Black voter turnout holds off threatened record drop in House seats

Incoming Congress to seat 60 Black House members, down from 63

High Black voter turnout, especially in the South, fueled Democratic wins in this year’s midterm elections that have forestalled, for now, a threatened record decline in Black representation in the U.S. House, according to an NPR analysis. Most notably, Rep. Shomari Figures, a Black Democrat, won reelection in Alabama even after the state’s Republican leaders redrew his congressional district to be far more GOP-leaning following this year’s Supreme Court ruling that further weakened the Voting Rights Act.

Even so, Black House representation is still slated to decline. NPR’s analysis found the incoming Congress is set to include 60 Black House members, including nonvoting members, down from 63 in the current House — a three-member loss that sits just one short of the record drop of four Black representatives after the 1876 election, around the end of the Reconstruction era. Beyond the unprecedented mid-decade redistricting fight, the usual churn of politics, including retirements and members running for higher office, contributed to the lower tally.

Figures joined Congress after the 2024 election as the first Black representative of Alabama’s 2nd Congressional District, which a lower federal court had ordered drawn to include a Black population large enough to have a realistic opportunity of electing its preferred candidate. He headed into the midterms with tough odds: voting in Alabama has been racially polarized between a Republican-supporting white majority and a Democratic-supporting Black minority, according to NPR.

The threat to his seat followed the courts. Weeks after the Supreme Court released its landmark decision in Louisiana v. Callais, which weakened the Voting Rights Act’s protections against racial discrimination in political mapmaking, the court’s conservative majority allowed Alabama’s Republican-controlled legislature to redraw the district. The lower court had previously found the new lines were “tainted by intentional race-based discrimination” and would “afford Black-preferred candidates zero chance of winning there.” Based on the redrawn map, Figures appeared to be on track to leave Congress like Rep. Cleo Fields of Louisiana, a Democrat who decided not to seek reelection after the Callais ruling struck down the Black opportunity district Fields represents.

Cliff Albright, co-founder and executive director of Black Voters Matter, said Figures’ victory took “a remarkable level of turnout.” “Some are calling it a blue wave,” Albright said. “For us, particularly here in the South, we’re calling it a Black wave because what we saw was the Black electorate’s been motivated by the attacks on our voting rights, by the gerrymandering that was taking place.”

Similar dynamics played out across the map. New voting maps in Texas and Florida undid some Black-represented districts, but Democrats’ sweeping victories in other states are helping to counteract those losses. North Carolina’s GOP-controlled legislature redrew the district of Rep. Don Davis, one of the state’s three Black representatives, and Davis defended his seat. Two incoming Black House Democrats, Cyril Jefferson and LaKesha Womack, flipped districts long represented by white Republicans. Democratic socialist Reps.-elect Melat Kiros, of Colorado, and Donavan McKinney, of Michigan, are adding to the incoming tally as well.

Democrats are also set to take control of statewide offices and legislative chambers in Texas and other long-standing Republican strongholds. By breaking the GOP trifecta in Georgia, the blue wave lowered the redistricting threat facing that state’s congressional districts represented by Black Democrats. Georgia’s outgoing Republican governor, Brian Kemp, announced last week that he will not call a special session on redistricting before handing the office in January to Gov.-elect Keisha Lance Bottoms, who will be the country’s first Black woman elected governor.

The picture differs in the Senate, where districts — and redistricting — do not apply. The midterm results lifted the number of Black senators in the new Congress to a historic high of seven, including Illinois Lt. Gov. Juliana Stratton and fellow Democrat Scott Colom, who is set to become the first Black senator from Mississippi since Reconstruction.

Advocates cautioned that the reprieve rests on conditions that may not repeat. Albright described this year’s midterms as unique. “What happens two years from now or four years from now, where it’s not the same wave year, where there’s not the same economic realities across the country, where you don’t necessarily get the same number of white voters that decide, ‘Oh, I guess I can vote for this Democrat’?” he said. “It’s simply not sustainable for Black voters to be carved up and have our voting power that diluted and for it to not have an impact over a more sustained period of time.”

Kareem Crayton, a redistricting expert and vice president of the Brennan Center for Justice’s Washington, D.C., office, took a wait-and-see view of some Democratic politicians’ talk that the results mark a generational shift in U.S. politics. “This sounds a lot like what people said in 2009 after a lot of massive change happened, including in the South, with the election of Barack Obama,” Crayton said. “And it wasn’t two years later that people sat in a haze, looking at returns that pretty much wiped out many of those changes that favored Democrats, including Black Democrats.”

“It could be that this is a start of a generational shift, but it might not be,” Crayton added. “And if you’re thinking about how rules ought to be crafted, I think the cautious approach is always the preferable approach in making certain that rights under the worst conditions are protected as opposed to the most rosy scenarios.”

Voting rights advocates and redistricting experts warn that the redrawing of district lines in the coming years, including after the 2030 census, continues to pose a threat to Black representation in Congress. Crayton said the redistricting rules now in place, shaped by the Callais decision and other court rulings, set up the potential dismantling of more opportunity districts for Black and other racial minority voters in future years. This year’s redistricting rush was limited in part because the ruling came too late for many states to redraw their maps in time for the midterms. “I think people who are looking at the recent Supreme Court decision around Callais and how it would be implemented always understood that the greatest reaction to that would not be in 2026, but would be 2028, 2030 and onward,” said Dedrick Asante-Muhammad, president of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, which tracks Black representation in Congress.

Janai Nelson, president and director-counsel of the Legal Defense Fund, which represents a group of Black Louisiana voters in the Callais case, said the ruling’s impact could reach well beyond Congress. “When we look at state legislatures, when we look at city councils, when we look at school board maps and we look at any other elected office that relies on districts, those have largely been untouched by Callais up until now,” Nelson said. “But as we enter a new state legislative process where these maps may be redrawn, then we might see devastating impact in electability by Black voters across the country and especially in the South.”