At the height of election season, it’s easy to believe that races will be won or lost on the basis of dozens of standard political factors—candidate quality, get-out-the-vote drives, fundraising, debate performance: everything the media throws into horse race analysis. The reality, however, is that the vast majority of races for the House of Representatives are decided before a single vote is cast: Whoever draws the lines of a congressional district picks the winner. That’s why there are fewer competitive districts this cycle than at any point in the past 52 years.

But the 2022 cycle introduced a new reality: The conservative courts have repeatedly decided to step in to determine the fate of district lines, and potentially control of the House itself. To a degree that’s absolutely unprecedented in modern times, the midterms will be conducted with illegal maps—all of which were manipulated by Republicans to benefit their party, and all of which were approved or imposed by Republican-controlled courts. Put simply, Republican-appointed judges may have already guaranteed GOP control over the House before a single ballot is cast.

The reason for that is simple: In February 2022, the Supreme Court effectively suspended the Voting Rights Act’s ban on racial gerrymandering. Before that point, lower courts had applied long-standing precedent to find that congressional districts drawn after the 2020 census violated the VRA. They were following the text of the law, which outlaws maps that deny racial minorities an equal opportunity “to elect representatives of their choice.” For years, the Supreme Court interpreted this provision to prohibit racial gerrymanders that carve up Black communities to dilute their political power.

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But in an unsigned 5–4 order in February, the Supreme Court majority ignored those precedents and froze a lower court order striking down Alabama’s egregiously racist gerrymander, which crammed most Black residents into a single district. It did not explain its reasoning, but the message was clear enough: The ultraconservative majority would let Republican legislators eliminate as many majority-Black congressional districts as they pleased, maximizing the number of safe GOP seats in the midterms.

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Its decision had an immediate and devastating ripple effect on litigation throughout the South. A federal judge in Georgia declined to block the state’s racial gerrymandered congressional map, despite his belief that it likely ran afoul of the VRA. Another federal judge shot down Louisiana’s racist gerrymander, but the Supreme Court revived it (with all three liberal justices dissenting). Meanwhile, a district court in Texas dismissed many claims against the legislature’s attack on Latino representation. SCOTUS’ decision also empowered Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to reject the Republican legislature’s moderate gerrymander and demand an extreme map that targeted Black voters with surgical precision. The legislature complied. A state judge struck down the resulting plan as a brazenly illegal racial gerrymander, but the Florida Supreme Court—stacked with DeSantis appointees—predictably reinstated it.

These numbers add up. At least one seat seized from Democrats in Alabama, Louisiana, and Georgia; two or more in both Florida and Texas: Republicans have proven that discriminating against Black voters pays off electorally. They seized several more in Ohio by flouting a fair districts amendment to the state constitution, then defying the state Supreme Court’s order to draw less-biased maps. If Republicans win the House of Representatives by a relatively narrow margin, they will have their allies in the judiciary to thank.

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• The Midterms Are About …

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