WASHINGTON—From gerrymandered voting maps to the latest surge in political spending, the Supreme Court’s fingerprints are all over the 2026 midterms.
A string of decisions from the court’s conservative majority has rewritten the rules that govern American elections, and this fall’s fight for Congress is the first to feel the full effects. Perhaps the court’s most visible impact is on TV airwaves in battleground states. Until this year, federal law capped how much money the parties could spend in direct coordination with candidates. The court declared those caps unconstitutional under the First Amendment. Callais , the court narrowed the Voting Rights Act and seemed to accept partisan gerrymandering as a valid goal of state legislatures. Partisan advantage, Justice Samuel Alito wrote in the majority opinion in Callais, is “a constitutionally permissible criterion that states may rely on as desired. Not all of the Supreme Court’s recent election-related rulings have helped Republicans. In June, the court rejected a Republican-led challenge to state laws that count ballots if they are mailed by Election Day and arrive shortly afterward. Last month, the court blocked a Trump administration plan to impose new requirements for mail ballots, and it stopped a long shot effort to install a pro-Republican voting map in Missouri. Any postelection litigation challenging results after Nov.
Chief Justice John Roberts’s 2019 majority opinion in Rucho v. 3 might have to be resolved by the high court, too.
Common Cause said that extreme partisan gerrymandering “leads to results that reasonably seem unjust”—but that federal judges aren’t equipped to referee such disputes. Tabatha Abu El-Haj, a law professor at Drexel University, said the court’s evolving language about partisan gerrymandering has seemed to validate the practice.
Then, earlier this year, in Louisiana v.
