US Midterms: How Court Rulings Are Changing the Rules

When the United States elects its Congress on 3 November 2026, the legal conditions in key areas differ from those at the start of the year. The Supreme Court has ruled on district boundaries, party spending and postal voting. On 25 October CNN described how strongly the conservative majority has thereby shaped the framework of the midterms.

The original rulings, however, point in more than one partisan direction. Some judgments change substantive electoral law. Others provisionally govern which rules apply while a case is still pending. Anyone who equates the two overestimates individual orders and at the same time overlooks long-term shifts.

Districts: A narrower standard of protection

In Louisiana v. Callais the court ruled on 29 April by six votes to three that a new district map for Louisiana amounted to an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. The state had created an additional district with a Black population majority after another court had found a possible violation of the Voting Rights Act.

The majority interpreted Section 2 of that act more narrowly: for a legal violation it requires circumstances that strongly suggest intentional discrimination. Partisan goals and ethnicity must be kept apart in the evidence. The ruling does not abolish the Voting Rights Act entirely, but it raises the requirements for such lawsuits.

Justice Elena Kagan dissented, joined by Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson. Their dissenting opinion considers the consequences for the protection of political participation grave. That is legal criticism from within the court, not an additional ruling. Nor can any particular election result be derived from the boundary drawing alone: candidates, mobilisation and the actual votes remain decisive.

Parties may work more closely with candidates

On 30 June, in the case brought by the National Republican Senatorial Committee against the election regulator FEC, the Supreme Court declared the statutory limits on coordinated party expenditures unconstitutional. This refers to expenditures a party makes in coordination with its candidates. The majority saw in them an impermissible restriction of political communication.

This category must be distinguished from direct donations and independent expenditures by third parties. The ruling therefore does not mean that every campaign finance rule has fallen away. Politically, the new freedom may help parties channel money more precisely into contested races. How many votes an additional advertising campaign wins cannot be calculated from it.

A further order of 14 October concerns discounted television advertising rates. Here the court stayed a short decision deadline imposed on the communications regulator FCC. The procedural reasoning matters: the order is not to be equated with a final substantive confirmation of all the advertising discounts claimed.