The Supreme Court’s recent handling of mid-cycle congressional maps has turned on reasoning drawn from an earlier case, Abbott v. League of United Latin American Citizens, without the Court spelling out how that precedent applied. Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson, the Court’s three liberals, dissented.
In December, the Court gave Texas’s redrawn map a temporary green light. In February, it did the same for California’s. Those two states opened the current round of mid-decade redistricting fights now underway across the country. Each map was drawn to add about five seats for the party in power — Republicans in Texas, Democrats in California — so the Court’s paired approvals largely canceled each other out heading into the 2026 midterms.
The Texas case began after Governor Greg Abbott, a Republican, asked the Supreme Court to halt a ruling from a three-judge panel in the Western District of Texas. That panel had held, 2–1, that race played too large a role in the state’s new lines. The Department of Justice urged the justices to intervene and reverse. It argued that Texas had redrawn the map for partisan reasons, not racial ones, and that the lower court had misread what the Voting Rights Act allows. Voting-rights groups that sued Abbott and the state called the map an illegal racial gerrymander. On December 6, the Court ruled 6–3 that the challengers had not produced an alternative map that still met Texas’s stated political goals. An unsigned order said the lower court should not have stepped into an active primary, sowing confusion and upsetting the balance between federal courts and state election administration.
That Texas fight is one front in a broader scramble over House maps before November. Another is now in Virginia, where a voter-approved redistricting referendum has been blocked and is headed to the Supreme Court of Virginia.
Analysts say the measure, if it stands, could favor Democrats in as many as 10 of the state’s 11 congressional districts and shift control of several U.S. House seats. Voters approved the referendum, but Circuit Court Judge Jack Hurley Jr. later ruled that it could not be certified. He found procedural violations in how the measure was placed on the ballot, including a failure to follow state rules on the timing of ballot questions relative to the start of early voting. His decision was the third time a court has found legal problems with the effort.
Republican officials moved quickly to challenge the referendum. They argue both that lawmakers skipped required steps and that the resulting map would be an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander. The case is now before the state’s highest court, which will hear arguments on whether the referendum complies with the Virginia Constitution and whether it was lawfully enacted.
Among the questions are whether the legislature broke procedural rules in advancing the measure and whether it conflicts with existing constitutional provisions on elections and redistricting. The Virginia Supreme Court had earlier declined to stop the referendum before the vote, a choice some legal analysts read as a preference for a fully developed record rather than preemptive intervention. With a lower court now blocking certification, the justices must weigh those procedural and constitutional claims under tight timing pressure as the midterm calendar closes in.
Together, the Texas stay and the Virginia fight show how courts are being asked to police maps drawn outside the usual once-a-decade cycle. In Texas, a 6–3 majority treated the absence of a politically satisfactory alternative map, and the risk of disrupting an ongoing primary, as reasons not to block the lines. In Virginia, the dispute is still at the state level and turns first on whether the referendum was properly put before voters at all. The outcomes will help decide whether mid-cycle redraws survive, and how many House seats change hands, before ballots are cast.
