On Friday, the Wisconsin Supreme Court declined to hear a challenge to the state's congressional map. The order was a blow to Democrats, who had argued that the map unfairly advantaged Republicans. It was also unexpected after liberals took control of the court with the election of Janet Protasiewicz in April 2023; Protasiewicz did not participate in the order.

As a result, Wisconsin will use its current congressional map, which has six Republican-leaning seats and two Democratic-leaning seats, in the 2024 election.

This week, New York's Democratic-controlled legislature took up the congressional map proposed by the state's bipartisan redistricting commission … and largely left it unchanged.

On Monday, after the legislature voted down the commission's proposal, many people assumed they would replace it with an aggressive Democratic gerrymander that would help the party in its quest to flip the U.S. House. But that's not what happened. Instead, the legislature passed a map with only minor tweaks from the commission's, which in turn was pretty close to the old congressional map drawn by a court-appointed special master in 2022.

Based on the results of the 2020 presidential election, no district will shift by more than 4 percentage points of margin. The biggest change is in the 22nd District, which now would have voted for Biden by 11 points, making it harder for Republican Rep. Brandon Williams to win reelection. Democratic Reps. Tom Suozzi and Pat Ryan also got a little safer in their districts, while the legislature also did a favor for Republican Rep. Nick LaLota, turning his 1st District from a narrow Biden district to a narrow Trump district.

Gov. Kathy Hochul signed the new map into law on Wednesday night.

We've largely stuck to covering congressional redistricting in this space, but over the weekend there was a pretty huge development in state-legislative redistricting that's worth noting. Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers signed a new set of state Senate and Assembly maps into law that will suddenly make Wisconsin's legislature — which has been dominated by Republicans for over a decade — competitive again.

Back in December, the state Supreme Court ruled that Wisconsin's old legislative maps were unconstitutional because they were not contiguous. The court asked Evers and the legislature to enact a new map, or else it would pick one for them. Normally, the Democratic Evers and the Republican legislature don't see eye to eye on anything, but when Evers's proposed maps turned out to be slightly better for Republicans than the other maps the court was considering, Republican legislators begrudgingly voted to pass them. (Ironically, most Democrats in the legislature voted against them.)

Still, the new maps are dramatically better for Democrats than the old ones. Under the old Assembly map, Trump carried 64 districts in 2020 and Biden carried 35. Under the new map, Trump would have carried 50 districts and Biden 49. And under the old Senate map, Trump carried 22 districts to Biden's 11. Under the new map, Biden would have carried 18 districts over Trump's 15.

All districts in the Assembly will be on the ballot this fall, giving Democrats a real chance to win control of the chamber for the first time since 2008. However, Republicans will remain strong favorites in the Senate because only half of the seats there (the even-numbered ones) will be up for election. The senators who aren't up for reelection include 12 Republicans and five Democrats, so Republicans need to win only five seats this fall to secure another majority in the 33-person chamber. That should be no sweat considering that there are elections this fall in six Senate districts that Trump would have carried by at least 10 points.

Roughly two months after New York's highest court ruled that New York must redraw its congressional lines, the New York Independent Redistricting Commission (which is, in fact, not truly independent, but rather composed of equal numbers of Democratic and Republican appointees) has proposed a new congressional map. The map is quite similar to the current one, which was drawn by a court-appointed special master in 2022 and scored pretty well on various metrics of fairness. However, the new proposal tends to benefit incumbents like Democratic Rep. Pat Ryan and Republican Rep. Marc Molinaro, as well as other candidates like Democratic state Sen. John Mannion, who is running for the 22nd District.

Overall, the map would result in 21 seats that President Joe Biden carried in 2020 and five seats that former President Donald Trump carried, the same breakdown as the current map.

This map may never actually be enacted, however. To take effect, it has to pass both chambers of the legislature with two-thirds support, and a few influential legislators have already come out against it. Some Democrats are probably still holding out hope that the legislature will draw its own, gerrymandered map that could lead to more Democratic gains, which could happen if the legislature rejects this map.

Ohio’s 2024 map is set, and it will be the same congressional district map as 2022. But the path Ohio took to this outcome was anything but straightforward. In November 2021, the Republican-controlled state government enacted a map where the GOP might have won as many as 13 of the state’s 15 districts. But in January 2022, the Ohio Supreme Court struck down the map as a partisan gerrymander, placing the map in the hands of the Ohio Redistricting Commission. With a 5-2 edge on the board, Republicans passed a second map in March 2022 that still gave the GOP a good chance of capturing at least 10 districts, if not more. Although the state’s high court ruled that this map was also unconstitutional in July 2022, by then the timeline for the case left the second map in place for the 2022 elections, in which Republicans won 10 of the state’s House seats.

The same map will now be used in 2024, too, after the Ohio Supreme Court dismissed legal challenges to the map in September. The plaintiffs who opposed the map had themselves sought a dismissal because they were less likely to have success before the state’s high court after the 2022 midterms, when Republicans captured a firmer majority with the retirement of Republican Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor, who’d ruled against the state’s maps. If the mapmaking process had reopened for 2024, Republicans may have drawn lines even more favorable to the GOP. Under Ohio law, a map passed without bipartisan support can only remain in effect for two election cycles instead of a full decade, so because no Democrats supported the map currently in use, it will remain in effect through the 2024 election and then need to be redrawn before the 2026 election.

Before then, however, the state’s redistricting process could change due to a citizen-initiated constitutional amendment that proponents aim to put on the November 2024 ballot. The proposal would implement a 15-member commission made up of Republicans, Democrats and independents, with bans against the participation of recent officeholders, lobbyists or party officials. The amendment also includes measures against partisan gerrymandering.