A blue tsunami led by Black voters washes over the South : NPR

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Tuesday’s dramatic midterm results have transformed the electoral map, ensuring the future path to power for Democrats and Republicans alike must run through the South.

Black voter turnout surged in states like Louisiana and Georgia, as Democrats flipped Senate seats in North Carolina, South Carolina and Texas. Mississippi is too close to call.

Republican-led efforts to redraw House districts to gain more favorable districts in places like Alabama, North Carolina, Texas and Florida backfired, with Democrats poised to net several seats in the region.

In several states, the margins at the top of the ticket were so large that the blue tsunami carried down ballot races along with it, flipping several state legislative chambers and statewide offices along the way.

Even in contests where Democrats ultimately did not prevail, the millions of dollars of investment from both sides and the wide-ranging repudiation of the Trump administration from every demographic group highlight the South’s important role in control of Congress and the White House in future election cycles.

Redistricting

In the aftermath of a Supreme Court ruling earlier this year that gutted part of the Voting Rights Act, Republican-led Southern states rushed to redraw House maps to create additional seats that would better withstand a midterm environment where voters punished the party in power.

They included changes in Tennessee that split Memphis into three districts (and where Democratic state Rep. Justin Pearson is within a few thousand votes of winning), a redraw of several Alabama districts that sought to unseat Rep. Shomari Figures (who won by nearly 8 points in the new Trump +14 configuration) and a target of nine seats in Texas and Florida.

As of Wednesday night, Republicans have won one of them, according to a race call by the Associated Press.

Before Election Day, there were signs that the ruling, along with the war in Iran, rising costs, concerns about corruption with the Trump administration and other top issues would serve as a motivator for turnout among Black voters.

In primaries held after the ruling, Black voter participation soared. Ashley Kennedy Shelton with the Louisiana-based Power Coalition for Equity and Justice previously told NPR that the court decision was “personal” for Black voters.

“Everybody’s spending more money on their electricity bills, their gas bills, their food bills,” she said. “All of these different things are really personally impacting voters. And I think that for all the folks that used to say, ‘I don’t do politics!’ I think they realize that politics is absolutely doing them, and they have to get involved.”

In South Carolina, where Democrat Annie Andrews flipped a U.S. Senate seat, the state saw record voting for a gubernatorial election year, driven in part by elevated Black turnout. It’s a similar story in Louisiana, where Democrat Jamie Davis narrowly lost to Sen.-elect Julia Letlow by less than two percent in a state Trump won by more than 15 points in 2024.