SCOTUS Rules Gerrymandered Maps Constitutional Despite Impacts on Voters

In a blow to pro-democracy advocates, the U.S. Supreme Court last week allowed Texas’ newly gerrymandered Congressional map to go into effect for the 2026 elections, despite evidence of its adverse impacts to the ability of racial minority voters to influence those elections. The Court’s decision split along increasingly predictable philosophical and partisan lines favoring the unfettered ability of state legislatures to stack electoral district maps on explicitly partisan grounds, regardless of actual disparate racial impacts. 

Exactly What Trump Wants

Democratic National Committee chairman Ken Martin said in a statement that the court’s decision “to allow Texas Republicans’ rigged, racially gerrymandered maps to go into effect is wrong — both morally and legally. Once again, the Supreme Court gave Trump exactly what he wanted: a rigged map to help Republicans avoid accountability in the midterms for turning their backs on the American people.” 

What Does This Mean for NC?

North Carolina’s legislature also passed a newly gerrymandered Congressional district map with clear disparate impacts on Black voters. However, a federal judicial panel in North Carolina declined to issue a preliminary injunction blocking use of this map in the 2026 elections. The panel found that while the plaintiffs “have shown a disparate impact on black voters, they have not demonstrated that this effect likely reflects discriminatory intent.” They said that the evidence submitted did not provide a “clear showing” that the challenge is likely to succeed. 

The U.S. Supreme Court’s intervention in the Texas case to block an injunction there strongly suggests that the ongoing challenge to North Carolina’s gerrymandered map has little chance of drawing a favorable ruling by the Court’s ‘conservative’ majority. This sobering reality only increases the critical importance of electing pro-democracy judges to the North Carolina appellate courts in 2026.