Imagine for a moment that in Spain the Catalan and Basque constituencies were redrawn to be folded into vast territories of Castile or Aragon, diluting their electoral voice. Or that in Galicia the urban Atlantic axis were sliced up to be surgically inserted into large rural districts with a conservative weight, so that Vigo or A Coruña would be electorally neutralized. The result would retain a formal appearance — everyone would still vote — but it would be a democratic fraud because the geometry of the districts would have masked the will of the people. With the added complication that, in the American case, ideological and sociological fracture is explicitly overlaid with a racial fracture.
That is exactly what is happening in the United States in the heat of reforms that Republican majorities are proposing and pursuing with urgency in recent weeks. Their objective is nothing less than to alter the electoral body in order to secure majorities despite the anti-Trump climate.
“For a portion of the southern Republican establishment, these numbers represent an electoral threat that there is a need to neutralize before it translates into effective political representation”
There is, obviously, a demographic reality (and a gesture of supremacist resistance) underpinning everything occurring in the United States and explaining, to a large extent, the political panic that drives it. The Latino population has reached 20% of the country’s total population, almost double what it was three decades ago, and Hispanics have accounted for 56% of the total demographic growth in the United States since the year 2000. The Black population totals 48.3 million people, 14.4% of the total, with a median age of 32.6 years, six years below the national average, making it a young, growing community with increasing electoral weight. Sixty percent of the African American population lives in the South, with Texas, Florida and Georgia as the states with the strongest Black presence. In the states that historically formed the Confederacy —the same ones that today lead the offensive on districting reforms—, this demography is the direct remnant of the vestiges of slavery. But for a portion of the establishment of the southern Republican Party, these numbers do not represent a citizen community: they represent an electoral threat that must be neutralized before it translates into effective political representation.
On April 29, 2026, the Supreme Court provided them with the legal instrument they needed. In the case Louisiana v. Callais, the Court struck down a Louisiana state electoral map that included two Black-majority districts and imposed a new standard that makes it almost impossible for the African American community to elect legislators and obtain fair representation. The ruling, drafted by Justice Samuel Alito with a 6–3 majority, profoundly recalibrates the legal framework established forty years ago in the United States in the heat of civil rights struggles, introducing changes that substantially hinder any challenge to discriminatory electoral maps.
To understand the magnitude of what has just occurred, one must recall what that law protected. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was the legal instrument by which the civil rights movement —led by Martin Luther King Jr. and backed by the presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson— managed to translate into an enforceable norm the right to vote that, in theory, the 15th Amendment of 1870 already recognized for African American citizenship. For nearly a century, that right had been neutralized in the Southern states through poll taxes, literacy tests, or Jim Crow laws. The Voting Rights Act ended electoral segregation. But with the Supreme Court’s decision last April, that shield protecting the rights of racial minority groups has been reduced to a legislative anecdote.
“Vote dilution consists of fragmenting a minority community by distributing it among several districts with a white conservative majority”
The mechanism employed by segregationist rules — and which is once again operative — is called vote dilution. It consists of fragmenting a minority community — which in a compact district would have enough demographic weight to elect candidates of its choosing — by distributing it among several districts with a white conservative majority, so that its vote is statistically neutralized. Racial discrimination will be tolerated so long as it is implemented under the guise of technical arguments of different kinds.
The map approved in Tennessee is the first adopted as a direct product of the ruling. To pass it, the Republicans previously repealed a state law that for almost five decades had prohibited redrawing districts between censuses, and modified the legislative rules to limit public participation and speed its approval.
The new map fragments Memphis — until now the state’s only Black-majority district — into three distinct districts, scattering Democratic voters into rural Republican districts that stretch hundreds of miles to the east.
“What happened in Tennessee is not an isolated episode, but the most visible consequence of a deliberate political strategy”
What happened in Tennessee is not an isolated episode, but the most visible consequence of a deliberate political strategy by Trumpism and the Confederate matrix of Republicans still present in the South. From the start of his second term, Trump sought to protect the slim Republican majority in the House ahead of the November 2026 midterms, so as to prevent a Democratic recovery from obstructing his administration’s plans. And this artificial redistribution of the electoral map seeks to subvert the outcomes of upcoming electoral moments.
This tactic of altering districts and purposefully redistributing census data exploded after Trump urged Texas Republicans to redraw the districts to give the party an advantage. Tennessee has become the ninth state to adopt new districts, and several more are considering it.
Sadly, history rhymes and repeats. And what is happening in the Southern states goes beyond the technical dispute about the cartography of electoral power. It is, therefore, the most recent manifestation of a tension that, for many Southern conservatives, was not resolved in 1865, which the civil rights movement contained but did not eradicate in 1965, and which Trumpism has reactivated by providing institutional cover and political legitimacy to a racial supremacism that never disappeared from the American political underworld.
Incorporating this journey into Southern supremacism, the new ultra-Republicanism is determined not to lose seats in the midterm elections (Trump’s approval rating hovers around 40%, the same as in 2018 when Republicans lost 41 seats and control of the House). And redrawing electoral districts can be, in this context, a safeguard against the ballot box.
“I cannot recall precedents, in consolidated liberal democracies, of such a premeditated alteration of electoral districts”
I have participated in election observation missions within OSCE teams, ODIHR, and the Council of Europe in countries across Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America. I cannot recall precedents, in consolidated liberal democracies, of such deliberate dilution of minority voices and such systematic subversion of democratic representation. Neither in post-Dayton Bosnia, nor in Kurdistan under Turkish tutelage, nor in the Caucasus —in Armenia or Georgia, despite ongoing Russian pressure— have there been designed electoral-body modifications of such magnitude. What is quietly unfolding in the United States in the Trump era has no parallel in the contemporary democratic world.
The open question is whether the democratic institutions of the United States still have enough resilience to absorb this cycle of erosion without becoming qualitatively different from what they were. And to what extent will the American citizenry permit their country to slide definitively, dangerously, and sadly toward a racist-matrix regime and illiberal government.
