Democratic judges have an uphill battle to change the 6-1 Ohio Supreme Court, where Justice Jennifer Brunner is an island unto herself in a sea of Republican justices. But she and another judge making a run for a seat in November sense a change in the winds when it comes to Democratic support, both in the judicial system and elsewhere.

“As I travel the state, I am taken by the movement, the energy, the sort of undertow that I’m sensing from the counties around the state,” Brunner said at the Ohio Democratic Party’s primary night event on Tuesday.

Brunner has been on the court since 2021, but until last year, she shared the bench with two other Democratic justices.

Races for the state’s top judicial positions were made explicitly partisan when Republican state lawmakers added party labels to the races starting in 2022. Since that change, the court has gone from 4-3 to 6-1 Republican.

“I don’t mind it,” Brunner said. “But I sure would like a little more company.”

The most recent general election in 2024 saw the defeat of Justice Melody Stewart and Justice Michael P. Donnelly, in favor of Republican justices Joe Deters and Megan Shanahan.

As Republican Indiana state senators lost their seats this week in a revenge-fueled primary after defying President Donald Trump on redistricting, the prominent Maryland Democrat who also sank partisan gerrymandering took note.

Maryland Senate President Bill Ferguson (D-Baltimore City) faces a Democratic version of that retribution, drawing the most difficult primary challenge of his 16-year career.

Like the ousted Indiana Republicans, Ferguson defied demands from his party’s leaders to create new congressional maps to boost chances of controlling the U.S. House. He, too, faces political consequences after rejecting efforts to eliminate the state’s one GOP-leaning House district.

While the Maryland-style payback from fellow Democrats does not resemble the overt revenge campaign waged in Indiana by Trump and his Republican allies, Ferguson is left aggressively defending a seat unlike ever before.

Gov. Wes Moore (D), who led the redistricting charge, pointedly did not include him in a list of more than 160 primary endorsements in state and local races released Thursday, boosting Democrats the governor said would “push back and push forward.”

The NAACP’s Tennessee chapter filed a lawsuit Thursday afternoon challenging the legality of the state’s new congressional map, redrawn so a majority-Black voting district was eliminated.

NAACP Tennessee President Gloria Sweet-Love filed an emergency petition to stop the map from going into effect in Davidson County Chancery Court. The lawsuit was filed less than three hours after Gov. Bill Lee signed the new map into law.

The Tennessee Legislature’s Republican supermajority passed the map — carving up a historic Democratic-held district in Shelby County — during a whirlwind special session called at President Donald Trump’s behest days after the U.S. Supreme Court weakened a key section of the Voting Rights Act. Protesters opposing the redistricting flooded the Capitol for the three-day session’s entirety.

When Lee called the special session, the lawsuit argues, he did not specifically state that its purpose included repealing or suspending a Tennessee law prohibiting mid-decade redistricting. The General Assembly passed a bill nullifying that law during the session, and Lee signed it into law shortly before the final vote on the new map.

The Tennessee Constitution stipulates that the General Assembly “shall enter no legislative business except that for which they were specifically called together,” and the map therefore violates “clear and unambiguous Tennessee statutory law and the mandates of the Tennessee Constitution,” the lawsuit states.

For more than four decades, the Ninth Congressional District of Tennessee stood as a bulwark, ensuring that the Black voters who compose a majority of the city of Memphis could choose their representative in Washington. With a nod from the Supreme Court, the state’s ruling Republicans took barely a week to wipe that district off the map.

Tennessee yesterday enacted legislation that splits much of Memphis among three separate districts, diluting the votes of Black residents and all but guaranteeing Republicans an additional House seat. The move was the first, and surely not the last, GOP legislative response to the Supreme Court’s decision last week gutting enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. Across the South, Republicans are rushing to redraw congressional districts that, because of the Court’s 6–3 ruling in Louisiana v. Callais, they believe they are no longer required to reserve for nonwhite voters, who predominantly cast ballots for Democrats.

Voting-rights advocates expected GOP-led states to use the ruling to escalate a nationwide gerrymandering race. But the speed and blunt force of the Republican response has been astonishing. Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry invoked emergency powers usually meant for natural disasters to suspend a primary election that was already under way to give lawmakers time to redistrict. Alabama Republicans held votes during a tornado watch while a storm flooded the state capitol to allow for new primary elections if federal courts clear the state’s path to redistrict. South Carolina legislators also took an initial step toward gerrymandering the district of Representative James Clyburn, one of the nation’s most prominent Black leaders.

Collectively, the moves could increase the GOP’s chances of retaining its narrow House majority in this fall’s midterm elections. Republicans received another major judicial boost this morning, when Virginia’s highest court struck down a statewide referendum designed by Democrats to give them as many as four additional House seats.

The Virginia decision will help Republicans in the short term, but the Callais ruling, written by Justice Samuel Alito and joined by the Supreme Court’s five other conservative members, could benefit the GOP and reshape congressional representation in the South for years to come. “This feels like the echoes of the ‘southern strategy’ of the ’60s,” Anneshia Hardy, the executive director of the advocacy group Alabama Values, told us. “This is diluting Black political power.” When the Court issued its ruling last week, Hardy had just finished speaking at an event at the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery. She got back to her car and wept.