About 9 in 10 Black voters backed the Democratic candidate in their U.S. House race this week, up from about 8 in 10 who voted for Kamala Harris in 2024, according to the AP Voter Poll. The party that just won Congress now has to decide whether to treat that as a gift or a debt.
Harris has answered for herself. “I’ve long believed that we have failed to put the resources into Southern states,” she told The Associated Press on Wednesday, blaming a “misdirected perception of who the people in those states are and what they want.” The South is where most Black Americans live, and where Republicans have worked to shrink Black representation on the map.
Alabama shows what that cost. Republicans cut the Black voting-age population in Rep. Shomari Figures’s district from 48% to 40%. Figures won another term anyway. “People are just tired, man,” he said. “They’re tired of the lack of decency. They’re tired of the lack of integrity. They’re tired of the lack of honesty.”
Sheyann Webb-Christburg, who marched in Selma on Bloody Sunday, saw the turnout and drew her own conclusion. “I think a new movement has started,” she said.
Black men moved the most
In Georgia, about 9 in 10 Black men voted for Keisha Lance Bottoms for governor, the AP Voter Poll found. About three-quarters of Black men had backed Harris in her 2024 loss to Donald Trump. Bottoms will be the state’s first Black woman governor.
LaTosha Brown, co-founder of Black Voters Matter, described voters who read the moment clearly. “We can smell racism. We can see it … we can feel it, and we know how to respond to it,” she said.
The Supreme Court’s Louisiana v. Callais ruling in April gutted what was left of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act and struck down Louisiana’s second majority-Black district. Black voters answered by showing up. Harris’s admission is the party conceding that the people who delivered those votes were not the ones it was funding.
Loyalty at 90% is not a mandate for more of the same. It is an invoice. The new Democratic House can start paying it with a vote to restore the Voting Rights Act, and with sustained money for Southern state parties and Black-led groups, not a rush of it before the next election. The first test comes when the party sets its priorities for the new Congress in January.
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