Black voters cast more than 34% of Louisiana’s early ballots in the midterms, a record for a congressional election in the state, as Capital B reported. They did it after the Supreme Court cleared the way for Republicans to eliminate one of the state’s two majority-Black congressional districts.
That loss pushed Democratic Rep. Cleo Fields to forgo reelection. The voters in his old district showed up anyway.
Louisiana was not alone. The NAACP counted Black early and absentee voting in Texas up 53% from the same point in the 2022 midterms, driven by in-person early voting.
The result at the ballot box was lopsided. About 91% of Black voters backed Democrats in U.S. House races and 8% backed Republicans, according to figures from the New York Times that Capital B cites. That is a 10-point move toward Democrats from 2024.
In Georgia, about nine in 10 Black women voted for Keisha Lance Bottoms, who became the first Black woman elected governor in the United States. In Texas, Democrat James Talarico won a Senate seat, the first statewide Democratic win there in more than 30 years.
The wins were not universal. In Florida, state Rep. Angie Nixon lost her Senate race to Sen. Ashley Moody by 2.9 points. In Louisiana, Democrat Jamie Davis ran a strong Senate campaign and lost. Turnout was not always enough.
“The story of this election is not just about who won. It’s about the Black wave of voters who understood what was at stake and made their voices heard,” said Dominik Whitehead, the NAACP’s chief of field, membership growth and unit sustainability.
Capital B’s reporting names the voters behind the numbers. Sonya Knox, 65, of Baton Rouge, said she voted to protect voting rights. Niecy Rahming, 95, of Miami, was lifted from her daughter’s car into a wheelchair so she could vote with 10 minutes to spare, hoping to help elect Florida’s first Black senator.
Republicans bet that erasing a Black district would quiet the voters in it. In Louisiana, those voters answered with a record. The next test is already running in Mississippi, where Democrat Scott Colom leads a Senate race by about 2,000 votes while lawyers for both parties fight over the ballots still to be counted.
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