Around the country, politicians are waging high-stakes battles over new congressional lines that could influence which party controls the US House of Representatives after the 2024 election.
In North Carolina, the Republicans who control the state legislature are crafting district lines that could flip as many as four Democratic-held seats. Democrats, meanwhile, could pick up seats in legal skirmishes now playing out in New York, Louisiana, Georgia and other states.
In all, the fate of anywhere from 14 to 18 House seats across nearly a dozen states could turn on the results of these fights. Republicans currently hold just a five-seat edge in the US House. That razor-edge majority has been underscored in recent weeks by the GOP’s chaotic struggle to elect a new speaker.
“Given that the majority is so narrow, every outcome matters to the fight for House control in 2024,” said David Wasserman, who follows redistricting closely as senior editor and elections analyst for The Cook Political Report with Amy Walter.
And with fewer competitive districts that swing between the political parties, Wasserman added, “every line change is almost existential.”
Experts say several other factors have helped lead to the slew of consequential – and unresolved – redistricting disputes, just months before the first primaries of the 2024 cycle.
They include pandemic-related delays in completing the 2020 census – the once-a-decade population count that kicks off congressional and state legislative redistricting – as well as a 2019 Supreme Court ruling that threw decisions about partisan gerrymandering back to state courts.
In addition, some litigation had been frozen in place until the US Supreme Court’s surprise ruling in June, which found that a Republican-crafted redistricting plan in Alabama disadvantaged Black voters in the…
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