Black voters did not just show up on Tuesday. They answered.
Exit polling from the November 3 midterms shows 93% of Black women and about 86% of Black men voted for Democrats, according to Jonathan Cox, who leads research and policy analysis at the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation. That is close to what former President Barack Obama captured in 2008, when he won support from 96% of Black women and about 95% of Black men.
USA Today called it a “blacklash,” and the organizers behind it used the same word. Melanie Campbell, president of the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation, referred to the election as a “blacklash” to the last two years.
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“Black people are turning up and turning out all over this country to try to save this democracy from becoming an authoritarian state and that is what was on the ballot,” Campbell said.
The ruling that lit the fuse
The through line is not hard to find. On April 29, the Supreme Court decided Louisiana v. Callais, throwing out Louisiana’s voting map and effectively gutting Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.
Republicans in southern states then raced to redraw congressional district boundaries. USA Today reports the maps diluted Black voting power, raising fears among activists that about 60 years of civil rights gains are being destroyed.
“Black women are out here holding down Democrats in ways that really needs to be shouted from the rooftops,” Cox told USA Today.
Political commentator Avis Jones-DeWeever put the moment in the same frame, pointing to the Trump administration’s attacks on diversity initiatives and Black history in his second term, economic policies that have hit Black families particularly hard, and Supreme Court decisions that effectively gutted part of the Voting Rights Act.
“It’s awakened something in us, a memory of what we’ve seen before,” Jones-DeWeever told USA Today.
The organizing behind the numbers
Thousands of organizers nationwide united after the Callais decision to build a wave of Black voters, hoping to drive home their outrage over the court’s decision and the move to redraw districts that reduced Black voting power.
The early voting numbers show the push was real. Black early and absentee voting ran well ahead of 2022 numbers in some states, including Florida, Georgia, Michigan and Texas, according to the NAACP. Early and absentee voting was up 20% in Georgia and 53% in Texas compared to the same point in 2022.
LaTosha Brown, co-founder of the voting rights group Black Voters Matter, said Black communities came together after the Callais decision to protect voting rights.
“What we saw in this country is that our political power has been hit, our economic power has been hit… we’ve seen white nationalism, all those things. So, they hit us, we’re hitting them back,” Brown said.
Exit surveys conducted in Southern polling locations on Election Day, unveiled by the coalition, found voting rights, reducing racism and lowering living costs were the top reasons Black voters turned out.
The math
The Black vote did not just hold the line. It moved the map.
USA Today notes that with this week’s strong Black turnout, Republicans now face a reality in which voters fundamentally shifted the political landscape, nudging swing states left and making red states suddenly competitive.
In Mississippi, Democrat Scott Colom is on the verge of flipping a Senate seat that has not been held by a Democrat since 1978. If he wins, Colom would be the first Black statewide official in Mississippi since Reconstruction. The race is still uncalled.
The Louisiana Senate race was also much closer than expected, with the Republican winning by less than 26,000 votes. Several House Democrats managed to hold on despite being drawn into unfriendly districts. The race in Louisiana’s Sixth District, at the center of the Callais decision, did not flip to Republicans outright and will head to a December 12 runoff.
Why it matters for us
This was a test of whether a court decision and a map redraw could quiet Black voters. The answer, in the exit polling, was no.
The work was not new. Grassroots groups have organized in Black communities for decades, but they began building coalitions after the Supreme Court ruled in 2013 that states with a history of race discrimination could make voting changes without federal approval. A flood of new laws requiring voter identification and placing limits on absentee voting followed.
They have mostly had to do it on their own. The South has been a Republican stronghold for so long that Democratic donors have focused on easier to sway seats. Activists wondered how much larger turnout could have been, or how much tighter margins would have been in close races, if national donors had recognized the unique opportunity to turn out Black voters after the Callais decision.
“I hope that what it means politically is that people start paying attention to the South and stop writing us off. There really is (an) opportunity here,” said Ashley Shelton, founder and president of the nonprofit Power Coalition for Equity and Justice, an original plaintiff in the case that led to the Callais decision.
What to watch
Mississippi is still counting, with the Senate race uncalled. Louisiana’s Sixth District goes to a runoff on December 12. And the question Shelton raised, whether national donors finally pay attention to the South, will be answered by where the money and the organizing go next.
