Redistricting wars shrink voter choice ahead of US midterms

When Americans vote in November's midterm elections, all 435 seats in the House of Representatives will be on the ballot, but in much of the country the result is barely in doubt. 

Years of increasingly aggressive "gerrymandering" -- drawing boundaries to favor one party -- have steadily hollowed out the electoral middle ground, and the latest battle over the maps cut deeper still.

The Cook Political Report rates just 38 House races as competitive this cycle, and only half of those are considered genuine toss-ups. The number of districts with single-digit margins in presidential elections has also been falling fast.

"The biggest problem with gerrymandering is it undermines the basic premise of a representative democracy," said Andrew Koneschusky, a former senior staffer in the US Senate.

"Voters are supposed to choose their representatives, not the other way around. With gerrymandering, you have politicians choosing their voters."

The mid-decade scramble, in which both parties tore up maps outside the normal post-census cycle, has compressed years of decline into months -- and left lawmakers who no longer fear the other party fearing their own.

It began with President Donald Trump, who urged Republican-led states to redraw maps to protect his party's narrow House majority.

Texas moved first, Democratic-led California retaliated with a map of its own, and an April Supreme Court ruling narrowing the Voting Rights Act opened opportunities across the South for Republicans.

The casualties were the seats either party could win. With some maps still in court, most estimates put the Republican net gain at around 10 seats -- enough to decide a chamber where Democrats need only a handful of gains to take control.

Behind that arithmetic are politicians whose districts became unrecognizable overnight.

Tennessee Republicans dismantled Democrat Steve Cohen's Memphis-based, majority-Black seat, splitting it among three safely Republican districts.

After nearly two decades in the House he threw in the towel -- one of six Democrats who have quit or lost primaries in redrawn seats -- accusing Trump's party of "coming for the power of Black voters."

Others are staying to fight.

Don Davis is contesting a new North Carolina seat after Republicans redrew his old district's lines to exclude his own home.

"The map changed. His reason for running did not," a Davis campaign spokeswoman told AFP. "We expect voters to send him back in November for the same reason they have before."

In Alabama, the new map cut the Black voting-age population of Shomari Figures's seat from 48 percent to 40, flipping a district Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris won in 2024 into one Trump would have carried comfortably.

Alabama had "intentionally discriminated" against Black voters, Figures said, warning of a return to "the 1950s and 60s."

Not every casualty is a Democrat.

California's mapmakers fragmented Kevin Kiley's Republican-leaning, Sacramento-area seat into six pieces, leaving him a far more Democratic electorate.

He quit the Republicans -- though he still votes with the party -- and will contest the midterms as an independent.

Kiley had seen it coming, pressing House Speaker Mike Johnson to take up his bill banning mid-decade redistricting, then accusing him of stoking a "redistricting war" likely to end in stalemate.  

Experts warn that the consequences extend beyond November.

In reliably Republican or Democratic districts, lawmakers can assume victory in the general election, and their greatest threat becomes a primary challenger calling them insufficiently conservative or liberal.

That pushes politicians to court activists rather than the broader electorate, analysts and former lawmakers say, rewarding more ideological candidates and making compromise in Washington harder.

"It's rigging the game to win rather than playing by the rules," said Koneschusky, the former Senate aide. "Taken to the extreme, elections become fights over maps rather than policies and ideas."

Maps are not the whole story. Political scientists point declining split-ticket voting and to Senate races, which cannot be gerrymandered, becoming less competitive too.

But the effect on the House is stark and leaves many voters in an odd position: their most consequential election is no longer in November. It was the party primary, and it has already happened.