In theory, the government could clear those barriers, appeal any adverse rulings and still tack the question onto the 2020 questionnaire, Cary Coglianese, a law professor who directs the Penn Program on Regulation at the University of Pennsylvania, said on Thursday. “But I struggle to see the path by which the citizenship question ends up on the 2020 census form,” he added.

In their rulings on Thursday, the justices stated pointedly that their decisions were legal opinions, not political ones.

“No one can accuse this court of having a crabbed view of its reach or competence,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote for the majority in the partisan maps cases. “But we have no commission to allocate political power and influence in the absence of a constitutional directive.”

But precisely because the gerrymandering and census cases were so deeply divisive, their resolution seems likely to reverberate through the political system, regardless of which political camp claims victory.

The rulings on Thursday only raise the stakes of elections across the country next year. The focus will now be on a handful of states like Texas, North Carolina and Georgia where political control is increasingly up for grabs and the fruits of victory — control over the mapping of scores of congressional districts, not to mention state legislative seats — are especially rich.

[Here’s what you need to know about gerrymandering.]

Republicans control most of those states. But Democrats hope to break their monopoly over redistricting by winning back state legislative seats in places like Texas, where the party is nine seats away from controlling the 150-seat House of Representatives, before new maps are drawn in 2021.

One reason the citizenship question is seen as pivotal is that those same states are heavy with the noncitizens and minority residents like Hispanics who analysts say would avoid a census that sought to know their status. While Republicans have denied that politics drove the decision to add the question to the head count, evidence filed in lawsuits suggests that partisan gain was at least a factor in the decision, and at most its central purpose.