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The COVID-19 pandemic has killed several would-be initiative campaigns in Oregon because organizers can’t send canvassers out to gather the tens of thousands of signatures needed to qualify for the November ballot.

But backers of a proposal to take redistricting out of the hands of the Legislature are not giving up. They’re trying to do something that’s never been done before in Oregon: collect almost all of the signatures through the mail or the internet.

“It’s a long shot,” conceded Kate Titus, the executive director of Common Cause Oregon. “It will be remarkable if we pull it off.”

Common Cause is one of the government watchdog groups pushing to create a nonpartisan commission to redraw congressional and legislative district lines. Pandemic aside, this coalition already faces major political headwinds going up against the state’s dominant Democratic political establishment.

The stakes in redistricting are particularly high for political partisans.

Democrats poised to control redistricting

For the first time in modern Oregon political history, Democrats are poised to be able to draw political boundary lines next year in the Legislature without having to negotiate with Republicans. They control the governorship and both legislative chambers. In previous redistricting battles spread over the last 50 years, the two parties shared control.

Because of the importance of how these lines are redrawn, the fighting over this measure started soon after it was filed last year. Groups allied with Democratic leaders in the Legislature mounted ballot title challenges in court that delayed signature gathering. They charged that the initiative has several flaws that would make it unfair to marginalized voters. They also say the measure would give Republicans too big of a say in redistricting.

Our Oregon, which organizes political activities for unions and other liberal groups, has also filed a lawsuit — which remains unsettled in the courts — questioning the constitutionality of the redistricting measure.

“There are some real fatal flaws” in the measure, said Our Oregon’s executive director, Becca Uherbelau, who is “watching and waiting” to see what happens next.

The initiative wasn’t cleared for signature gathering until early April, when the entire state was under strict lockdown orders. “You can’t go out with a clipboard,” Titus said. “it wouldn’t be safe.”

Organizers plan mass mailings

Instead sponsors pivoted. They have raised about $250,000 — mostly from business interests — to organize a mass mailing that is sending petitions to 500,000 Oregon households containing more than a million registered voters. They are also sending out mass emails to their supporters urging them to download single-signature petitions, sign them and return them in the mail.

Backers need nearly 150,000 valid signatures from registered voters by the July 2 deadline, a daunting task even without the lurking dangers of the coronavirus.

“This is entirely new territory for any initiative-signature campaign,” said Norman Turrill, a longtime Oregon League of Women Voters official who is one of the measure’s chief sponsors.

But Turrill said he thinks the timing is right to get the attention of voters since districts around the country will be redrawn next year following the 2020 Census. Although many Democratic groups in Oregon are leery of this measure, it has been Democrats around the country who have repeatedly highlighted the issue. They have criticized several Republican-led states for manipulating congressional district lines to gain additional seats in the House.

Former President Barack Obama has formed a group, All On The Line, to fight against “rigged electoral maps drawn with surgical precision by politicians to preserve their party’s political power and silence the will of the people,” according to the group’s website.

The group is initially focused on redistricting battles in 10 states. Oregon is not among them, although the Democratic Party of Oregon’s 2018 platform supports having redistricting “determined by a politically neutral entity.”

Molly Woon, the party’s deputy director, said the party’s elected leadership has not taken a stand on the redistricting initiative. She said the central committee will decide at its August meeting whether to support or oppose measures that qualify for the ballot.

Still, measure sponsors say their own polling shows strong voter support for independent redistricting, with the highest support levels among Democrats.

Voters in Oregon “understand the importance of the redistricting process and the threat of gerrymandering,” Turrill said, “and if we can get this on the ballot, we think it will pass handily.”

The proposed constitutional amendment calls for a 12-member redistricting commission that would be made up of an equal number of Democrats, Republicans and voters who don’t belong to either major party. They would be chosen in a complicated process that begins with three administrative law judges picking a pool of 150 commissioner applicants split equally among those three political-party groupings.

Supporters say the process is aimed at driving consensus among voters coming from different ideological points of view. That is why it calls for an equal number of Republicans and Democrats, even though Democrats have a large voter registration advantage. Turrill, a chief sponsor, also noted that the measure requires that no redistricting plan can be approved without the votes of at least one commissioner from each party grouping.

Still, critics say the initiative could wind up leaving some people excluded.

“The real problem we have with this ballot measure is that it’s exclusionary of young people, newly naturalized citizens and people in civic leadership,” said Samantha Gladu, executive director of Next Up. Formerly known as the Bus Project, the group works helps young people get involved in progressive political causes.

She criticized provisions in the initiative that require commissioners to be registered within the same political party for the past three years — and noted that it excludes many people already involved in politics, such as lobbyists and members of party central committees. She said these restrictions can prevent the involvement of community leaders on the commission.

Two groups representing minorities, the Asian Pacific American Network of Oregon and Causa, have also raised these criticisms.

Turrill said the aim is to prevent seating commissioners who have conflicts of interest. And he said that the commission should be made up of people who have some experience and knowledge of the state and its communities. He also noted that there are provisions in the measure seeking diversity among the commissioners.

The measure is also supported by Oregon’s four local chapters of the NAACP, the nation’s oldest civil-rights group. Eric Richardson, executive director of the Eugene-Springfield chapter of the group, said he believes that independent redistricting should be adopted nationally.

“I’m not naïve to what is going with the Republican Party” in other states where it has sought to minimize the electoral clout of African-American voters, said Richardson. “But the thing is, we want to hold the high ground and be principled.”

Republicans joining in support of measure

In Oregon, Republicans have been active in supporting the redistricting measure. The other chief sponsor is Sharon Waterman, president of the Oregon Farm Bureau, which tends to back GOP candidates. Out of the $247,000 raised by the initiative campaign, $148,000 comes from business donors.

Rebecca Tweed is a Republican political consultant who is active in the redistricting initiative campaign. “The fact that Democrats for the first time could reapportion exactly how they want is even more of a reason than ever to have an independent commission do it,” she said. “And I would say that if it was flipped and Republicans owned the state.”

Like just about everybody else, Tweed acknowledged the difficulties of qualifying for the ballot. “They’ve created a program that at least pencils out the opportunity to be successful,” she said.

In addition, backers say they also are hoping they won’t have to depend solely on the mail and the internet. Before the July 2 deadline, they hope to have at least some in-person canvassing.

“We’ll get out there as soon as we can,” said Turrill, hoping that petitioners could help put them over the top.

One other petition campaign — for a measure to decriminalize possession of illegal drugs and provide more money for drug treatment – has also once again resumed to collecting signatures in person. Devon Downeysmith, a spokeswoman for that campaign, said in an email that canvassers are now working in some parts of the state where most businesses have been allowed to reopen.

Downeysmith said canvassers wear masks and gloves and place a new petition and pen on an easel that a voter can sign.

However, backers of this measure had already gathered around three-quarters of the signatures they needed before the pandemic hit. That was back when it was OK for petitioners to stand outside a grocery store and thrust a clipboard and pen in front of a voter.

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Contact
Norman Turrill (503) 386-7996

People Not Politicians, a coalition of Oregon voters and organizations concerned about good government, today filed two statewide initiatives to reform Oregon’s redistricting process: one to reform congressional redistricting and one to reform state legislative redistricting. These filings follow the filing yesterday of a single statewide initiative petition (IP #57) which combines the congressional and state legislative proposals.

The initiatives would amend Oregon’s constitution to create an independent citizen redistricting commission to draw congressional and legislative voting districts. Currently, Oregon legislators draw their own legislative districts and also the state’s federal congressional districts, often without taking input from everyday Oregonians into account.

The two initiatives would not create separate commissions; there would be one 12-member independent citizen redistricting commission responsible for drawing both sets of electoral maps.

The initiatives have already been endorsed by the League of Women Voters of Oregon, Oregon Farm Bureau, Common Cause Oregon, the Independent Party of Oregon, NAACP Eugene/Springfield Branch, Taxpayer Association of Oregon, OSPIRG, American Association of University Women of OR (OR AAUW), Oregon’s Progressive Party, and many others.

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For Immediate Release

Contact
Norman Turrill: (503) 386-7996

People Not Politicians, a coalition of Oregon voters and organizations concerned about good government, today filed a statewide initiative to reform Oregon’s redistricting process.

The initiative would amend Oregon’s constitution to change how legislative and congressional district boundaries are drawn, creating an independent citizen redistricting commission to draw voting districts. Currently, Oregon legislators draw their own districts, often without taking input from everyday Oregonians into account.

“Letting politicians manipulate voting maps is like putting the fox in charge of the hen house. Politicians in power shouldn’t be allowed to draw voting maps that benefit themselves, but that’s exactly what they do now. It’s a conflict of interest.” said Norman Turrill, Chair of People Not Politicians and President of the League of Women Voters of Oregon Advocacy Fund.

“We need to reform the process to create a fair system so that voters are choosing their politicians instead of politicians choosing their voters,” said Turrill.

Traditionally, state legislators draw district boundary maps every 10 years based on national census data. New district lines based on the 2020 census will be especially important because Oregon is projected to gain a sixth U.S. congressional seat due to population growth.  People Not Politicians launched this campaign in order to ensure that the 2021 redistricting process and every process that follows is fair, impartial and transparent.

The initiative would create the Oregon Citizens Redistricting Commission consisting of 12 Oregonians selected from qualified applicants – four Democrats, four Republicans and four others who are third party members or non-affiliated. Major donors to political candidates or parties would not be eligible. Neither would elected officials, political party officials or their family members. Commissioners would be selected to represent the broad diversity of Oregonians.

The commission would be required to follow strict criteria in drawing the maps and would be prohibited from favoring or discriminating against any candidate, elected official or political party, nor could they create districts for the purpose of diluting the voting strength of any language or ethnic group.

The initiative has already been endorsed by the League of Women Voters of Oregon, Oregon Farm Bureau, Common Cause Oregon, the Independent Party of Oregon, NAACP Eugene/Springfield Branch, Taxpayer Association of Oregon, OSPIRG, American Association of University Women of OR (OR AAUW), Oregon’s Progressive Party, and many others.

“When politicians engineer voting maps, they’re effectively fixing elections,” said Sharon Waterman, President of Oregon Farm Bureau and Chief Petitioner on the initiative. “Turning the redistricting process over to impartial citizens will take partisan politics out of the equation.”

###

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In its recently concluded term, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down two big decisions affecting the decennial process of adjusting U.S. House districts to updated demographic data, with Chief Justice John Roberts writing for a 5-4 majority in both. In Ruccho v. Common Cause, the Court largely shut the door on any federal judicial interventions to limit partisan (as opposed to racial) gerrymandering, giving the mapmakers who are already making plans for what they’ll do once 2020 Census data is available a green light to exercise such powers as their own state laws and political dynamics make available. And in Department of Commerce v. New York, SCOTUS stopped the Trump administration from including a poorly justified citizenship question in the Census itself.

While the redistricting process is incredibly complex, and its trajectory will depend on election results in 2019 and in 2020, we now have some clarity in the congressional reapportionment part of the decennial adjustment, which is conducted by the House itself (which is required to notify the states by January 25 of the year following the Census of the number of seats they are “apportioned”). Yes, the president’s convoluted reaction to the Court’s decision on the Census held open the possibility of the federal government’s collecting citizenship data that states might theoretically use to change the basis of redistricting decisions (though there will be intense legal warfare if they do), but the administration has surrendered on the Census itself.

So we have a pretty clear idea of which states will be winners and losers in congressional reapportionment, based on Census estimates and projections. According to a late-December 2018 analysis from Election Data Services, Texas will pick up three House seats and Florida two; while Arizona, Colorado, Montana, North Carolina, and Oregon will gain one each. New York is projected to lose two seats, while Alabama, Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and West Virginia are expected to lose one. California and Minnesota are thought to be on the bubble for possibly losing one seat.

Illustration: Brennan Center for Justice

These shifts obviously reflect the long-term trend of shifts in population and political power from the Rust Belt to the Sun Belt, though the partisan implications aren’t quite that clear (five of the eight likeliest “loser” states were carried by Trump in 2016). Over time, some of these shifts have represented a sort of slow-motion demographic riot: The Electoral College map in place a half-century ago, prior to the very close 1960 election that produced President John Kennedy, gave New York 45 electoral votes (it will likely have 27 in 2024); Texas 24 electoral votes (41 in 2024); Pennsylvania 32 electoral votes (19 in 2024); California 32 electoral votes (52 or 53 in 2024); and Florida just 10 electoral votes (31 in 2024). 24-Hour Sale! 40% off access to Intelligencer and everything New York.

More immediately to the point, states gaining and losing House seats provide the easiest playgrounds for gerrymandering if they are under one-party control. At present, Republicans have total “trifecta” control of state governments in “winning” states Arizona, Florida, and Texas (though there is an independent redistricting commission in Arizona and there are restrictions on gerrymandering in Florida) and practical control in North Carolina (where the Democratic governor has no role in the process) and in “losing” states West Virginia and Alabama (where the Voting Rights Act even in its currently vitiated condition would likely prevent elimination of the state’s one Democratic House district). Democrats have a trifecta in “winners” Colorado and Oregon and “losers” Illinois and New York, though Colorado and New York have independent redistricting commissions. Some of these power balances could change next year.

It’s also worth remembering that populations (and for that matter, political alignments) don’t stop changing between the Census years, which can erode gerrymandering, as Reid Wilson noted recently after looking at trends in Texas:

“The GOP gerrymandering efforts rely on the most efficient distribution of GOP voters across as many districts as possible, the idea being to waste very few votes in each victory margin,” said Tom Bonier, a Democratic data analyst who runs the firm TargetSmart. “Combined with the population trends in many exurban areas, as they become more racially and ethnically diverse, the gerrymanders can become somewhat less effective the closer we get to the next decennial redistricting.”

Texas has grown at such a rapid pace that those careful calculations have been thrown out of whack. Where the average congressional district in the United States has grown by 23,200 people since the last Census, the average Texas district has grown by 74,000 people — and the average competitive Texas district, mostly centered around Houston, San Antonio, Austin and Dallas, has grown by an incredible 96,500 residents.

Texas Republicans publicly celebrate so many new residents, who come from states like California and New York in search of plentiful jobs and lower taxes. Privately, those Republicans bemoan the fact that the new residents still vote like they live in California or New York.

Post-Census shifts make it particularly important that gerrymanderers don’t overreach, since small margins of control in a large number of relatively competitive districts can backfire on the mapmakers owing to either population shifts or political trends, as Nathan Gonzales observes:

After they’ve earned the right to draw the maps by winning state elections, parties must balance the desire to maximize gains immediately with the reality that a map needs to withstand changes in the political environment over the course of a decade.

For example, in Pennsylvania, Republicans drew the map prior to the 2002 elections that elected 12 Republicans and seven Democrats. But the map took a hit mid-decade when Pennsylvania voters voiced their disapproval with President George W. Bush in the 2006 and 2008 elections by electing 12 Democrats and seven Republicans to the House. Republicans recovered in the 2010 elections to close out the decade with a delegation of 12 Republicans and seven Democrats again.

It’s all a tricky game on an ever-shifting landscape. So don’t expect to see maps that are fair or that truly determine future control of the House.

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GOP retains edge, but perhaps not as sharp of one as it had following 2010. KEY POINTS FROM THIS ARTICLE

— The Supreme Court’s recent decision to stay out of adjudicating gerrymandering doesn’t necessarily change anything because the court had never put limits on partisan redistricting in the first place.

— Republicans are still slated to control the drawing of many more districts than Democrats following the 2020 census, although there are reasons to believe their power will not be as great as it was following the last census.

— How aggressively majority parties in a number of small-to-medium-sized states target incumbents of the minority party following 2020 may help tell us whether the Supreme Court’s decision will lead to more aggressive gerrymanders. Redistricting: Rucho and beyond

The Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision in Rucho v. Common Cause last month reiterated something that has always been true: There are no court-enforced limits on partisan redistricting. By declaring that such cases are nonjusticiable, the high court decided that federal courts are going to stay out of determining what is and what is not a gerrymandered House map, at least for the time being.

Again, this is not really a change. While the court has suggested at times, such as in 2004’s Vieth v. Jubelirer, that it hypothetically could create standards for determining whether a gerrymander has gone too far, it never actually created such a standard.

It may be that this ruling could allow gerrymanders to become even more aggressive in the future, although it may also be that they already are maximally aggressive. For instance, one North Carolina Republican — whose party authored not just one, but two, effective congressional gerrymanders this decade — bluntly conceded that they drew a map designed to elect 10 Republicans and three Democrats “because I do not believe it’s possible to draw a map with 11 Republicans and two Democrats.” (In 2018, North Carolina elected nine Republicans and three Democrats, with a pending election do-over in NC-9 coming in September.)

Part of the reason that lawmakers can be so brutally frank about partisan gerrymandering is that using such language seeks to define their behavior as something that is legal and always has been legal –partisan gerrymandering — instead of something that courts have ruled can be illegal: racial gerrymandering.

Courts can still weigh in against districts that constitute racial gerrymanders, which illegally pack minority voters into single districts to make surrounding districts whiter (this can benefit Republicans, given that nonwhite voters are much likelier to vote Democratic than white voters). Because of racial differences in voting, constraints on racial gerrymandering may effectively represent constraints on partisan gerrymandering.

There are reasons to believe both that redistricting after 2020 will be more balanced in the aggregate, but also that when given the opportunity, one-party-dominated redistricters may act aggressively. Who draws the lines?

First of all, we don’t precisely know exactly how many seats Republicans will hold sway over, how many Democrats will, and how many will be decided through bipartisan or nonpartisan methods. The 2019 and 2020 elections will help finalize partisan control of redistricting in some places.

Following the 2010 elections, Republicans had the power to draw 193 districts while Democrats had the power to draw only 44. So Republicans had much more redistricting power than Democrats, and they used that power to reinforce its then-new majority, which survived without much trouble until the 2018 Democratic wave.

As of right now, that topline is not that much different, according to a post-election analysis by Daily Kos Elections’ Stephen Wolf, a redistricting expert and liberal critic of gerrymandering.

Wolf found that Republicans currently control the redistricting levers in states containing 179 districts while Democrats control only 49. The rest will be drawn by divided governments or through bipartisan or nonpartisan methods (or they are in states that have only a single House member and thus have no need to redistrict).

However, the alignment of line-drawing control has shifted in ways that make the GOP’s current edge less imposing than the one they enjoyed after 2010.

For instance, two of the few states where Democrats actually controlled redistricting after 2010 were in Arkansas and West Virginia; now Republicans control those states, but they already hold all seven seats between them.

Meanwhile, Republicans have lost their dominance in some key places. Pennsylvania and Wisconsin now have Democratic governors, blunting the GOP gerrymandering power from a decade ago (the Keystone State’s Democratic-controlled Supreme Court unwound the GOP gerrymander in advance of 2018).

It is also possible that new reforms will emerge in certain places, or state courts will intervene, as has happened in Florida and Pennsylvania. Michigan, another site of a GOP gerrymander that held up from 2012-2016 but not in 2018, now has a nonpartisan redistricting system and also divided government.

This count on current control of redistricting also does not take into account reapportionment following the census. Speaking of: State-by-state assessments

According to a late 2018 report from Election Data Services, here are the current projections for the states that will gain and lose seats thanks to population shifts.

Projected gainers: Arizona (+1), Colorado (+1), Florida (+2), Montana (+1), North Carolina (+1), Oregon (+1), and Texas (+3)

Projected losers: Alabama (-1), California (-1 or even), Illinois (-1), Michigan (-1), Minnesota (-1 or even), New York (-2), Ohio (-1), Pennsylvania (-1), Rhode Island (-1), and West Virginia (-1)

As has been the overall trend for decades, the South and West — particularly Florida and Texas — are gaining seats at a rapid rate, while the Northeast and Midwest continue to grow more slowly and lose seats. A big exception to that trend would be California if it indeed loses a district: The Golden State delegation consistently grew from statehood through the 2010 census, when it failed to add a seat, so it has never seen its seat total contract.

The reapportionment projections provide a good jumping-off point to look at some of the redistricting decisions coming after 2020. Here are some possibilities in the states projected to gain or lose seats, a list that allows us to assess redistricting in many of the nation’s most populous states (Michigan and Pennsylvania, both slated to lose seats, were addressed above).

— Assessing the partisan consequences of some of these shifts, if in fact they occur, are easy. For instance, if Rhode Island (-1) and West Virginia (-1) each indeed lose a seat, the Democrats will lose one of their two seats in the Ocean State and the Republicans will lose one of their three seats in the Mountain State. Those losses cancel each other out.

— Alabama (-1) has only one Democratic district as it is, which almost assuredly will be protected as a majority-minority district, so Republicans probably will have to eliminate one of their own members.

— Texas (+3) seems to be becoming less Republican, and the state’s GOP gerrymander came perilously close to breaking in 2018: Democrats picked up a couple of seats and came close to winning several others. Assuming Republicans retain control of the process, it will be interesting to see how they both add seats and protect incumbents, potentially of both parties. For instance, if newly-elected Reps. Colin Allred (D, TX-32) and Lizzie Fletcher (D, TX-7) win second terms next year, Republicans could give them safe seats as a way of shoring up neighboring Republicans and helping preserve the GOP’s overall edge in the delegation, which is currently 23-13.

— The Republican majority in Florida (+2) may be blunted by state-specific reforms. Their previous gerrymander already was, back in 2015, although the state Supreme Court that ordered the change based on a state constitutional amendment passed by voters in 2010 may now be less receptive to acting against a gerrymander.

— Illinois (-1) Democrats, who also controlled the process a decade ago, will be faced with the challenge of eliminating a seat and shoring up some new incumbents. On the current map, Democrats drew IL-6 and IL-14 in the Chicago exurbs as Republican vote sinks, but the GOP’s troubles in the suburbs allowed Democrats Sean Casten (IL-6) and Lauren Underwood (IL-14) to actually win both districts in 2018. Meanwhile, Democrats may be able to reconfigure downstate districts to endanger Rep. Rodney Davis (R, IL-13), who won very narrow victories in both 2012 and 2018, although they probably will also be inclined to help Rep. Cheri Bustos (D, IL-17), whose gerrymandered district is trending Republican.

— California (maybe -1) has a nonpartisan process that undoubtedly helped Democrats this decade: Democrats netted a dozen seats there this decade, creating a lopsided 46-7 Democratic edge in the nation’s largest House delegation. This was after the 2000s, when California’s map was amazingly stable: In 265 individual House elections over five cycles (53 contests per year), only one seat ever changed hands. Though the process is formally nonpartisan, ProPublica found back in 2011 that Democrats found ways to influence the maps in their favor. Republicans might be able to make gains on a new map — or even on the current map as they try to win back some lost ground in 2020 — although the state has become so Democratic that even places where the GOP used to dominate, like Orange County, are trending blue. Some perspective: As recently as 2004, George W. Bush only lost California by 10 points, and he carried much of Southern California outside of Los Angeles County; that included carrying four of the seven counties in the whole state that cast more than 500,000 votes in that election: San Diego, Orange, Riverside, and San Bernardino. By 2016, Hillary Clinton was carrying the state by 30 points, and she carried all the big counties (all 13 that cast 250,000 or more votes). So while the Democrats’ huge edge in the state’s House delegation probably is unrealistically inflated, it may not be.

— New York (-2) also will be trying out a nonpartisan redistricting process next decade. It may be that both the Democrats and Republicans will lose a seat apiece in the interest of fairness.

— Arizona (+1) and Colorado (+1) are competitive states with nonpartisan redistricting systems that favor the creation of competitive district when possible: Arizona’s has been in place for a couple of decades, while Colorado’s is new. So perhaps each will get a new swing seat as part of the growth of their delegations?

— Oregon (+1) is controlled by Democrats, who hold a 4-1 edge statewide. Presumably they will try to make that 5-1 Democratic, although in the process they may also need to shore up the districts of Reps. Peter DeFazio (D, OR-4) and Kurt Schrader (D, OR-5), both of whom occupy districts that are competitive on paper if not necessarily in practice (at least for them).

— If Montana (+1) gets back its second district, which it lost following the 1990 reapportionment, the state might revert back to having a district covering the state’s eastern two-thirds and then its western third; the eastern district would be safely Republican in all likelihood, but the western one could very well be competitive and winnable for a Democrat even if it leaned Republican on paper.

— Ohio (-1) voters approved a constitutional amendment last year to make redistricting less partisan; we’ll have to see how effective it is. But a reasonable compromise between the two parties might involve Democrats getting new, winnable seats centered on Cincinnati and Toledo while Rep. Tim Ryan’s (D, OH-13) Democratic but Republican-trending seat that runs from Akron to Youngstown could be split several ways, potentially making it difficult for Ryan to win reelection in 2022. Perhaps the uncertainty of redistricting provides some of the explanation for why Ryan is trying to raise his profile through a quixotic presidential bid.

— The 2020 election will determine if Minnesota (maybe -1) Democrats will get to control redistricting (they hold the state House and the governorship; Republicans have a narrow edge in the state Senate). If divided government endures, judges may end up drawing the map, as they have done recently in Minnesota.

— In North Carolina (+1), the state’s Democratic-controlled state Supreme Court has just begun hearing a gerrymandering case involving the state’s legislative districts. If Democrats succeed in that lawsuit, perhaps the threat of a similar lawsuit concerning congressional districts might hamstring GOP efforts in that state (or the Democrats might win control of a state legislative chamber, giving them a formal say in the process). North Carolina is unusual in that the governor — Roy Cooper, a Democrat who is up for reelection next year — has no role in redistricting. That was a change made by North Carolina Democrats back in the 1990s, back when moderate-to-conservative Democrats still held a dominant position throughout the South. State legislative Democrats “reason[ed] they would always hold the legislature but voters might occasionally elect a Republican governor,” observed the authors of the 2014 Almanac of American Politics as they described a devastating gerrymander passed by a Republican state legislative majority over the objections of a powerless Democratic governor following the 2010 census. Things change in a hurry.

Beyond these reapportionment changes, it will be interesting to see if partisan majorities in one-party states will crank up their gerrymandering. For instance, assuming the GOP retains control of the process in states like Indiana, Kentucky, Missouri, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Tennessee, they could attempt to break apart the districts of Reps. Andre Carson (D, IN-7), John Yarmuth (D, KY-3), Emanuel Cleaver (D, MO-5), Kendra Horn (D, OK-5), Joe Cunningham (D, SC-1), or Jim Cooper (D, TN-5), assuming these members are reelected in 2020 (Carson, Yarmuth, Cleaver, and Cooper occupy safe Democratic seats, but first-termers Horn and Cunningham are among the most vulnerable House Democrats). These efforts would generally involve cracking big, Democratic-heavy urban areas into smaller pieces that are absorbed by surrounding Republican-held districts. If Republicans are able to really flex their redistricting muscles after 2020, it may be that it manifests itself in some of these smaller states.

Maryland Democrats, who hold veto-proof majorities in both houses of the state legislature and thus could overrule Gov. Larry Hogan (R-MD) on redistricting matters, successfully eliminated a GOP district in the post-2010 round (which led to one of several lawsuits that the Supreme Court effectively threw out as part of its recent decision). They could try to turn their 7-1 Democratic delegation into an 8-0 majority if they went after Rep. Andy Harris (R, MD-1) on the Eastern Shore. Democrats could have attempted to draw an 8-0 map following the 2010 census, but some of the Democratic members of the state’s delegation didn’t want to potentially risk drawing such a gerrymandered map and then see it backfire.

This sort of dynamic could also emerge in some of the aforementioned GOP-dominated states, in which the self-interest of individual members could come into conflict with larger partisan goals.

Democrats also currently control the process in Nevada and New Mexico, where they may be able to shore up newly-elected members in competitive districts: Reps. Xochitl Torres Small (D, NM-2), Susie Lee (D, NV-3), and Steven Horsford (D, NV-4), assuming they survive 2020.

What happens in some of these small states could help us determine the impact of Rucho. Was redistricting already maximally aggressive, or can it become more so? In the states with one-party rule, we’ll find out.

P.S. In the immediate aftermath of the Supreme Court’s redistricting decision, I appeared on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal to discuss it and other redistricting topics. Click here if you’re curious to hear more about the ruling and the fallout.

Kyle Kondik is a Political Analyst at the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia and the Managing Editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball.

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