This week’s election will likely mark another milestone in the partitioning of America into divergent and increasingly hostile blocs of red and blue states.

From New Jersey and Virginia to California, Tuesday’s results are poised to extend a process that has allowed each party to consolidate political control over a huge swath of the country and that is heightening conflict among the states to a degree unmatched since the civil rights era in the 1960s — if not, the Civil War a century before that.

This week’s voting could further this separation in two distinct ways. Democratic victories in the governor’s races in Virginia and New Jersey would continue the trend of Democrats winning most elected offices in the states that typically go blue in presidential elections — while the inverse is increasingly true for Republicans in typically red states.

Even more important, though, this week’s vote will almost certainly accelerate the redistricting war that threatens to uproot one of the last beachheads for both parties in the geographic area dominated by the other. Following moves by Texas and other Republican-controlled states to eliminate Democratic House seats, the near-certain passage of Proposition 50 in California to erase up to five GOP-held seats will escalate the redistricting arms race between the parties. As that struggle unfolds across the country, it is likely to doom a substantial share of the remaining House members from each party in states that usually vote the other way for president.

As it becomes more difficult for each party to compete for nearly any office in the other side’s strongholds, both may grow increasingly inclined to write off the interests and perspectives of the places outside of their coalitions.

President Donald Trump has raised this dynamic to an ominous height by treating blue states less as partners in governing a federal republic than as hostile territory to be subdued. But even future presidents less inclined than Trump to view regions that voted against them as “the enemy within” may find it growingly difficult to craft national policies acceptable to both sides of this hardening red and blue divide.

Whether it’s Trump’s militarized approach to immigration enforcement or former President Joe Biden’s attempts to set rules on how schools treat transgender students, large swaths of the country are now viscerally recoiling each time the other party tries to impose its priorities through national policy, noted Geoffrey Kabaservice, vice president for political studies at the libertarian Niskanen Institute.

“You are getting two blocs of the country that have less and less in common with each other and the idea that they could be subjected to the preferences of the other bloc becomes more and more intolerable,” he said.

Spheres of influence

The hardening of partisan control over large spheres of influence has been one of the defining trends of 21st-century politics.

The 25 states that Trump has won in all three of his races is the most that a candidate from either party has carried in that many consecutive presidential elections since Republicans Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush won 38 in the three elections of the 1980s.

But after that impressive streak, Democrats in 1989 still controlled a slight majority of the US Senate seats (40/76) and governorships (21/38) in the states that voted for Reagan and Bush each time.

That world is extinct. Democrats today wield virtually no political power in the Trump 25 states. Republicans control the governorships in 22 of them, and all of their state legislatures and US Senate seats.

Democrats are nearly as strong in the 19 states that have voted against Trump in all three of his campaigns. Democrats control 17 of their 19 state legislatures, all but one of their US Senate seats, and all of their governorships except in New Hampshire, Vermont and Virginia, where former US Rep. Abigail Spanberger is heavily favored to win on Tuesday. This week’s governor’s race in New Jersey is much more competitive, but if Democratic Rep. Mikie Sherrill maintains her narrow lead in late polls Democrats will control 17 of the 19 governorships across the anti-Trump states.

There have always been some exceptions to these patterns — Democrats, for instance, have a good chance to win a Senate seat next year in North Carolina, one of the Trump 25 states. But the general direction of greater alignment between presidential outcomes and other races in red and blue states alike is unmistakable, and probably irreversible any time soon.

Failures of representation

Though the overall partisan impact of this trade-off will likely benefit Republicans (perhaps substantially depending on how the Supreme Court rules), the biggest losers will be House members representing states that usually vote the other way for president.

That raises thorny questions of representation. Voters from the minority party in each region could be reduced to minimal representation in the House, even though 26.8 million people voted Democratic in the 25 Trump states in 2024, while 26.8 million people voted Republican in the 19 anti-Trump states.

The implications for representation of racial minorities are even more ominous. From 2010 to 2023, voters of color accounted for 92% of the total population growth in Alabama and Texas, 87% in Florida and 81% in North Carolina, according to analysis of census data conducted for me by the Equity Research Institute at the University of Southern California. In Mississippi, Louisiana and Georgia, all of the states’ population growth over that period was non-White; the White population actually declined, the institute found. Yet if the Supreme Court further retrenches the Voting Rights Act, Republicans across the South may eliminate a dozen or more House seats now represented by Democratic minorities.

“The Voting Right Act was passed … to unrig the electoral rules of the game; now we see the South rise again to embrace old habits of suppressing minority voices in the political process,” said Manuel Pastor, the institute’s executive director.

With governorships, the state legislatures and US Senate seats already overwhelmingly following the presidential results, the decline in House members from mismatched states could snip one of the final threads encouraging presidents to consider the interests of states that typically vote against them, notes Eric Schickler, a University of California at Berkeley political scientist.

The need to help protect dozens of House members in states that usually vote against a president gives him or her “some audience he wants to appeal to … so he can’t just write off the state,” Schickler said. “You can think of that as kind of stitching the country together in a way because it means any president has important constituencies in 50 states rather than (only) the states that voted for him.” If House members from the other party become nearly as rare in the red and blue blocks as other elected officials, he adds, “it just exacerbates this movement where it really is becoming two Americas in a way that has not been true before.”

One of the last footholds for either party in the region dominated by the other has been US House seats. Even in the bluest states, Republicans often win in seats centered on exurban and rural areas; Democrats routinely win seats in the major metropolitan areas of red states.

Today, Democrats hold 43 of the 185 House seats, or 23%, in the states that voted three times for Trump. Republicans in turn hold 39 of the 185 House seats, or 21%, in the states that voted three times against him. (The GOP controls the House majority because it also holds 39 of the 65 House seats in the six states that have flipped between Trump and the Democratic nominees at any point in his three campaigns.)

But the ongoing redistricting war could shrivel the number of legislators surviving on that hostile terrain. The mid-decade redistricting efforts that Republicans are pursuing under pressure from Trump in states including Texas, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio and Indiana, and possibly Florida, Kansas, Nebraska and others, might easily eliminate one-third or more of the Democratic-held seats in the Trump 25 states. If the Republican-appointed Supreme Court majority further weakens the Voting Rights Act, as appears almost inevitable, red states might respond by eliminating 12 to 20 seats now held by Black or Latino Democrats (though there might be some overlap with the partisan redistricting.)

Democratic-controlled states haven’t yet responded as forcefully. But if Proposition 50 — the California ballot initiative backed by Gov. Gavin Newsom to redraw the state’s Congressional districts — passes resoundingly this week, as seems likely, that would intensify pressure on other Democratic-controlled states to act. Last week, the Democratic-controlled Virginia state legislature began the process to do so, despite substantial obstacles, which could make holding out more uncomfortable for other blue states that have resisted moving, including Colorado, Illinois and Maryland. By the time this process concludes, Republicans might lose a quarter or more of their House seats in blue states.

From neighbors to adversaries

The decrease in elected officials from states dominated by the other party is changing relationships both within and between the parties. In Congress, their decline has already narrowed the opportunities for bipartisan agreement.

Legislators from states that typically vote the other way for president have often been bridge-builders seeking bipartisan accommodations. Now, with virtually all senators — and potentially nearly all House members — representing states that also voted for their party’s presidential nominee, the incentives are reversed; most legislators now face enormous pressure to always side with a president of their own party and against a president of the other.

In a world where the parties derive their Congressional majorities overwhelmingly from states reliably in their camp at the presidential level, each side is “able to govern without any regard for what (the other) wants or thinks,” says Schickler, co-author of Partisan Nation, a 2024 book on how polarization has destabilized the Constitutional system.

This decline is changing the dynamics within the parties too. Elected officials from states leaning the other way at the presidential level have often provided the nucleus of internal reform efforts designed to broaden a party’s appeal to a wider range of voters. The most successful of those modern efforts — the centrist Democratic Leadership Council formed in 1985 to rebuild the party’s presidential competitiveness — revolved around elected Democrats from states trending Republican under Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, noted Al From, the group’s founder.

“The reform movement was to help you win in areas we don’t normally win,” From said. “That’s why at the beginning we were considered Southern and Western-dominated, because they were the areas that were the most vulnerable (for Democrats).”

Elected officials from that precarious terrain are often a source of innovative new thinking. One reason Bill Clinton could so effectively rethink traditional Democratic approaches in his two winning presidential races was that he had spent years trying to reformulate progressive priorities in a manner that would be acceptable to most voters as governor in Arkansas, a state not nearly as open to those ideas as New York or Illinois.

Evan Bayh, a Democrat and son of a former US senator who served as both governor and later a US senator from Indiana himself, said that winning in a Republican-leaning state meant “I had to go beyond the solid base of my party; I had to reach out to independents and reach out to moderate Republicans. And that involved compromise.”

Bayh, who made it on to Barack Obama’s short list of potential running mates in 2008, said that operating in such a challenging political environment also required creative thinking. “You don’t learn anything new living in an echo chamber,” Bayh said. “You have to have an open mind to different points of view and that can really stimulate the policy making process.”

These concerns about how geographic polarization has undermined compromise and policy innovation are relatively long-standing. Likewise, policy disagreements have been mounting for years between presidents and states in the other block, and lawsuits from coalitions of red or blue state Attorneys General to block the initiatives of a president from the other party have become routine.

But Trump has escalated these tensions into something much closer to a cold civil war. Trump and his advisers have portrayed blue states and their elected officials as both illegitimate and un-American, pressured them to adopt red state social policies by systematically threatening their federal funds, arrested or threatened to arrest state and local Democrats, and subjected blue cities to aggressive immigration enforcement and National Guard deployments over the heated objections (and lawsuits) of local Democratic officials, while enlisting red states to send National Guard forces into blue jurisdictions.

Trump doesn’t “see himself as president of the whole country,” said From. Trump’s view about blue states, he added, seems to be “that they didn’t vote for him, so he wants to punish them, just as he goes after his personal enemies.”

Trump may feed these centrifugal forces in a uniquely dangerous manner. But as each party comes to believe it has virtually no prospects or interests in the other’s sphere of influence, the tendency will only grow on each side to view the other less as neighbors than as adversaries. No one can predict exactly what will flow from that rising animosity, but even the direst possibilities no longer seem inconceivable.

“On the one hand, there’s no conceivable way in which the country breaks apart that makes any sense whatsoever,” said Schickler. “On the other hand, how the country sticks together as one given these forces also seems much more problematic than I ever would have imagined.” (CNN)