Jeffries’ Illinois redistricting push meets cool reception in Springfield

U.S. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries’ push for Illinois Democrats to redraw the state’s congressional map as a counter to President Donald Trump’s mid-decade redistricting project in GOP-led states has met a cool reception with state lawmakers.

“I think there is next to zero appetite to do it,” one House Democratic lawmaker told Capitol News Illinois. Another lawmaker said “there is no world where I see this happening.”

Lawmakers are back in Springfield next week for the final days of their annual fall veto session. Reform of the state’s public transportation agencies and addressing soaring energy costs have dominated the discussion. But Jeffries is making a late play with state legislative leaders to put a new map on the agenda, too, Punchbowl News, a Washington D.C.-based news organization, reported earlier this week.

The New York Democrat’s move comes amid a national redistricting battle initiated by Trump to squeeze additional Republican seats out of GOP-controlled states to bolster the party’s chances of retaining its narrow House majority in the 2026 midterm elections.

A spokesperson for Jeffries did not return a request for comment.

Cool reception in Springfield

With Gov. JB Pritzker and Democratic supermajorities in the state legislature, Illinois is one of the few states where the party can pick up another seat. The state’s congressional delegation is currently composed of 14 Democrats and three Republicans.

However, Democratic state lawmakers and party officials told Capitol News Illinois that most, if not all, the redistricting conversations have been initiated in Washington. And there appears to be little interest  in Springfield for blowing up the state’s congressional lines.

Among the roadblocks is the clock. The candidate petition filing deadline for the March primary is Nov. 3. If lawmakers act next week, they would have to consider moving the primary date or tweaking signature requirements for petitions.

Perhaps an even larger hurdle is opposition from Black elected officials, who worry that a new map could lead to the dilution of the state’s Black political representation.

Currently, three of the state’s congressional districts are at least 40% African American, according to U.S. Census data, and Illinois has four Black representatives in Congress.

But a more aggressive gerrymander would likely require these majority-minority, overwhelmingly Democratic districts to absorb additional rural, majority-white parts of the state that overwhelmingly vote Republican.

“We’re going to fight back,” congressional candidate and state Sen. Willie Preston, D-Chicago, the Senate chair of the Illinois Legislative Black Caucus, told Punchbowl News on Wednesday. “We just won’t do so at the expense of our own power.”

More generally, some Democrats worry that a new map would further weaken existing Democrat-held districts and make them electorally vulnerable to Republicans.

Representatives for the state’s legislative leaders said they’ve not seen any proposed maps and have not taken any steps to initiate that process.

Delores Walton, press secretary for Illinois House Speaker Emanuel “Chris” Welch, D-Hillside, told Capitol News Illinois that “there are no substantive plans to pass a new congressional map, and House Democrats have taken no steps to draw any new maps.” But she added that “all options must remain on the table,” citing Republican map-drawing efforts in red states.

John Patterson, spokesperson for Senate President Don Harmon, said they “understand why this conversation continues,” but reiterated that “there’s no plan and we’ve seen no maps.”

A counter to GOP redistricting

Texas Republicans enacted a new map this summer that could net the party an additional five seats. Lawmakers in Missouri and North Carolina recently approved maps aimed at gaining one more GOP seat apiece. Efforts are also underway in Indiana and Kansas.

Democrats have countered with California, where the party is backing a ballot measure that would allow the Democrat-led state legislature to override an existing commission-drawn map and adopt new, temporary district lines that could net the party five more seats.

The party’s options behind the Golden State are limited — Democrats have single-party control in fewer states than Republicans and many have placed strict constitutional limits on redistricting or put it in the hands of an independent commission.

As a result, Jeffries has turned to Illinois and Maryland to further bolster Democrats.

Pritzker, a Trump critic who hosted Texas Democrats earlier this summer when they fled the Lone Star State in opposition to the Republican remap, has been coy about redrawing his own state’s lines as a countermeasure.

The governor told reporters earlier this week that he generally doesn’t think Illinois should redistrict, but that Democrats shouldn’t have to “sit on the sidelines” when Republican states are engaging in mid-decade redistricting.

Still, he said a remap is “really going to be up to the legislature.”

Illinois already gerrymandered

In 2021, the Democratic-led state legislature passed and Pritzker signed one of the most aggressively gerrymandered congressional maps in the country. It provided Democrats with a 14-3 majority in the delegation — or 82% of the seats in a state where Vice President Kamala Harris only won 54.5% of the statewide vote in 2024.

Read more: Congressional redistricting plan clears General Assembly

Democrats achieved this by “packing” Republicans into as few districts as possible while consolidating Democratic pockets of strength downstate and stretching out their partisan advantage in the Chicago region as far as they possibly could.

Illinois’ current congressional map earned an F grade from the independent Princeton Gerrymandering Project, finding the map fails in every category on political fairness and competition and geographic compactness.

Illinois Republicans over the years have unsuccessfully challenged the state’s legislative maps in court and have filed legislation to create an independent redistricting commission. The idea has never gained traction in the Democrat-controlled legislature.

Capitol News Illinois is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news service that distributes state government coverage to hundreds of news outlets statewide. It is funded primarily by the Illinois Press Foundation and the Robert R. McCormick Foundation.