Hakeem Jeffries wants to redraw House maps from Oregon to New York. He’s willing to take on Democrats to do it
Top Democrats spent the last 10 months tearing up their midterm playbook and duking it out with the GOP over redrawing US House districts — forcing Republicans to a draw.
Then, in just 13 days, Hakeem Jeffries and his party found themselves in a worst-case scenario.
A pair of court rulings — one from the US Supreme Court, one from Virginia — set the party’s redistricting ambitions back by as many 10 seats and left Democrats increasingly desperate to find ways to respond in the coast-to-coast redistricting war that President Donald Trump started last summer.
Jeffries and his allies have designed plans for the next two years to push Democratic-held states to set aside nonpartisan redistricting rules or gerrymander even more aggressively, with an eye toward producing a dozen or more new Democratic-held seats by November 2028, people familiar with the matter said. They’re eying seats from Oregon to New York in an effort that will cost hundreds of millions of dollars more in the next two years.
And they’re willing to put an uncomfortable spotlight on members of their own party to do it.
“The days of Democrats unilaterally disarming are over, particularly given how high the stakes are,” Jeffries told CNN.
Behind the scenes, the House minority leader’s allies are preparing a messaging push against any Democrats who stand in the way of gerrymandering, insisting that only “real Democrats” are willing to fight, according to one person close to Jeffries.
Some of the ideas kicked around by Democrats speak to the anger within the party. One lawmaker has been in early talks with potential delegates at a future Democratic convention on trying to prevent any blue-state leaders who can’t get a new map passed from getting a speaking slot. And for those already in office, primary challenges aren’t off the table, multiple sources said.
In a weekend strategy call after the Virginia Supreme Court invalidated a Democratic-led referendum that could have helped the party gain as many as four seats, frustrated lawmakers threw out ideas that had next to no chance of passing.
Those ideas, first reported by The New York Times, included replacing the entire state Supreme Court and reinstating the map voters approved — though most of the focus was on how to defeat Republicans in the current map, according to a person on the call and another person who was briefed on it.
Virginia Senate Majority Leader Scott Surovell, a Democrat, told CNN the idea of replacing the state’s justices is going nowhere. He noted that Virginia’s chief justice, Cleo Powell, led the court’s dissent.
“We just swore in the first Black female chief justice of the Supreme Court of Virginia in our 250-year history about three months ago, and to throw her out because her colleagues made a bad decision would be ill-advised,” he told CNN.
But it wasn’t just Virginia Democrats musing about what they could do. Behind the scenes, some Democratic members and campaign officials were seriously discussing whether they could force action in Maryland or New York by November — a scenario that party leaders have ruled out.
Rep. Terri Sewell of Alabama recently told reporters that her party should pursue a clean sweep in blue states — aiming to eliminate all GOP-held seats when they can with aggressively gerrymandered districts.
“I (would) take 52 seats from California, I sure would,” she said, “and 17 from Illinois.”
“We’re going to play their game and beat them at it.”
Jeffries’ push is likely to accelerate Republicans’ efforts to gain even more red-leaning seats in states they control — something critics of gerrymandering in both parties acknowledge.
“It’s almost a race to the bottom,” said Rep. Cleo Fields of Louisiana, who could lose his seat now that his state has been cleared to redraw its maps.
But he said Democrats in blue states have a responsibility to do something.
“The Democratic Party has always taken the moral high ground. It’s always been, ‘We can’t do this because it’s not the right thing to do,’” Fields told CNN. “I think they all need to rethink that. At least short term.”
Jeffries told CNN that Democrats in New York, New Jersey, Washington state, Colorado, Oregon, Maryland and Illinois must act “aggressively” to respond to the GOP’s gerrymandering push. There are also half a dozen more states on the table if Democrats can win key state races this November, according to multiple party officials.
Democrats’ biggest target for 2028 is New York. But there are enormous hurdles there — requiring a change in the state’s constitution.
The blue state, which sent seven Republicans to Congress last year, has some of the nation’s strictest rules against gerrymandering. It also left deep scars for Democrats over map-drawing, with state courts — and, earlier this year, the US Supreme Court — siding against them in favor of Republicans at critical moments.
Jeffries recently sent a fellow New York Democrat, Rep. Joe Morelle, to Albany to make the case that Democrats have no choice but to act. Morelle, who spent 27 years in the state legislature, including a stint as party leader in the Assembly, stressed to the state’s top Democrats that they need to act within three weeks on the first step of a long process to redraw those maps.
“Anyone who puts this in the column of, ‘Oh yeah, this is gonna get done,’ misunderstands the degree of difficulty in changing constitutions,” Morelle said.
Morelle once voted for the state’s redistricting language that Democrats are working to erase. He said his former colleagues were aware of the stakes and of what Jeffries was trying to do.
“They know him, they know how important it is. It’s not lost on anyone that the next speaker of the House is likely to be a New Yorker.”
It’s not yet clear how many GOP seats Democrats would keep in a new map — but some in DC have suggested there are ways to draw a map with only a few Republicans left. (Republicans are skeptical Democrats could get more than three.)
Democrats are also moving in Colorado, where four GOP seats could be up for grabs. A Jeffries-aligned political group gave $150,000 this month to support the state’s redistricting ballot initiative.
In New Jersey, newly elected Gov. Mikie Sherrill last week offered her first public support of a redistricting push in an interview with CNN.
In Washington state, where voters first approved an independent redistricting system in 1983, leaders are talking about scrapping it if they can win a supermajority this fall. Democrats would need to flip 10 state legislative seats there in November before they can consider legislation to put a redistricting referendum to voters in a future election, said Shasti Conrad, who chairs the state Democratic Party.
States like Illinois and Maryland could also prove difficult.
Key Democrats in both states already blocked the effort this cycle, though Maryland state Sen. Bill Ferguson, who rejected Jeffries and Gov. Wes Moore’s push to target the state’s only Republican, has not ruled out putting a constitutional amendment on the ballot this fall to change maps for 2028, according to two sources familiar with the discussions.
Democrats also have a “third tier” group: states that could redraw lines under certain circumstances. That includes Wisconsin, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Arizona and Nevada.
Republicans have their own list — and a lot fewer legal hurdles in the red states.
And some of those states aren’t waiting until 2028.
Florida recently passed a new map that seeks to eliminate four Democratic seats. A new map enacted in Tennessee last week targets the last remaining Democratic-held seat in the state. Alabama now appears on track to use a new map this November, while Republicans in Louisiana are also racing to eliminate Democratic seats in time for the midterms. Those actions follow a US Supreme Court decision late last month that declared unlawful a majority-minority congressional district in Louisiana as an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.
Republican states in the South have had a much simpler, and much swifter, process for redrawing their maps, with no voter referendums. And some top Democrats, including Jeffries, say it’s time for blue states to eliminate their own “good governance” rules until there’s a nationwide detente on redistricting.
“We cannot exist in an environment where Republicans are free to gerrymander congressional districts out of existence without an expectation that Democrats are going to respond immediately and forcefully,” Jeffries told CNN.
Jeffries’ entrance into the national gerrymandering war began last June, when a group of Texas Democrats, led by Rep. Marc Veasey, sat down in his Capitol suite with an unlikely idea.
Veasey, whose seat was set to be eliminated by the state GOP’s new map, urged Jeffries to do something in response.
Specifically, he and those Texas Democrats wanted Jeffries to pressure blue states, starting with California, to go after GOP seats in the same way in what Veasey described as “mutually assured destruction,” according to multiple attendees of that meeting.
Jeffries took an uncharacteristically decisive leap. He was in.
But the race to cut Democratic districts in red states has raised fears among some Black legislators that their political power faces significant erosion in the years ahead.
Leaders of the Congressional Black Caucus have said that as many as 19 of the 62 seats they hold in Congress could be at risk in the redistricting push from Republicans. Veasey is leaving Congress after deciding not to move districts to run for Rep. Jasmine Crockett’s seat.
New York Democratic Rep. Yvette Clarke, who chairs the caucus, said securing as many Democratic seats as possible remains paramount, even if that risks diluting some majority-minority districts in blue states in the short term. She emphasized that members in the CBC represent a diverse range of districts, including some not shaped by the Voting Rights Act or those without majority-Black populations.
“That idea here is that in order to protect Black voters and to advance progress in the Congress and to have accountability for what is taking place is to make sure we have a Democratic majority,” she said.
But in redrawing maps across the South and potentially eliminating Black Democrats’ seats, Republicans have driven up tensions within the Democratic Party.
In Florida, for instance, the map created by Gov. Ron DeSantis shrinks five Democratic-friendly districts in South Florida to three — leaving two high-profile Democrats, Reps. Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Jared Moskowitz, having to decide where they will run ahead of the June 12 filing deadline.
Several Black Democrats in South Florida, however, are urging Wasserman Schultz to steer clear of the majority-minority 20th Congressional District. The seat is now vacant following the recent resignation of Democrat Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick.
“Representation and life experiences matter,” said state Sen. Rosalind Osgood, one of the Black lawmakers expressing concerns. She said she has spoken with Wasserman Schultz about the issue.
“It’s not personal with Debbie,” Osgood added. “We really respect Debbie. We value Debbie. We want her to be in Congress. But we also want to have Black representation in Congress as well.”
In a statement, Wasserman Schultz said she has not made a final call.
“I’m still having vital conversations and doing my due diligence on how to best serve the Broward County community I’ve lived in and devoted my life to fighting for,” she said. “And I won’t be presumptuous or rash in making a decision.”
The story headline has been updated.
