How the Suburbs Have Changed Gerrymandering

Under maps passed by Georgia’s Republican-led legislature, the bluest parts of both districts would be stuffed into the Seventh, while rural territory in northwestern Georgia would neutralize the remainder of the suburbs and make the Sixth District safely Republican.

Allison Riggs, a co-executive director and chief counsel for voting rights at the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, emphasized North Carolina. There, legislators packed urban voters into one district each in Charlotte and Raleigh, and parceled out the increasingly Democratic and decreasingly white suburbs among several.

“You know in these counties and in these areas, there are enough votes to create new opportunities for voters of color, new opportunities for Democrats,” Riggs said. “And instead they’re carved up like a pizza pie.”

Neil Makhija, the executive director of the advocacy group Indian American Impact, noted that growing Asian American communities had helped turn many suburbs blue, including in Georgia and North Carolina last year, when they voted in larger numbers than they had in previous elections.

He expressed concern about the new district lines around Dallas and Fort Worth that link suburban Indian American communities to rural counties along the Oklahoma border.

The “G.O.P. can pack or crack our communities and claim they aren’t racial gerrymandering, but instead using partisan indicators,” Makhija said, adding that his group was also closely watching redistricting in Democratic states like New York and California. “There’s no difference to us, however, because the end result is the same: We lose our voice in the process.”

In lawsuits, advocacy groups are still focusing largely on cities, where they have the strongest cases under the Voting Rights Act of 1965. It requires mapmakers to draw opportunity districts — where a racial minority group is a majority of the voting-age population — under certain conditions when demographics make it possible.