Sherrill opens door to redrawing N.J. congressional map

Up until now, New Jersey has not been on the front lines of the nationwide mid-decade congressional redistricting war, but that may be starting to change.

During an appearance on CNN last night, Gov. Mikie Sherrill said that she’d be open to rethinking New Jersey’s commission-driven redistricting process: “If Trump is going to try to attack fair voting across the country, then New Jersey’s going to stand up so that we can create a counterbalance to whatever he’s doing,” she said.

When pressed on whether that meant she would actively seek to change the state’s congressional map, which is already drawn to favor Democrats, she indicated she might. “We have some constitutional limitations on doing it immediately, we’d have to get some votes through, but I’d certainly be willing to work with the legislature to do that,” she said.

Last summer, at the insistence of the Trump administration, several Republican-led states like Texas, Missouri, and North Carolina began the process of redrawing their congressional maps to add several new GOP seats; Democratic-led California and Virginia responded in kind, putting successful referendums on their ballots to gerrymander their own maps.

New Jersey, though, was never at the center of that debate, in part because of the sheer logistical headache of undoing the state’s redistricting commission, which is enshrined in the state constitution. Democratic state legislators said when the redistricting war began that they had little interest in pursuing a redraw, and it was essentially too late anyways for the state to make a change that would affect the 2026 midterms.

But the Supreme Court’s decision this week in a Louisiana redistricting case, undoing many of the protections for majority-minority districts that were put into place in the Voting Rights act of 1965, has some New Jersey Democrats beginning to rethink their prior hesitance.

The legislature has two mechanisms to propose a state constitutional change: either pass an amendment with three-fifths votes in both the Assembly and Senate once – Democrats have supermajorities in both chambers, though only narrowly in the Senate – or with simple majorities two years in a row. In the former case, an amendment could go before voters as soon as this November’s general election; in the latter, it would go on the ballot in 2027.

If Sherrill does indeed encourage Democrats in the legislature to pursue a constitutional change, she may run into some headwinds from an often-torpid body that is not known for its bare-knuckled partisanship. (She herself has no direct role in the amendment process, since the governor’s signature is not required for amendments to make it onto the ballot, though she of course possesses plenty of behind-the-scenes influence.)

Senate President Nick Scutari (D-Linden) and Assembly Speaker Craig Coughlin (D-Woodbridge), who would be the driving forces behind any constitutional amendment, have not yet shown any obvious appetite for overhauling the redistricting process (though years ago, Scutari did propose an overhaul of the state’s legislative redistricting commission). Some Democratic legislators from swing districts may be especially nervous to put an amendment on the ballot in 2027, when increased GOP turnout may put them at risk of losing their own seats.

Democrats would also have to confront the question of what the state’s new redistricting procedures would look like. Would it pass purely into the hands of the state legislature, with all the provincial complications that would entail? Would the change be permanent, or could an independent commission return in the future? What about legislative redistricting, which is also handled by a commission under the state constitution?

And in the event that, through one mechanism or another, a new map does come about in time for the 2028 elections, what does that new map look like? How aggressive do Democrats get? Republicans currently control three of the state’s 12 districts, but Democrats have even odds of winning one of them this year and have an outside chance at flipping a second; how would those results affect a potential redraw?

Some of New Jersey’s existing incumbents, too, likely would not be overjoyed to see their districts change, even if it didn’t risk their own chances of re-election. Reps. LaMonica McIver (D-Newark) and Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-Ewing), the only Black women New Jersey has ever elected to the House, both expressed dismay at the Supreme Court’s Voting Rights Act decision on Wednesday, but neither liked the idea of New Jersey redrawing its maps in retaliation.

“I think New Jersey, its districts are fairly representative of the state,” Watson Coleman said. “So no, I don’t want us to do anything about it.”