The next House of Representatives will have at least 60 Black members, including nonvoting delegates, down from 63 today. NPR reported the count Thursday, and it is a loss that could have been far worse. The only bigger one on record is four seats, after the 1876 election, when Reconstruction ended.
The cause is the Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais in late April, which weakened Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act and cleared the way for Republican legislatures in the South to redraw maps that had given Black voters a chance to elect their own representatives. Retirements and members running for higher office added to the toll. The Congressional Black Caucus warned after the ruling that 19 of its 62 members could lose their seats through the 2028 cycle.
Before the election, the forecasts were grimmer. The Hill reported in the spring that Congress was on track to lose more than a dozen Black members across both parties. Black voters, especially in the South, turned out in numbers that changed that, and a Democratic wave carried the party to control of both chambers.
Alabama is the clearest case. Republicans redrew Shomari Figures’s district, and he won it anyway. “It took a remarkable level of turnout in order for [Figures] to be able to win,” Cliff Albright of Black Voters Matter told NPR. In North Carolina, Rep. Don Davis held his seat, and two new Black Democrats, Cyril Jefferson and LaKesha Womack, flipped districts that Republicans had held. Melat Kiros in Colorado and Donavan McKinney in Michigan also won. In Louisiana, Rep. Cleo Fields did not seek reelection after the map changed.
The Senate went the other way. Juliana Stratton in Illinois and Scott Colom in Mississippi lift the number of Black senators to a record seven.
That is the good news, and it carries a condition. A district a Black candidate can win only when Black voters turn out at record levels depends on that effort every two years, and the law that once protected those maps no longer does.
“It could be that this is a start of a generational shift, but it might not be,” Kareem Crayton of the Brennan Center for Justice told NPR about the gains.
Three seats is not a victory. It is what Black voters salvaged from a ruling that made them work this hard to keep what they had. Democrats now control the House and the Senate, and they owe those voters a vote to restore what Callais took away. Redistricting experts warn that the maps will be redrawn again after the 2030 census.
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