There are four state supreme court elections this November that will determine the shape of eleven congressional districts, and none of them has drawn national coverage.
The mechanism is straightforward. In each of the four states — Wisconsin, North Carolina, Ohio and Montana — the state constitution contains a clause governing districting standards, and in each the operative interpretation of that clause was set by a decision reached on a bare majority. A single seat changing hands changes the majority. A changed majority invites a new challenge to maps that were litigated to exhaustion two years ago.
This is not a hypothetical sequence. It has already happened twice: in Wisconsin in 2023, where a new majority struck legislative maps it had previously upheld, and in North Carolina in 2022 and again in 2023, in opposite directions.
What is unusual about this cycle is the money. Judicial races that cost under $2 million a decade ago are now clearing $30 million, and the disclosure regime governing them is substantially weaker than the one governing congressional campaigns. Roughly 60 per cent of outside spending in the 2024 Wisconsin race came through entities that do not disclose donors.
State bar associations in three of the four states have proposed recusal rules that would require judges to step aside from cases involving major campaign donors. None has been adopted. The objection, offered candidly by one state chief justice, is that a strict rule would disqualify most of the court from most of the significant cases.