Dem
47
GOP
53
As an example of the fine line Democratic leaders have to walk, consider the ramifications of the Supreme Court's decision to gut the remaining bit of the Voting Rights Act. Black leaders, especially in the South, are feeling isolated. Party leaders are focused on swing House districts and states and 2028 presidential hopefuls are in early states, of which only one (South Carolina) has a large Black population. Howard Dean's 50-state strategy never got going, and instead, Democrats have something like a 30-state strategy, where the party apparatus has been left to wither and die in many red states, especially in the South.
Some Black leaders in the South are despairing. Florida House Minority Leader Fentrice Driskell (D) said: "Republicans in the Legislature and the Supreme Court have said that it's okay to turn back the clock and reverse civil rights progress in this country. They're basically giving these Southern states what they have consistently and persistently wanted, which is to suppress Black voices." Some people are more explicit as to where the problem is. Yolanda Renee King, the granddaughter of Martin Luther King Jr., said: "The Democrats sort of allowed for this behavior to regularly happen," referring to the Democrats' failure to pass the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Act when they had the trifecta.
But part of the problem is internal. The 62-member Congressional Black Caucus, which is entirely Democratic, has been focused on swing seats. A leader of its PAC, Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-NY), said: "The PAC has always been focused on electing Democrats in tough seats so that we can reclaim the majority. That goal, that focus, has not changed." Note that he said nothing about holding Black seats or supporting Black challengers to Republicans. In most cases, it is supporting white candidates who have a good chance of holding a tough blue district or flipping a marginal red one. The CBC's priority is maximizing the number of Democrats in the House, not the number of Black Democrats.
Another problem for Southern Black lawmakers is that the Democrats' response to the Supreme Court VRA decision is still murky. Some Democrats want to focus on offense and gerrymander the hell out of blue states like California and New York. Others want to focus on going to court to try to reverse the damage, at least in the short run. If the Democrats end up picking the former strategy, the resulting maps will be ugly as sin and will undoubtedly break up majority-minority districts and put some of the Black voters in previously red districts in order to elect a (white) Democrat there. Still, it is a hard sell to Black lawmakers to have to tell them that for the overall good of Black people, they have to give up their jobs to maximize the number of Democrats in the House, even if they are all white Democrats. In this model, the only Black Democrats left in the House will be those individual candidates strong enough to win in a largely white district. For example, Rep. Joe Neguse (D-CO), who is Black, represents CO-02, a D+20 district around Boulder that is 76% white, 14% Latino, and 1% Black. But there aren't a lot of Black representatives from enormously white districts. That requires either a very talented candidate or an extremely liberal district or both. (V)