Black voter turnout surges in US south despite Republican redistricting drive: ‘They could not stop the momentum’

Black voter turnout surged across US southern states where Republicans were accused of redrawing electoral maps to “diminish Black political power” in the wake of a seismic supreme court ruling.

Democrats flipped or held seats in Alabama, Texas and Florida with the support of this voting bloc, building on a decades-long, dedicated movement to protect and build Black political power in the region.

The redistricting drive “blew up” in Republican lawmakers’ faces, said Ashley K Shelton, CEO and president of Power Coalition for Equality and Justice in Louisiana. “There’s nowhere to go but up from there,” she said. “We still have to fight to protect representation. We have to continue to fight for that representation.

“Let’s be clear: voters overcame unbelievable voter suppression across this country, and in particular in the south, to make sure that they were able to cast their vote in their voice.”

It comes after the supreme court effectively gutted a major section of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) in April with the Louisiana v Callais decision, rendering ineffective the last remaining powerful provision of the 1965 civil rights law that prevents racial discrimination in voting.

Even before Callais, Republican lawmakers in Texas, following directives from Trump, had redrawn maps in an attempt to consolidate their party’s political power. With the supreme court decision, multiple southern states – Alabama, Tennessee and Louisiana – did the same, redrawing majority Black districts.

Voters and voting rights groups across the south were incensed – both by the supreme court decision and by the actions of Republican lawmakers, leading to protests across the region, including All Roads Lead to the South in Alabama, which drew thousands of people from across the country.

But Tuesday’s midterm elections provide the first opportunity to see the impact of redistricting efforts on voters.

“There is a direct correlation between the Callais decision, the behavior of these state assemblies, and Black voters turning out during the primary, and then the results that we saw on Tuesday,” said Ashley England-Albright, co-founder and legal director of Black Voters Matter (BVM).

In 2024, Black voters in Alabama celebrated when Shomari Figures, who is Black, was elected as the first congressman in the state’s then-newly drawn, majority-Black second congressional district.

The district – which includes most of the state capital of Montgomery – “for years didn’t have the representation that they needed to push certain things, like more for the schools, better housing, things like that”, Jamey Thompson, who was elected to a local school board that year, said at the time.

But, after Callais, Alabama swiftly reinstated an old map that reverted Figures’s district to one that a court previously found diminished the influence of Black voters in the state’s Black belt.

Still, facing a tougher election contest after his district was redrawn to be more favorable to Republicans, Figures – a Democrat – won by nearly eight points on Tuesday.

Majority-Black counties in Alabama, like elsewhere in the south, had distinctively high turnout this election: voter turnout increased on average by 65% across the state, from 28% in 2022 to 44% in 2026, according to data reviewed by the Guardian.

Black-majority turnout in Figures’s district increased by 81%. The three counties with the highest voter turnouts in the district were Black-majority.

“So much of what this administration has done has been to roll back the protections that give us access to the ballot, while simultaneously flooding us with propaganda that tells us that it doesn’t matter,” said Nadine Smith, president and CEO of Color of Change, which worked to mobilize voters across the south before the election. “What you saw was Black voters showing up in the face of an administration that has spent two years attacking our rights, weakening voter protections and redrawing maps specifically to diminish Black political power.

“Even in early voting, we were seeing a surge. We organized anyway, and we voted anyway. Even in places where they, not all, but many of the places where they redrew maps, they could not stop the momentum.”

A study from July that analyzed voter turnout in the south during the primaries indicated that Callais, even then, was spurring increased participation from Black voters.

Alabama’s Greene county surpassed 50% turnout in the primary election, while Bullock, Lowndes, Macon and Montgomery counties – all of which are in Alabama’s second congressional district – also experienced significant turnout. Bullock county, which is more than 70% Black, had the third-largest turnout in the state.

In Louisiana, which triggered the Callais decision, Black voters made up 35.7% of the primary electorate during the primaries, despite making up only 32.1% of the population.

Louisiana maintained increased Black voter turnout through to this week’s midterms, when more Black voters cast early ballots than in any other midterm or gubernatorial election in the past decade.

“The turnout and the exit polling that we’re hearing from partners and the boots on the ground that we had was that folks were not going to allow the court decision to undermine the power and the authority that they had with their votes,” said Sarah Whittington, advocacy director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Louisiana.

Organizers in the south have been working for decades to mobilize voters. The fall of the VRA reminded them of how hard previous generations had fought to secure it.

Five months prior to the VRA being signed, about 600 people who marched in support of voting rights on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Alabama were brutally attacked by law enforcement officers, who confronted them with teargas, billy clubs and other weapons.

“Bloody Sunday”, as the march is remembered due to the viciousness of the attacks, was a turning point in the civil rights movement. That was one of the fights that voting rights advocates uplifted frequently to remind voters of what is at stake.

“This is the lesson of the south,” said Smith, of Color of Change. “There’s power in community, in connecting with each other. We saw HBCU students marching to the polls. We saw so much of that sense of: ‘I vote not simply about the candidates in front of me. I vote as an expression of my love for my community, for my people, for my family. I’ll do everything in my power, and my power is considerable to make the path more humane.’”