Politics

The clock is running out for SCOTUS to deliver the GOP a big 2026 redistricting win

Published

2 days ago

January 8, 2026

Republicans want a big Supreme Court redistricting win. They’re losing hope it will help them in the 2026 midterms.

The Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais could weaken the Voting Rights Act and open the door to redrawing congressional maps, particularly across the South. Court watchers expect at least a partial win for conservatives that could let the GOP draw more seats for themselves by erasing Black- and Hispanic-majority districts.

But while that decision could theoretically come as soon as when the court returns on Friday, many experts think the case is more likely to be resolved with the flurry of decisions the court typically releases in late June.

The window of opportunity for new maps going into place before this November’s elections is rapidly closing, as states would need ample time to change deadlines, shift election calendars, vet signatures and print and distribute ballots. And the longer it takes for the Supreme Court to issue a ruling, the harder it will be for state-level Republicans to throw their maps out and draw new ones before this fall’s elections.

“It can get very complicated and very sticky, and that is not fast work,” said Tammy Patrick, the chief programs officer for The Election Center, a nonpartisan consulting firm that works with state and local election officials. “That is time-consuming, very methodical and detail-oriented work that needs to have sufficient time.”

Some state-level Republicans have already given up hope. Louisiana, the plaintiff in the Supreme Court case, will use its current map in its 2026 elections regardless of the Court’s decision, as the candidate qualifying period opens next month. Louisiana Republicans pushed back its 2026 primary election dates from April to May during a special session late last year, in hopes the Court would rule by the end of 2025 and give them time to install a new map. But the shift still wouldn’t be late enough for a late-term SCOTUS ruling.

At the center of the Supreme Court case is Section 2 of the VRA, a provision that broadly outlaws discrimination in elections on the basis of race and has led to the creation of majority-minority districts, where Black, Latino or Asian voters make up a majority of the population.

Republicans have long argued such districts violate the Constitution and benefit Democrats. Democrats warn that the elimination of seats drawn to satisfy Section 2 could decimate minority representation in Congress and allow lawmakers to redraw lines in such a way to eliminate as many as 19 Democrat-held, majority-minority districts, many in the South.

Democrats in Blue states could also take advantage of a Section 2 change and redraw, but the party’s options are more limited, both because of geographic limitations and pressure from civil rights and minority groups.

But even as many legal experts expect the court to rule in a way that weakens the VRA, the case’s prominence has led many watchers to predict an end of term ruling in June. At that point, many states across the country will have already held primary contests and there will be no room to undertake redistricting.

“If it’s in any way a big deal, we’re not going to get that decision before June,” said Justin Levitt, a professor of law at Loyola Law School who worked in the Biden White House as an adviser on democracy and voting rights. “It’s really hard for me to see a decision that does anything significant that wouldn’t occasion a major dissent, and it’s really hard for me to see that dissent not taking a fairly long time in the back-and-forth.”

Many southern states where Republicans stand the most to gain have early primaries — seven of the 11 states that belonged to the Confederacy have primaries scheduled before or on May 19 — making the timing even tougher for the GOP.

That doesn’t mean that lawmakers are done gerrymandering before the 2026 election.

At least three southern states — Florida, Kentucky and Virginia — are eyeing redistricting ahead of the 2026 midterms, and lawmakers seem emboldened to attempt it with or without a Supreme Court ruling. In Florida, state House Republicans hope to tackle the issue during the legislative session that started this month, while Gov. Ron DeSantis called a special session in late April, in an effort to wait as “long as feasible” for a Supreme Court decision. And in Kentucky, some Republican lawmakers are weighing a redraw, even though the map would likely be vetoed by Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear.

In Virginia, the Democratic-controlled legislature is considering a move independent of a Supreme Court decision that will put redistricting before voters akin to the move in California last year.

But other southern states reliant on a weakened VRA to redraw, like South Carolina and Alabama, may be out of luck. Republicans in the Palmetto State — including Rep. Ralph Norman, who is running for governor — are pushing the legislature to draw out the state’s lone Democrat, Rep. Jim Clyburn. But the state’s candidate filing deadline looms in late March.

Pushing back the filing deadline further in hopes for a Supreme Court decision would scramble the primary calendar and put elections officials in a bind.

“Anytime a state decides to redistrict, it creates a domino effect of administrative issues that need to be addressed,” said David Becker, the executive director and founder of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation & Research. “Election officials and voters are able to manage that when it’s once every 10 years. When it becomes once every two years, it might get very, very difficult for that to be managed.”

Utah got a taste of the challenge of shuffling deadlines late last year after a district judge installed a new congressional map in November. The state’s top election official, Republican Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson, immediately announced her office would move forward with the new map, even as Republican lawmakers fumed and vowed to fight it. “There will likely be an emergency appeal,” she noted on X, “but the process of finalizing new boundary details will take weeks of meticulous work on the part of state and county officials.”

The state’s Republican-controlled legislature went forward with an appeal — which is unrelated to the VRA — after it pushed back the candidate filing deadline by two months for congressional hopefuls during a special session last month, offering itself a window for potential judicial action. Should the legislature — which meets for its scheduled session this month — again adjust the electoral calendar, it would send elections officials statewide into a scramble.

“The questions we would be asking are, you know, how much time do we have to program our ballot? What are the new dates? What would we communicate with voters?” said Nikila Venugopal, the Salt Lake County chief deputy clerk. “We haven’t heard any plans to do so at this point, and we’re moving forward with the assumption that the elections will be held as planned.”

Politics

Republicans need Susan Collins to win reelection. Trump keeps going after her.

Published

4 hours ago

January 9, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Donald Trump said Thursday a Republican senator who is crucial to the party’s chances of keeping the Senate this year should “never be elected to office again.” Susan Collins has seen it before.

Trump issued the Truth Social broadside against the longtime Maine senator and four other Republicans on Thursday after they voted with Democrats to rein in his powers to carry out future military actions against Venezuela, a sharp rebuke of the White House’s unilateral outlook following the capture of Nicolás Maduro.

The president’s online salvo comes as the Maine senator navigates a tough reelection in a blue state that Trump lost by 7 points in 2024. Her bid will rely on a coalition that includes independents and Democrats, many of whom have backed her in the past because of her breaks from Trump and other GOP leaders. But she also needs to turn out Trump’s MAGA base in a year he won’t be on the ticket to juice turnout — a tougher challenge if they’re actively feuding.

Collins told reporters after Trump’s post that she guessed Trump “would prefer to have Gov. Mills or somebody else with whom he’s not had a great relationship” than her — alluding to a confrontation between Maine Gov. Janet Mills and Trump when the governor visited the White House last year. Mills, who is now running to challenge Collins, told Trump she would sue to fight his administration’s actions to restrict transgender youth from sports.

Trump’s attack on Collins was met with laughs from Democrats who said that they, too, would like to see Collins never elected again. She is their top target on a tough Senate map, and if they have any hopes of flipping the upper chamber they need to defeat the shrewd senator.

Mills painted the vote as one of election-year political expediency.

“Susan never does the right or hard thing the first time when it’s needed most — only when it serves her politically. She is always a day late and a dollar short,” Mills said in a statement to Blue Light News. “To the President, I say ‘See you in the Senate!’ Wait until you see what I’ve got in store for your MAGA agenda.”

The campaign of Graham Platner, the other prominent Democrat challenging Collins, did not respond to requests for comment.

Trump’s anger at fellow Republicans has been enough to drive others from office. There is no indication so far the White House is serious about finding a primary challenger to Collins, and they are quickly running out of time if they were to try to do so. But any sustained animosity from Trump toward Collins could still spell trouble for her reelection.

A source close to the Trump administrations granted anonymity to speak candidly told Blue Light News that the general thinking is Republicans will hold the Senate with or without Collins, but didn’t predict a sustained campaign against her: “Like a lot with the president, this is a moment in time, and what is said today does not necessarily hold for tomorrow.”

This is far from the first time Trump has gone after Collins. And criticism from the president ahead of her last reelection bid in 2020 was not enough to tank her.

“Trump has caused no end of problems for Sen. Collins,” said Mary Small, a Republican former state lawmaker in Maine and Collins ally. “I think she’d be in the 70th percentile right now of approval rating if we didn’t have Donald Trump as president. So she’s had to walk a very cautious line.”

Still, blowback from voters loyal to Trump in Maine might be offset by independents and Democrats who appreciate Collins setting her own path, Small said.

“Republicans have never been able to elect someone just on their own,” she said. “She has to have independents support her to get elected, and Democrats.”

Some who’ve been in similar spots say that’s not so easy to manage.

Mike Coffman, the Aurora, Colorado mayor and former five-term GOP congressman, empathized with Collins’ tricky electoral position. Coffman kept Trump at arm’s length during his 2018 reelection bid in hopes of siphoning Democrat support in his swing district, but it wasn’t enough: He lost that race to Democratic Rep. Jason Crow by 11 points in a state that voted for Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton two years prior.

“That’s very hard to navigate,” Coffman said of Collins’ relationship to the president. “Because when you distance yourself from Trump you might pick up some support in the middle but you’re going to lose the hardcore Trump supporters whose loyalty is to Trump and not to the Republican Party.”

In Trump’s first term, Collins broke with Senate Republicans to help sink the attempted Affordable Care Act repeal. Then, weeks before the 2020 election — the toughest reelect campaign of her career — Trump blasted her for not supporting his nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court. (Collins argued the winner of the 2020 presidential election should get to appoint a new justice.)

Collins still sailed to victory a few weeks later, winning 52 percent of the vote statewide while Trump won just 44 percent.

Democrats are hopeful that the 2026 midterms won’t let her replicate that success. Collins has not had to run for reelection in a midterm with a Republican president since 2002. Trump’s approval rating was 19 points underwater in a Maine poll last month, while Collins didn’t fare much better, at 17 points underwater. That same poll found her tied with both Mills and Platner in hypothetical general election matchups.

When Collins voted in 2021 to convict Trump in his second Senate impeachment trial, she avoided some of the blowback that other GOP senators encountered: Maine Republicans opted not to censure her. No primary challengers have emerged ahead of her 2026 run, with some in the state acknowledging that any alternative to Collins was far more likely to be a Democrat than another Republican.

That hasn’t stopped Trump from criticizing Collins. Just last summer, he posted on Truth Social that Republicans should typically vote “the exact opposite” of the Maine senator, while White House officials privately discussed who they might want to replace her if she opted not to run again.

Former GOP Sen. Mark Kirk, who distanced himself from Trump before losing a Senate race in blue-leaning Illinois in 2016, said he thinks Collins’ longtime popularity in the state will outweigh any attacks from the president. He recalled joking with Collins during a congressional delegation trip overseas about her winning one of her Senate primaries by a “North Korean percentage.”

“Susan Collins has reached that state of nirvana that all of us in the Senate want to reach, to be synonymous with her state,” Kirk said.

“People will say ‘Well, if Donald Trump’s against her, then I’m gonna vote for her,” he added. “My guess is on edge, he will have actually helped her with this.”

Alex Gangitano contributed reporting to this report.