GOP lawmakers want to redraw Arizona districts. Sen. Gallego says that'll help Democrats

Arizona Republican lawmakers want to redraw the state’s legislative and congressional districts early. Democratic Sen. Ruben Gallego believes that would be a boon to Democrats.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled last week in Louisiana v. Callais that states can’t consider the race of constituents as the main factor when drawing congressional lines.

Arizona Senate President Warren Petersen (R-Gilbert) said he plans to file a lawsuit to redraw the state’s lines mid-decade in light of that decision.

Gallego said mid-decade redistricting would help Democrats win more congressional seats and flip both chambers of the state Legislature blue.

“When it comes to the state House state Senate, I think the Republicans would probably lose the state House state Senate in perpetuity at that point,” he said on Thursday.

Gallego said he advocated for diluting the population of Latinos in congressional districts previously, because they tend to lean liberal:

“I actually used to try to make it less Latino, because I knew that Republicans were actually packing all the Republicans into one district and that made all the other districts less competitive,” Gallego said.

Gallego indicated redistricting would add more minority voters to red districts, making them more favorable for Democrats. However, several Republicans seem to think the opposite is true.

University of Arizona political science professor Chad Westerland said it’s too soon for either side to know for sure that they’ll get any benefit from redistricting.

The Arizona process

In Arizona, a bipartisan group made up of two Democrats, two Republicans and an independent make up the Independent Redistricting Commission. The IRC was established by a voter-approved measure and is tasked with drawing legislative and congressional lines once every decade.

The last IRC met in 2021 to create the current districts.

Arizona has nine congressional seats, which are controlled 6-3 by Republicans and Democrats.

The IRC also drew the 30 districts which make up the state Legislature, and both the House and Senate are in Republican hands.

In other states, like Louisiana, the state Legislature is the entity tasked with drawing districts and the requirements for how to create those districts are very different.

The IRC adheres to the federal Voting Rights Act and has to take a handful of other factors into account. Those include keeping “communities of interest” together and incorporating municipal and geographic boundaries.

The Supreme Court decision deals specifically with Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, making it more difficult for a plaintiff to challenge districting which dilutes minority votes.

In other states, Westerland said that gave a green light for lawmakers to carve up “majority minority” districts in a way that’s helped Republicans.

However, because those states are drawn by different entities and the distribution of both political and racial groups is different — he said Arizona lawmakers can’t make the assumption that the decision will benefit Republicans.

And Westerland said there is an avenue for new districts to help Democrats.

For example: Tucson has a large Latino population and is divided into two congressional districts.

One of those, Congressional District 7, is extremely blue and represented by Democratic Congresswoman Adelita Grijalva.

The other, Congressional District 6, is one of the most competitive districts in the country and is represented by Republican Congressman Juan Ciscomani.

If some of the Latinos in CD7 were redrawn into CD6, Grijalva would still be in a “safe” blue district, but Ciscomani could find himself in a blue-leaning district for the first time.

Westerland noted that some other states already had new maps ready to go in anticipation of the court decision, but not Arizona.

“The usual take has been, the absence of the Voting Rights Act will help Republicans in the short term because we know the states where it's immediately going to go into effect. … That's just not the case in other places where it's going into where that decision is having an effect immediately. And so here it's just, you know, a little more nuanced, a little more complicated and might pull in a couple of different directions,” Westerland said.

Petersen said he intends to file a lawsuit before the end of the year and the new maps could potentially go into effect before the 2028 election, but that depends on how long the court process, redistricting, and any potential legal challenges will take.

Westerland said the place to look is Maricopa County, as far as discerning how the new districts will change Arizona races.

“Because there's just such a concentration of population there and how sort of the districts are drawn, like you can carve up districts in lots of different ways for partisan advantage there,” Westerland said.

Looking at the big picture, it’s not clear yet if redistricting would even significantly change Arizona’s makeup.

Because the IRC must keep “communities of interest together” and some minority communities tend to live in the same geographical areas, like the Navajo tribe, current maps which already keep many of those communities together could remain relatively similar.