How Maximum Partisan Warfare Gives Way to a More Centrist Politics

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, May 14, 2026

 

With the overturning of Virginia’s partisan gerrymander by the state’s highest court and the Supreme Court’s ruling that the majority-minority districts once mandated by judicial interpretations of the Voting Rights Act’s Section 2 are unconstitutional, Republicans look like they’re set to win the mid-decade redistricting wars that Donald Trump inaugurated. It looked touch-and-go there for a while. But the GOP’s victories could yet be pyrrhic.

 

Splitting up reliably Democratic majority-minority districts, thereby diluting their partisan lean by pushing more Republicans into them, will certainly make those districts less Democratic. By virtue of the math, however, it also means that districts which were once ruby red will have a lighter hue to them.

 

“Nothing ever plays out exactly in politics as we think it does,” said longtime Republican strategist Karl Rove. In a “swing year” in which Republican voters are unenthusiastic compared with their Democratic counterparts — a description that very much applies to 2026 — districts that were once partisan locks become “more vulnerable.” Given the mood of the electorate, he added, it’s “hard to believe that the Republican losses are only going to be five or six seats.” Creating maps that are larded up with “dummymanders,” as they’re derisively referred to by political professionals, is a fraught prospect.

 

Republicans are in no mood to contemplate unanticipated consequences. But neither, it seems, are the Democrats.

 

“A lot of Democrats are willing to sacrifice Black voting power to beat the GOP,” Politico reported on Thursday. According to its latest poll, a large plurality of the Democratic Party’s voters would rather “counter Republican efforts by drawing their own maps that create more Democratic districts, even if it means reducing the number of majority-minority districts.”

 

Some have interpreted these results to mean that Democratic partisans are not nearly as convinced as they claim that the Supreme Court’s decision in Callais consigns black Americans to racist disenfranchisement. Perhaps. What’s certain is that the practical effect of this outlook, if it is operationalized by their state-level representatives, would be to dilute the Democratic Party’s own partisan districts with all the same downside risk that the GOP is inviting.

 

We have a couple of election cycles ahead of us before the 2030 census and the process of decennial reapportionment that follows. In the meantime, if this dynamic plays out, the nation will have many more competitive congressional districts. And those competitive districts will, by virtue of necessity, compel those who seek to represent them to moderate their appeals to voters. There will still be plenty of fire-breathing radicals whose toughest race for Congress is the primary, but there will be fewer of them.

 

Perhaps both parties recognize their mistake in 2030 and reverse course. Or maybe Americans get used to a condition in which there are more than a handful of toss-up races when each of the 435 House seats is up for reelection every two years. We may be about to find out.