Republicans set out this year to weaken Black voters' power across the South, and new numbers suggest the effort has badly misfired.
Black voters have already cast more than 160,000 more ballots than they had at this stage of the 2022 midterms, The Bulwark reported Wednesday, with the sharpest shifts showing up in Southern states, especially in Louisiana and South Carolina. Louisiana is where the case that led the Supreme Court to gut Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act began.
After the ruling in Louisiana v. Callais, Republicans in several states raced to dismantle majority-Black congressional districts. Democrats predicted the power grab would spur Black voters who usually skip midterms, though not everyone was convinced. Raymond Smith, a former state lawmaker running in North Carolina's 3rd District, told The Bulwark in June he feared the GOP's efforts "could be lost on the younger generation."
The data so far points the other way. Tom Bonier, a senior adviser to TargetSmart, said the jump is coming mostly from young voters.
"When you break down the increase in Black voter turnout, it's overwhelmingly being driven by younger Black voters, which is somewhat surprising or unexpected because we know that early voting tends to skew older," Bonier said.
Democratic pollster Cornell Belcher, who is tracking Black turnout in Georgia, said the participation of infrequent voters stands out.
"When you look at how more sporadic voters are turning out and are a part of the early-vote conversation, you do get a sense that something different is going on," Belcher said.
The trend is already reshaping the map. In Tennessee, Republicans broke up the majority-Black Memphis district into three pieces, yet early turnout in Shelby County is up 8 percentage points from this point in 2022. That has Democrats eyeing two districts Trump would have carried by more than 20 points under the new lines, and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee began spending in the 5th District Tuesday.
In South Carolina, where a New York Times poll released Wednesday showed Republican Darline Graham barely ahead of Democrat Annie Andrews in the Senate race, Black voters account for roughly 30 percent of the early vote, according to former DNC chair Jaime Harrison.
"There's more of the South in play with this new energized and sort of awakening of that Black and brown coalition," Belcher said. "It is a real challenge to Republicans."
Strategists cautioned that early returns are incomplete. Not every state reports voters' race. Mississippi and Alabama offer no in-person early voting, and a late surge of white voters on Election Day could shrink the Black share of the electorate.