Black women voted for Democratic House candidates at 93% last week, according to the national exit poll. Now the Black members of that new majority are saying out loud what they expect in return.
Speaking at the AfroTech conference in Houston, Rep. Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts said the party owes Black voters reciprocity. What happens at the ballot box, she said, is “a down payment,” as Blavity reported. Black voters overall backed Democrats at about 90%, and Black men at 86%, according to the same polling.
Pressley named two bills. One is H.R. 40, the reparations commission bill she leads. It has been introduced in Congress for decades and has never reached a House floor vote. The other is the AI Civil Rights Act, which she wrote with Rep. Yvette Clarke of New York. It would bar companies from deploying biased algorithms and require more transparency about how they work. Clarke chairs the Congressional Black Caucus.
Clarke told the audience Black voters “knew the assignment” and said the Caucus needs a standing structure that reaches “every sphere of influence” in civil society, as Blavity summarized her remarks.
Rep. Steven Horsford of Nevada, a former Caucus chair, was more specific about the order of business. The first bill, he said, will address the “affordability crisis.” He called for “an affirmative agenda” built on opportunity, wealth and small business.
Affordability is the right fight. Black households already spend a larger share of their income on power, and Affordable Care Act premiums are rising 13% for people who were uninsured at higher rates to begin with. But a party that treats it as the whole agenda would be making a familiar trade. It would spend Black votes on relief that everyone shares and leave the bills that name the harm for a later session that never comes.
Pressley put the point in terms of who decides. “The people closest to the pain should be the closest to the power, driving and informing the policymaking,” she said at AfroTech. Black women are now the people closest to the power that put Democrats in the majority. The test is whether H.R. 40 gets a committee hearing, and the AI bill a vote, before the party cuts its first big deal.
The new Congress is sworn in in January.
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