In the Deep South this month, Black voters turned out at about 96% of their 2024 presidential-year level. White and other voters came back at about 71%. That 25-point gap decided where the region went.
The estimate comes from data analyst G. Elliott Morris, who compared county-level ballots cast on Nov. 3 with 2024 across Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi and South Carolina. He found “a direct relationship between the share of a county that is Black and its turnout relative to 2024.” Midterm turnout usually falls off. For Black voters in this region, it barely did.
NPR’s own analysis, published Friday, found the same pattern in six states (those five plus North Carolina). Majority-Black counties turned out at about 85%, compared with about 76% in counties that are majority white and non-Hispanic. In Clay County, Mississippi, turnout rose 17 points over 2024.
The other half of the story is the Republicans who stayed home. In counties Donald Trump won, turnout fell 26% from 2024. In counties Kamala Harris won, it fell 19%. The region swung an average of 22 points toward Democrats, against 14.5 points nationally. Michael Whatley, the Republican nominee for Senate in North Carolina, got 1.25 million fewer votes than Trump did two years earlier, about 43% fewer. NPR counts Democratic Senate flips in North Carolina, South Carolina and Mississippi.
Mississippi shows what the surge was worth. Black voters made up 33% of the state’s ballots, up from 30% in 2024. Morris calculates that with the 2024 electorate, Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith would have won by about 4 points rather than coming close to losing.
This turnout did not happen by accident. NPR ties it in part to the Supreme Court’s May ruling that weakened the Voting Rights Act, which came after Republican legislators in Texas, Florida, Louisiana, Alabama, Tennessee and North Carolina had already redrawn maps that split Black communities across majority-white districts. People were told their votes would count for less. Many answered by casting them in larger numbers.
Andra Gillespie, a political scientist at Emory University, told NPR that compared with 2022, “we saw higher voter turnout amongst African Americans, Latinos and Asian American voters in the state of Georgia.”
A region that tried to shrink Black political power got a Black turnout that nearly matched a presidential year, and the Democrats who now hold the seats it delivered owe something for them. The maps that diluted those votes are still on the books. The next test is whether the new majority fights to repair them before 2028 or lets the people who carried it go back to being taken for granted.
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