TGIF (The GOP Is Fiendish)

Happy Friday!

Here’s a lil wrap-up on all the statehouse action from the week, and a peek at what’s coming up next.

First, I made a passing mention of Georgia’s racist redistricting moves on Wednesday, but I didn’t elaborate because the legislature won’t be redrawing maps for 2026.

So, now I’m elaborating.

• On Wednesday, GOP Gov. Brian Kemp called a special session of the Republican-dominated Georgia legislature to do its own round of re-gerrymandering.

  • The session will kick off on June 17, the day after the Peach State (don’t yell at me, South Carolinians, I didn’t give it that nickname) wraps its primary runoff elections for 2026, so even without Kemp’s proclamation specifying that the redistricting would be for the 2028 elections, it’ll definitely come too late for the midterms.

But the proclamation includes something we really haven’t seen happen yet: redrawing not just Georgia’s congressional districts, but also its state legislative maps.

• We’ll also be seeing this in Mississippi when it takes up gerrymandering, which is one of the few states with legislative elections in 2027.

Because of the near-existential nature of the outcome of this year’s midterms on the federal level, most of the commentary (mine included) on the fallout from the Callais ruling has been focused on US House seats and southern Republicans’ race to eliminate Black members from their congressional delegations.

But make no mistake: While Mississippi and Georgia are getting a head start, other Republican legislatures in the South will absolutely spend chunks of their legislative sessions next year redrawing their state House and Senate maps to decimate Black political power as far down the ballot as they’re able.

According to an analysis by Fair Fight Action and Black Voters Matter, post-Callais statehouse gerrymandering could reduce the number of legislative districts where Black or Latino voters make up a majority of the voting age population (VAP) from 342 to 202.

That’s 140 seats, y’all!

But the number of Black- or Latino-majority districts isn’t the only calculation here.

• Eliminating those districts opens up entire legislative maps for redrawing, and since SCOTUS has basically blessed partisan gerrymandering, and the same analysis finds that as many as 191 Democratic seats could be eliminated across 10 southern states (specifically: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas).

  • And of course, the vast majority of those lost seats are currently held by Black lawmakers.

The fact is, most of these states’ legislative maps are already heavily gerrymandered in favor of Republicans.

The GOP’s new capacity to gerrymander them even more severely might seem like a matter of degrees, but Black political representation is important, and decimating Black political power also decimates the policies Black lawmakers often champion, like healthcare funding, public school funding, voting rights, reproductive freedom, criminal justice reform, and more.

The signing of the Voting Rights Act – the 1965 law Callais essentially finished gutting – marked the end of legalized Jim Crow discrimination in the South (actual progress took longer, I know). It’s not even remotely alarmist to expect the impending destruction of Black political power at the state legislative level to usher some iteration of that back in.

Next week I’ll talk a little about Democrats’ plans to fight the GOP’s racist gerrymandering juggernaut for 2028, but I’m sure you can understand why I’m not in a huge rush to get to it.

...because democracy has to survive until 2028 for it to matter, that’s why

• Speaking of the survival of democracy, next week I’ll be writing about some of Trump’s non-gerrymandering-related work to undermine 2026 elections in states, too. Some scary stuff is happening on that front, and more people should be talking about it.

• Also next week, I’m hosting my first ever Substack Live with State Futures’ Gaby Goldstein, who got into state legislative work in the long ago time of 2017 and is absolutely killing it. We’re chatting at noon ET on Wednesday, May 20, so you can learn about important downballot things while you’re eating lunch! SO EFFICIENT

…there’s a nonzero chance that my gorgeous calico will make a cameo appearance, too

• Also also next week, there are two statehouse special elections on Tuesday: One in deep-red Pennsylvania House District 196, and the other in fairly-swingy-but-Dem-leaning Georgia Senate District 7.

  • Both are basically dry runs for this fall’s general elections, which will feature mostly the same candidates, but more on those soon.

    • And there will be primaries, and we’ll get to those, but there’s one more thing to highlight before wishing y’all a swell weekend:

Frankly, with its ostensibly nonpartisan legislature, I don’t talk about the Nebraska Unicam (short for unicameral – no House + Senate here, just one chamber, called the Senate) too often.

But not much is actually nonpartisan any more, and that’s super true for state legislatures.

• Further, the state Republican and Democratic parties absolutely endorse and support senators in their elections, so the “nonpartisan” nature of the body is, frankly, laughable.

Based on their actual affiliations, the 49-seate Nebraska Senate has 33 more-or-less Republicans, and 16 more-or-less Democrats (yes, I know one or two can be considered “independent,” but this is useful shorthand).

Those 33 Republican seats mean that the Party’s majority is filibuster-proof.

But if Democrats can flip just one of the 24 seats on the ballot this fall, that filibuster-proof majority is gone.

• This matters for Democrats’ ability to block all manner of harmful legislation, but there’s one reason non-Nebraskans might want to pay special attention to Nebraska’s elections this fall.

The blue dot.

… by which I mean the congressional district containing the city of Ohama.

• Nebraska does that funny thing that only one other state (Maine) does, and that’s partially allocate its Electoral College votes by congressional district.

  • If the Democratic candidate wins the Omaha-based district, they get one of the state’s five electoral votes – which was what happened in the 2020 and 2024 elections.

In a tight presidential election, that one electoral vote could make a pretty pretty huge difference.

So Republicans in the state would like to do away with their split-EV system and go to winner-take-all ahead of 2028.

Which, frankly, would eliminate one potential Democratic electoral vote for … well, a really long time.

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A Republican push to change the Nebraska EV system early this year came up short when a couple of GOP-aligned lawmakers opposed it, but there’s no guarantee they’ll continue to resist the mounting national pressure to make this change.

So the only way to really ensure that Nebraska keeps its split-electoral vote system is by flipping at least one seat in its legislature in November.

Which seats are Dems targeting? Primaries just wrapped on Tuesday, so stay tuned for more to come there.