Louisiana, Tennessee, South Carolina, Alabama, and Indiana are moving — in sequence or in parallel — to eliminate their lone Democratic House members through redistricting. The Bulwark's Jacob Rubashkin maps the cascade, and the geography of it matters: these are not close calls. These are deliberate purges of minority representation from state congressional delegations.
Said South Carolina Senate Majority Leader Shane Massey: "There will be another Democratic president. And drawing out our lone Democrat could be bad for the state."
Massey's warning is the most honest thing anyone in the GOP has said about this round of gerrymandering — and it will almost certainly be ignored. What he is describing, without quite saying it, is the logic of escalation: blue states will retaliate, the norm against maximalist redistricting will collapse entirely, and the endpoint is single-party congressional delegations as the national standard.
South Carolina Senate Majority Leader Shane Massey is not wrong on the political science. The last extended period in which congressional delegations were routinely purged of opposition-party members was the post-Reconstruction South — roughly 1878 through the Voting Rights Act of 1965. During those eight decades, the Democratic Party held every House seat from most Southern states not because it won every argument, but because the rules of the game were structured to produce that outcome. Republican voters in Alabama or Mississippi were not fewer; they were systematically excluded from representation.
The mechanism then was disenfranchisement. The mechanism now is districting geometry. The effect — delegations that do not reflect the actual distribution of voters — is structurally identical.
Massey told reporters that the redistricting map under consideration in South Carolina “confirms the concerns I’ve had all along.” That sentence, from the majority leader of the state senate, is a remarkable piece of public evidence: the person with the most power to stop this is on record saying it is a mistake, and proceeding anyway under pressure from a president who has made maximalist gerrymandering a loyalty test.
The Bulwark’s framing — that redistricting is “the start” of winner-take-all politics, not the endpoint — is historically well-grounded. Institutional escalation follows a recognizable American pattern. The Senate filibuster was weaponized incrementally: first for civil rights bills, then for judicial nominees, then for everything. Each step was justified by pointing to the previous step taken by the other side.
The redistricting version of this dynamic is already visible. California, Illinois, and New York — blue states that had accepted independent redistricting commissions or court-supervised maps as a kind of informal arms-control agreement — are now watching Republican-controlled states discard that agreement unilaterally. The rational response, under pure game-theory logic, is to retaliate. Massey is warning his colleagues that they are pricing in only the next cycle, not the next presidency.
The 2019–2022 redistricting round produced some of the most aggressive gerrymandered maps in the post-Baker v. Carr era. What is being described now is a second round, mid-decade, designed not to respond to census population shifts but purely to eliminate surviving opposition members. That is a qualitatively different act: it abandons even the procedural fiction that redistricting is about fair representation.
The Constitution gives state legislatures plenary authority over congressional district lines, subject to the equal-population requirement established in Wesberry v. Sanders (1964) and the Voting Rights Act constraints that remain after Shelby County v. Holder (2013). The Supreme Court ruled in Rucho v. Common Cause (2019) that federal courts cannot review partisan gerrymandering claims. That decision removed the last structural check on exactly what is now happening.
The Founders did not anticipate this. They built the House as the chamber closest to the people, with two-year terms designed to keep representatives responsive. A system in which state legislatures can, mid-decade, draw lines specifically to guarantee their party holds every seat is not what Madison described in Federalist No. 52 — a body that would “have an immediate dependence on, and an intimate sympathy with, the people.”
Massey’s private fear is the same as Madison’s public design: democratic legitimacy requires that the opposition have a real path to power. When that path is engineered away, what remains is a legislature in form only.
Indiana is the next state on the list. Watch whether its Republican majority follows South Carolina’s lead — or Massey’s.