Gov. Brian Kemp takes the high road on redistricting. Republicans should stay there.
On Friday, Georgia’s Gov. Brian Kemp told my colleague Greg Bluestein that he won’t call a special session to redraw Georgia’s political maps ahead of the 2026 elections.
With the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling earlier this week to drastically weaken Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, Kemp has saved Georgia from the chaos other leaders are happily jumping into in order to squeeze any electoral advantage they can ahead of the midterm elections.
That quick act of sanity might seem unnecessary, since the midterm elections are already underway in Georgia after early voting started on Monday. Kemp’s hands may have been tied legally, anyway. But in today’s hyperpolitical, blindly partisan environment, sanity and acknowledging the law have become the exception, not the rule.
President Donald Trump’s demand that Republican legislatures redraw their congressional districts to keep the U.S. House in GOP control, along with Democratic-led states’ moves to respond in kind, has only made matters worse.
After the Supreme Court decision this week, Louisiana Republican Gov. Jeff Landry announced on Thursday he’ll suspend his state’s primary elections next month until state lawmakers can redraw Congressional maps.
In Tennessee, Republican U.S. Sen. Marsha Blackburn promised to eliminate the state’s only Democratic U.S. House district if it hasn’t happened by the time (she hopes) she’s elected governor in November. And in Georgia, GOP candidates called on Kemp to convene a special session to secure more Republican seats in 2026, even though tens of thousands of Georgians had already cast their ballots in the election.
Georgia’s U.S. House map currently gives Republicans a nine-to-five advantage in Congress. Why not make it 10-to-4 or 11-to-4, the thinking goes? The same holds true for the state House and Senate, where Democrats have been chipping away at GOP majorities for years.
Redrawing the lines to eliminate Black-majority districts could mean Republicans remain in power for years longer than they would have, without changing a thing except for the people who vote for them.
But just because Republicans can redraw minority-Black districts out of existence doesn’t mean they should.
The reasons not to gerrymander the state even further are plentiful, starting with the fact that the partisan balance in Georgia has become roughly 50-50, as “battleground” as a battleground state can be. An 11-to-3 Republican congressional delegation would not represent Georgia voters any more than Virginia Democrats’ latest 10-to-1 Democratic House map reflects that state’s significant share of Republican voters.
It would also put Georgia on a dangerous path toward eliminating Black and minority members in Congress and the state Legislature when those members represent the millions of Black and minority voters who put them there. Republicans’ immediate plans to redraw U.S. Rep. Sanford Bishop’s 50% Black district in Southwest Georgia to make it a GOP pickup show exactly where Georgia’s political boundaries are headed without Voting Rights Act protections in place.
A wise man once said you can’t take the politics out of politics, so nobody involved in this process is naive enough to think that the parties in power in all 50 states won’t use this as an opportunity to maximize their own political power.
But it’s impossible to overstate how important the Black and minority members of the General Assembly are and have been to debates about voting, schools, healthcare and the economy. They represent the lived experiences in a state where racial disparities and sometimes even blatant racism are alive and well.
With a weakened Voting Rights Act, Georgia leaders in the not-at-all-distant past (who were Democrats at the time by the way), passed laws and drew political lines that shut Black voters and representatives out of power entirely.
Although Kemp said Georgia won’t redraw its congressional maps ahead of the 2026 elections, he also said he believes the Supreme Court’s decision requires Georgia to redistrict the state ahead of the 2028 elections. Look for a special session for those lines while Kemp is still governor, since Republicans know they can’t guarantee a Republican will win the governor’s race in 2026.
Despite years of Republican dominance, or maybe because of it, Georgia has become a toss-up state by any measure. But Republicans have made sure the balance of power tilts toward themselves.
When they convene, lawmakers should consider not just their own seats, but the future of the state. This vibrant, bustling, diverse and dynamic state isn’t going backward. Its politics shouldn’t either.
About the Author
Patricia Murphy is the AJC's senior political columnist. She was previously a nationally syndicated columnist for CQ Roll Call, national political reporter for the Daily Beast and Politics Daily, and wrote for The Washington Post and Garden & Gun. She graduated from Vanderbilt and holds a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University.
