State Senator Randy McNally, lieutenant governor of Tennessee, on the floor of the Senate during a special legislative session at the Tennessee State Capitol in Nashville, on Tuesday, May 5. Tennessee is considering redrawing its House congressional map following a key Supreme Court decision last week, a move expected to bolster Republicans ahead of what are forecasted to be tough midterm elections in November.
State Senator Randy McNally, lieutenant ...

While the national mood seems to be veering away from President Donald Trump as his popularity drops, Republicans are trying to squeeze every possible advantage out of a recent Supreme Court decision.

Multiple states are still in the process of tearing up and drawing new congressional maps, or waiting on courts to have their say, creating an unprecedented amount of flux in American democracy six months before Election Day.

Candidates don’t know where to run. Lawmakers are seeing their districts carved up. Voters don’t know which district they live in.

An election system in chaos

► On Sunday, Trump issued a directive on social media for Republican-led states to capitalize on last month’s Supreme Court decision upending the Voting Rights Act and erase multiple majority-Black districts across the South after the high court made it more difficult to challenge future maps for racial discrimination. Multiple efforts were already underway.

► Tennessee Republicans unveiled a map Wednesday to carve up the state’s only district represented by a Democrat and disperse its majority-Black voters into surrounding GOP-represented districts. While the Tennessee primary isn’t until August, candidate filing closed back in March and the new map required the legislature to repeal its own longstanding ban on mid-decade redistricting.

► Louisiana’s governor declared an emergency to postpone the state’s congressional primaries even though some voters had already cast mail-in ballots. They will likely need to vote again if state officials Republicans successfully change maps to advantage Republicans.

“We cannot allow there to be an Election that is conducted unconstitutionally simply for the ‘convenience’ of State Legislatures. If they have to vote twice, so be it,” Trump wrote Sunday on Truth Social.

► Florida Republicans had drawn new maps in anticipation of the Supreme Court decision, and Gov. Ron DeSantis signed them into law Monday even though voters in 2010 expressly forbade the redrawing of maps for partisan gain.

► Similar efforts are underway in Alabama and Mississippi, but not in more closely divided states such as Georgia, where the outgoing Republican governor acknowledged that voting is already underway.

► In Virginia, where Democrats dominate, there are candidates who don’t know which district they’ll be running in as the state Supreme Court considers whether to allow redrawn maps blessed earlier this year by state voters.

State Representative London Lamar, a Democrat from Tennessee, holds a copy of the proposed congressional map for Tennessee during a special legislative session at the Tennessee State Capitol in Nashville, Tennessee, US, on Wednesday, May 6.
State Representative London Lamar, a Democrat from Tennessee, holds a copy of the proposed congressional map for Tennessee during a special legislative session at the Tennessee State Capitol in Nashville, Tennessee, US, on Wednesday, May 6.
Madison Thorn/Bloomberg/Getty Images

Who will win the redistricting war? Republicans are ahead and gaining

CNN has been tracking the redistricting war. So far, Republicans have enacted new congressional maps in five states, targeting 13 US House seats currently held by Democrats. New maps in California, Utah and Virginia could flip as many as 10 seats for Democrats.

That means that Republicans have drawn themselves a net of three new GOP-friendly seats so far, but more are now expected. Each state’s situation is different, but new maps in Tennessee, Alabama, Louisiana and South Carolina could push that total up to seven or eight. Mississippi has already held its primary, but there are calls for it, too, to redraw its map.

The GOP advantage could grow beyond 10 if the Virginia Supreme Court agrees with Republican lawmakers and invalidates on procedural grounds a voter initiative that passed last month.

Accusations of partisanship at the US Supreme Court

Rep. Steve Cohen, who represents a soon-to-be sliced and diced Memphis district, accused the US Supreme Court’s conservative majority of handing a seat to Trump.

“They knew what they were doing,” he said on CNN Tuesday. “They’re trying to give him additional congressional seats throughout this country without any consideration of how it affects a large, great city like Memphis.”

Justices moved Monday to make sure the decision took place in time for Louisiana to postpone its primary and draw new districts. The high court also stood in the way of New York redrawing its maps to erase a Republican district on Staten Island earlier this year. On the other hand, justices allowed California’s new maps, gerrymandered to help Democrats, to take effect.

Chief Supreme Court Justice John Roberts attends US President Donald Trump's address to a joint session of Congress at the U.S. Capitol on March 4, 2025 in Washington, DC.
Chief Supreme Court Justice John Roberts attends US President Donald Trump's address to a joint session of Congress at the U.S. Capitol on March 4, 2025 in Washington, DC.
Win McNamee/Getty Images

Election officials will have to pivot

In Louisiana, ballots were already in the mail when the primary was postponed. In Mississippi, where the primary has already taken place, a second primary would have to be held if maps are changed. In Alabama, there’s talk of delaying the primary from June to August or potentially holding a second primary for redrawn districts.

A ‘race to the bottom’

“This is not how it should be,” Democratic Rep. Shomari Figures of Alabama told CNN’s Laura Coates on Monday. He thinks courts, including the Supreme Court, will ultimately protect his district.

The redistricting war, he said, is absolutely evidence that Trump is trying to rig the election.

“He’s grasping for straws; he’s doing everything that he can to ensure that Republicans stay in power,” Figures said. But the ultimate result of the redistricting war, he said, will be a “race to the bottom” that benefits no one.

“This whole attitude of ‘let’s just minimize the voice of our political adversaries,’” Figures said, “if this was the attitude back during the Constitutional Convention, we never would have left out with the United States of America. … We have to have that realization and come to the table and be Americans at the end of the day.”

Voters don’t always behave as expected

It’s possible that either party, by trying to draw itself new seats, makes previously safe districts competitive and ends up shooting itself in the foot, or at least doesn’t win all its new targets. New GOP-friendly maps in Florida and Texas, for instance, assume that gains Trump made among Latino voters in 2024 will hold this year. That’s a gamble.

Special elections held since 2024 have indicated a potential swing toward Democrats that could overtake any efforts to game the system.

A voter casts a ballot at a polling station in the East Liverpool City Hall during the Ohio voting primaries on May 5, in East Liverpool, Ohio.
A voter casts a ballot at a polling station in the East Liverpool City Hall during the Ohio voting primaries on May 5, in East Liverpool, Ohio.
Jeff Swensen/Getty Images

There is some optimism the system will hold

Trump seems to know there is a backlash brewing, which helps explain his efforts to change the system.

“A president who is feeling confident going into the elections does not do these things,” according to David Becker, founder of the nonprofit and nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation and Research, which works with state election officials to build confidence in the US democratic system.

But for all the uncertainty caused by the unprecedented redistricting war, Becker said the guardrails of the election system are holding. Once legislatures settle on maps, voters will be able to vote for candidates and have those votes accurately counted.

“The fact that election officials out there are having to work so hard just to do their basic job, just to hold on to a functioning democracy, that’s not great,” he said. “It’s really bad, but it’s working.”

Where Trump has failed so far

The redistricting war Trump demanded is only one of multiple things the president has promoted expressly to help his party stave off a blue wave. Some of Trump’s wackier ideas (or jokes?) — about canceling the November midterm, for instance — would be unconstitutional and outside his power.

Other efforts to change how elections operate have failed, so far, in Congress and the courts. Trump could not muster a necessary Senate supermajority to impose new nationwide voter ID rules. His executive orders to impose new rules and get the US Postal Service involved in denying mail-in voting have met resistance in the courts. It’s also not at clear that new restrictions that put up barriers to voting would help Republicans, since the parties have realigned in many ways, and some voters who back Trump and the GOP are less engaged and might opt not to take part in midterm elections.