ATLANTA — Georgia is poised to become the next Southern battleground over redistricting, as Republicans prepare to redraw voting maps in ways critics say could weaken the influence of Black and other nonwhite voters. The effort follows a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that stripped away key Voting Rights Act protections that had long shaped district boundaries in racially diverse states.
The General Assembly is set to gavel in Wednesday for a special session called by outgoing Gov. Brian Kemp after the court’s ruling in Louisiana v. Callais, which invalidated Louisiana’s congressional map as an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.
Kemp, now in the closing stretch of his second term, has taken a different approach from other governors who rushed to adopt new congressional maps ahead of the November midterms, in part amid pressure from President Donald Trump to bolster Republican odds of holding Congress. Instead, Kemp wants Georgia lawmakers to craft districts for the 2028 election cycle. At the same time, he has moved faster than some Southern peers by also directing the Republican-led Legislature to redraw its own state House and Senate lines.
If that happens, Georgia would become the first state to extend the Callais ruling to its legislative maps, underscoring how quickly the Supreme Court’s decision is reshaping politics across the South, where Black voters and Black elected officials make up a larger share of the electorate than anywhere else in the country.
The stakes are especially pronounced in Georgia. The state Capitol grounds feature a statue of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., and the building stands just blocks from the places where the slain civil rights leader lived, preached and helped drive the movement that led to passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965.
Even so, as of late Tuesday, neither Kemp nor top Republican lawmakers had released proposed map changes, heightening frustration among Democrats and voting-rights activists who say they will hold demonstrations each day of the special session.
“They have not been transparent,” said state Rep. Tanya Miller, a Black legislator from Atlanta who is the Democratic nominee for attorney general. “Something as fundamental as voters getting to choose their leaders ought not to be done in the dark, ought not happen in back rooms.”
The governor told The Associated Press he wasn’t ready to discuss details.
“I’ll talk about redistricting on Wednesday,” Kemp said as he campaigned for fellow Republicans ahead of Georgia’s primary runoffs that were held Tuesday.
House Speaker Pro Tem Jan Jones, a veteran of earlier redistricting efforts, said the outcome “will be a legislative prerogative” — a notion Kemp aides confirmed. But Jones said that even as a top-ranking Republican on the committee that would consider new maps, she hasn’t “been in any room creating maps.”
Asked directly who is drawing new districts, she replied: “I don’t know.”
Conservative justices gave the green light
Before Callais, Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act was understood to require maps — for Congress, state legislatures and local legislative bodies — that gave historically marginalized minorities a reasonable chance to select candidates of their choice. Nationally and in Georgia, those so-called “opportunity districts” have disproportionately elected Black and other nonwhite representatives.
For example, about a third of Georgia’s 180 state representatives are Black. Latino, Asian and other minorities bring the total nonwhite share to about 40% — roughly reflecting the state’s overall population. Georgia’s U.S. House delegation has five districts out of 14 total where the electorate is majority or plurality nonwhite. All elected Black Democrats in 2024.
With the Callais ruling, issued earlier this spring, a conservative majority of justices concluded that jurisdictions drawn with racial makeup in mind are discriminatory and violate the U.S. Constitution’s equal protection clause. The justices declared that apportionment should be “race neutral.”
Their stated reasoning did not hinge on party interests, and federal courts have said partisan gerrymandering is constitutionally permissible. But in Southern states, especially, party loyalty dovetails considerably with race and ethnicity. So the decision has allowed Republicans — a party dominated by white people — to redraw maps to goose likely GOP districts by redistributing nonwhite voters who tend to support Democrats.
That, many civil rights activists and experts argue, makes it impossible for Southern legislatures to be genuinely “race neutral” when drawing boundaries.
Emory University professor Carol Anderson compared Callais and the resulting redistricting push to poll taxes and literacy tests imposed by white Southern conservatives — and blessed by the Supreme Court — during the Jim Crow era.
“They used racially neutral language for policies that were clearly racially targeted,” said Anderson, who is also a board member of Fair Fight Action, a group organizing against the Georgia redistricting.
There are risks for Kemp and Republicans
It’s not guaranteed that Georgia Republicans can get what they want from new maps.
Partisan gerrymandering involves redistributing voters — packing certain citizens into fewer districts or dividing them across more districts. Around metro Atlanta, spreading nonwhite, Democratic-leaning voters across more districts could make more seats seem to lean Republican. The risk, however, is that more battleground districts emerge because white metropolitan voters are trending less conservative, which could give Democratic candidates of any race or ethnicity more chances to win.
That’s perhaps not a major factor in the Georgia state Senate, which already is considered gerrymandered for Republicans. But it could be a consideration when drawing state House and U.S. House maps.
Kemp is effectively asking Republicans, especially in metro Atlanta, to redraw their own boundaries and take on new, unfamiliar territory.
Trump started the fight before the Supreme Court decision
Nationally, a partisan redistricting battle started last year when Trump urged Republican-controlled states to redraw congressional boundaries to shore up the GOP’s narrow House majority in Washington this November. Texas answered the call first.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Democrats in Sacramento answered with their own gerrymander that voters later approved. A succession of states followed. The outcome would have been close to even had the Virginia Supreme Court, controlled by conservatives, not struck down new Democratic-drawn maps approved by the state’s voters. All told, Republicans think they could gain as many as 16 seats from their redistricting efforts while Democrats think they could gain six seats from new districts in California and Utah.
That still may not be enough for the GOP to hold a congressional majority, given Trump’s lagging approval ratings. But it could mitigate Democratic gains and set Republicans up well for 2028 and beyond.
