreme Court during oral arguments in Louisiana v. Callais. (Photo by Bill Clark/Contributor via Getty Images)

Is Congress hurtling toward permanent Republican rule?

Yesterday, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Louisiana v. Callais, a case concerning Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (VRA), which bans states from drawing legislative maps that discriminate against minority voters, thereby protecting largely Democratic Black- and Hispanic-majority districts across much of the South and West.

Section 2 has long been a target for conservatives — Chief Justice John Roberts argued against its expansion when he was a lawyer in the Reagan administration. And during yesterday’s hearing, the court’s conservatives seemed poised to curb the law and potentially overturn it entirely.

“This court’s cases, in a variety of contexts, have said that race-based remedies are permissible for a period of time, sometimes for a long period of time — decades, in some cases — but that they should not be indefinite and should have an end point,” conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh said at one point during oral arguments.

If Section 2 meets its demise, red states would be free to gerrymander away a slew of districts currently held by Democrats. A number of outlets have cited a report by Stacey Abrams’ Fair Fight Action, which concluded that the loss of VRA protections would cost Democrats 19 U.S. House seats. Combined with redistricting efforts that are already ongoing, the group concluded that Republicans could net 27 to 33 seats, giving them a nearly insurmountable advantage. Based on those numbers, HuffPost declared that the case could “Lock In One Party Rule.”

Could it really? We’re not sure. It certainly makes it vastly harder for Democrats to gain power, especially in presidential election years when the battle for the House tends to be closer. But the doomer view ignores two key facts: First, it’s not just Republicans who can gerrymander, Democrats can too. But more importantly, eliminating a bunch of majority-Democratic districts doesn’t actually erase all the Democratic voters; it just shuffles them around, which can create new competitive swing districts.

To examine the hypotheticals in a more concrete manner, we conducted a modeling exercise, gaming out potential redistricting scenarios and their implications for control of the House.

To do this, we took the presidential results of each district from 2024 relative to the nation. We then adjusted each district for incumbency, as well as each incumbent’s 2024 Wins Above Replacement (WAR) score, which helps us more accurately account for candidate-specific effects. We find this to be a more accurate assessment of the House field of play, because incumbents have specific strengths and weaknesses that we can’t just ignore.

For instance, it makes no sense to treat Maine’s Jared Golden or Pennsylvania’s Brian Fitzpatrick like generic incumbents, because they’re both much stronger. (Using WAR makes our analysis a bit different from the similar exercise Nate Cohn published at The New York Times yesterday. We also explore the possibility Democrats will retaliate with more gerrymanders, which Cohn didn’t.)

We should note here that many consider it unlikely the Supreme Court will rule in time to influence next year’s midterms. Ordinarily, the justices hand down their biggest opinions of the court’s term during the summer, and a decision in June or July of 2026would likely be far too late for states to redraw their maps based on the ruling. But they could make an exception and rush a decision out the door earlier to give lawmakers a chance to redistrict.

With that in mind, let’s talk math.

Under the current maps, with new district lines from Texas, Utah, and Missouri, we estimate that Democrats would likely need to win the national House popular vote by roughly 1.4 percentage points in 2026 to gain a majority. This is certainly within the realm of possibility: Our most recent poll from The Argument had Democrats leading by two percentage points with registered voters, which grew to five points when undecided voters were pushed to pick a side.

The picture doesn’t change much if the rest of redistricting plays out as experts expect. For example, if California successfully redraws its maps, as polling suggests is likely, and if Florida, Ohio, Indiana, and North Carolina also redraw theirs, the net effect is almost nothing — our calculations suggest Democrats would still just need to win the national House vote by 1.5 points.

In other words, under any set of plausible scenarios right now, Democrats would be strong favorites to flip the House. Over the last 20 years, every single out-party has managed to exceed a 1.5-percentage-point popular vote victory margin in the midterm elections.

But if Section 2 is struck down, it gets more complicated. At that point, we estimate Democrats would need to win the House vote by around 5.4 points, because Republicans could draw out every Democratic seat in South Carolina, Louisiana, Alabama, Tennessee, and Mississippi, along with one each in Georgia and Florida. That would net the GOP nine additional seats, on top of their other redistricting gains.

Under an even more aggressive approach, they could also target Wesley Bell in Missouri by cracking St. Louis, and take out Veronica Escobar in Texas by splitting El Paso. But even those would barely move the needle for the tipping-point, assuming the rest of redistricting plays out as expected.

Overcoming a five-point structural disadvantage is not easy. But it’s also not impossible — Democrats comfortably beat this margin in 2018’s blue wave. Among those who said they were likely to vote in our most recent survey, Democrats actually lead by six points. Clearing the hurdle would likely be harder in a presidential year, when the margins tend to be tighter than during midterms. But it has happened before. Amid the crashing economy of 2008, Democrats won the House popular vote by about 10 percentage points.

Should Section 2 meet its doom, blue states could also retaliate. For instance, Democrats could easily gain an additional four or five more seats after redraws in Illinois and California, once they’re unencumbered by the need to create VRA-compliant, minority-majority districts in certain parts of those states.

With these new seats, Democrats would need to win the House vote by approximately 4.8 percentage points in order to win the majority. This is considerably more difficult than the current maps, but it’s also nowhere near the sort of scenario Fair Fight envisions. (It’s actually eerily close to the 4.5 percentage point bias Democrats had to overcome in 2018 in order to flip the House.)¹

We should note that if you somehow knocked 19 seats off the Democratic total, as Fair Fight claims is plausible, and also didn’t bake in any blue-state retaliations, then they’d need to win the House vote by nearly 8 percentage points. In those circumstances, the party would need a 2018-esque wave to have a decent shot at flipping the House. But this scenario would require red states to draw out almost every single Section 2-protected Democratic seat, and it’s not possible to do something that extreme without creating many new competitive districts (some of which might go blue in 2026).

For instance, consider Georgia, which is a Trump +2 state. It’s easy to draw out Sanford Bishop, in the state’s southwest, as he represents a seat that was just Harris +8, and he’s surrounded by two districts that backed Trump by more than 30 percentage points in 2024. But you can’t do something like that in the left-trending Atlanta area without putting an incumbent Republican into some dicier territory, which would almost certainly yield opposition. And as Cohn notes, you’d run into a similar problem in parts of Florida and Texas as well. At some point, it just becomes a math problem: Democrats have to exist somewhere.

The other reality is that redistricting is never as simple as it looks. It’s one thing to draw a map of Georgia that could elect 11 or 12 Republicans, but it’s entirely another to get an incumbent Republican in a safe seat to suddenly accept a borderline-competitive one containing large chunks of metro Atlanta. In addition to juggling parochial demands on what their seats and maps look like, Republicans have also been burned in the past by stretching their maps too thin — and that is a big reason parties almost never go for the maximal gerrymanders drawn by laser-eyed teenagers on Election Twitter. Bad years may be unlikely, but they still do happen, and parties don’t want to risk maps backfiring badly when they do.

There are other avenues for both Democrats and Republicans to make gains in redistricting as well. In Wisconsin, it is conceivable that the majority-liberal Supreme Court could choose to order a redraw for the state’s congressional maps, which currently hosts six Republicans and only two Democrats. Similarly, in Oregon and Minnesota, Democrats could attempt mid-cycle redistricting, assuming they win trifectas in 2026. Meanwhile, Republicans could cancel some of this out by redrawing Kentucky and Kansas.

In either case, the claims of impending one-party rule are a bit overblown. In reality, the net effect would really be that Republicans win the House three or four times as often as the Democrats.

Given the magnitude of the wins we have seen in recent memory, Democrats still have a shot at winning. But it’s far from fair. We don’t write this to tamp down fears of how unbalanced our politics is becoming. But it’s not hopeless. There’s still time to fight.

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(Data analysis by Lakshya Jain and Ethan Chen)

1. As determined by the margin of victory in the tipping-point seat, which in 2018 was California’s 10th District with a margin of 4.49 percentage points.