American Democracy in 2026: Redistricting Wars

Over the last year, Americans watched while a number of states redrew their electoral maps. While the exact partisan impact of this unprecedented wave of mid-decade redistricting is unclear (though it is likely to favor Republicans) the ultimate loser is American democracy.

Democracy is under threat—globally and in the United States. Since 2000, all prominent measures of democracy have recorded worldwide declines. For example, in 2025, Freedom House reported the nineteenth consecutive year of declining freedom globally.  Similarly, The Economist reported that global democracy was in worse shape in 2024 than at any other point in the last two decades, although some stabilization was noted in 2025.

The United States largely mirrors these global trends. While several measures still place the United States in the free and democratic camp, they nevertheless record significant declines. The Economist Intelligence Unit, for example, downgraded the United States to a “flawed” democracy in 2016, with its numeric score falling even further in 2025. Relatedly, Freedom House reduced the United States’ Global Freedom Score from 93 in 2012 to 81 in 2025, now scoring the United States as similar to countries like Argentina and South Africa.

Worse still, other measures have entirely removed the United States from the ranks of democracies. Polity used to classify the United States as “full democracy,” but this changed to “democracy” in 2016, and to “anocracy”—a regime that mixes democratic with autocratic features—in 2020. This puts the United States in the same camp as countries such as Somalia and Niger.

Although democracy has many constituent parts, one of the most visible and vital contemporary elements is elections. Elections play the central role in connecting citizens to their government. Every prominent theory and measure place free, fair, and frequent elections at the heart of the democratic political institutional framework. At the most basic level, elections are fair when voters have a choice of candidates or parties, rules are impartially administered, and there is neither coercion nor fraud. Without such elections, representative democracy cannot exist.

Given elections’ centrality to democracy, the recent redistricting combined with broader partisan administration of the electoral process give reasons to worry about fairness in U.S. elections—and about U.S. democracy more broadly. Freedom House gives the United States only 3 out of 4 points for the fairness of its electoral laws and their impartial implementation, reflecting its view that the electoral framework has been manipulated in response to both partisan pressures and legal decisions. While the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index Summary Reports (2024 and 2025) describe U.S. electoral institutions as resilient, they cite recent controversies, baseless allegations of fraud, the January 2020 attack on the Capitol, and partisan gerrymandering as evidence of a challenged electoral process.

All democracies must administer their elections—they must maintain voter rolls, run polling places, and count ballots. If an electoral system contains districts (not all do), they must also define the boundaries of those districts. This process is known as either districting or delimiting. In most democracies, election administration is nonpartisan. Similarly, in most democracies, the districting process is a relatively technical, uncontroversial, and nonpartisan process.

This is not the case in the United States. Rather, the districting process is heavily partisan, awash with partisan gerrymandering, and features a prominent role for the courts. After the 2020 redistricting cycle following the decennial census, the Brennan Center found that only about 20 percent of House districts were drawn by independent, nonpartisan commissions. Partisan state legislatures exercised exclusive control in 52 percent of districts, with the vast majority drawn by state legislatures controlled by Republicans.

Partisan control of the broader electoral administrative framework is also common in the United States, with most county and state election supervisors elected on a partisan basis. Partisan control can have deleterious effects. Take the case of Tina Peters, a Republican who was elected county clerk of Mesa County, Colorado in 2018. In 2020, Peters allowed pro-Trump conspiracy theorists unauthorized access to the county’s electronic voting machines, compromising the voting machines and casting doubt on the integrity of the election. At the state level, Danny Hoskins, the Republican Secretary of State of Missouri, ruled in 2026 after months of delay that the Missouri legislature’s Republican-leaning redistricting plan was not eligible for a state-wide referendum (despite redistricting opponents having gathered enough signatures for one).

Recent attempts to introduce national standards through the congressional legislative process, including expanding voting rights and banning partisan gerrymandering (the Freedom to Vote Act of 2021), have failed. An exception is the Electoral Count Reform and Presidential Transition Improvement Act of 2022, which modernized the outdated and ambiguous 1887 Electoral Count Act to ensure that the electoral votes counted by Congress accurately reflect each state’s public vote. President Trump casts his recent interventions in election administration as “reform” as well, but the benefits of his executive orders (such as Executive Order 14248 of March 2025, which places limits on voting by mail) are likely to accrue to his own party.

One of the reasons for this troubling state of affairs is the highly decentralized nature of electoral rules in the United States, which is comparatively unusual. U.S. states have significant leeway to regulate not only state and local elections, but federal elections as well. Moreover, federal laws and jurisprudence are silent on many critical matters. While this can lead to beneficial experimentation, such as Maine and Alaska’s recent embrace of ranked choice voting, it also creates inequities that strike at the heart of democracy, from the actual operation of the electoral process (including partisan fingers tipping the scales) to public perceptions of its legitimacy.

For two decades, a voter-led movement calling for nonpartisan districting processes had been growing in many states; however, that has started to reverse. Beginning with Texas, whose state legislature redrew electoral maps in August 2025, creating five additional Republican-leaning districts, other Republican-controlled states such as Missouri followed suit. California returned fire in early November 2025 with its voter-endorsed Proposition 50, which temporarily replaced the electoral district map drawn by the state’s independent redistricting commission with a partisan one, creating five additional Democratic-leaning districts.

The redistricting wars received a further boost in April 2026 with the Supreme Court’s Louisiana v. Callais ruling, which narrowed states’ abilities to use race as a determining factor in drawing electoral districts and thereby weakened Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. All in all, as of September 2026, ten states, primarily Republican-controlled, have redistricted: Alabama, California, Florida, Louisiana, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, Tennessee, Texas, and Utah. However, Missouri’s new, Republican-favoring maps have been subject to repeated court challenges, reaching up to the Supreme Court, with the outcome uncertain at the time of writing as ballots go out in the mail. Seven other states (both Republican- and Democrat-controlled) are either in the process of or considering redistricting, but their new maps will not be in effect for the 2026 elections (Georgia, Indiana, Maryland, New York, South Carolina, Virginia, and Washington).

While some maps are still being drawn, the big question of how the completed new maps will affect the 2026 midterm elections remains unanswered.

Heather Stoll is an associate professor in political science at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

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