Latest / Burn the Playbook with Michael Starr Hopkins / Republicans Are Erasing Black Districts Across the South. Democrats Answered With $17,500 a Month.

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Republicans Are Erasing Black Districts Across the South. Democrats Answered With $17,500 a Month. · Burn the Playbook with Michael Starr Hopkins

• 0:00
  Tennessee redrew the map around Memphis, splitting Shelby County among three congressional districts. Residents did not have to move for their political power to move away from them.
• 0:09
  It's October twenty-seventh, twenty twenty-six. Memphis voters encountered the new lines in their August primary. The change reaches beyond one retiring congressman or one election.
• 0:20
  For decades, Tennessee's Ninth District was compact, majority Black, and reliably Democratic. Steve Cohen held it for nearly twenty years.
• 0:28
  The reshaped district starts in the state's northwest corner, runs down the Mississippi River to Memphis, and stretches east toward Nashville. It became Republican-leaning. Cohen chose not to run.
• 0:39
  The legal turn came on April twenty-ninth, when the Supreme Court ruled six to three in a Louisiana redistricting case.
• 0:45
  The new standard required a strong inference that the state intended to diminish minority voters' power. Showing the harmful effect of a map was no longer enough.
• 0:55
  Justice Kagan warned in dissent that the ruling left Section Two of the Voting Rights Act all but a dead letter. The Congressional Research Service also described the shift toward proving intent.
• 1:05
  That changes the fight a voter has to bring to court. Demonstrating that a map weakens Black voting power and demonstrating that lawmakers meant to weaken it are different burdens.
• 1:14
  The injury can be visible while the purpose remains contested. Southern legislatures moved quickly. Florida approved a new congressional map the day of the ruling.
• 1:24
  Louisiana enacted a map on May twenty-ninth, eliminating its second Black-majority district. Tennessee called a special session and split Memphis.
• 1:32
  Among Republican-run Southern states, Georgia alone had ruled out new congressional lines for twenty twenty-six. The ballot survives.
• 1:40
  The ability of a community's ballots to produce representation can still be weakened by how the district is drawn.
• 1:46
  Fifty-six percent of Black Americans live in the South, a share that has grown every decade since nineteen seventy. That makes these lines a question about where people live and whether they can turn votes into seats.
• 1:58
  It also makes the South central to the next story, turnout. No Southern state is majority Black.
• 2:04
  Black turnout alone cannot guarantee a Democratic victory, but losing participation among a party's essential voters can erase a narrow path to winning. Georgia supplied the example in twenty twenty.
• 2:15
  Joe Biden won by about twelve thousand votes, and two Democratic Senate victories followed. In twenty twenty-four, Trump's share of Black voters nationally rose from eight to fifteen percent.
• 2:25
  Pew found that most of the shift came from people staying home rather than switching sides. The available polling offered Democrats opportunities.
• 2:33
  An Atlanta Journal Constitution and University of Georgia poll put Jon Ossoff ahead of Mike Collins, forty-eight to forty. North Carolina polling averages put Roy Cooper about ten points ahead of Michael Whatley.
• 2:44
  Those were polling snapshots, not election results. They suggested a competitive route through the South without making turnout optional. Then came the Democratic Party's investment.
• 2:54
  On August fourteenth, the Democratic National Committee announced what it called a historic commitment to Southern states. Chair Ken Martin said, "The puck is heading to the South."
• 3:03
  The commitment was seventeen thousand five hundred dollars a month per state party, with another five thousand for Republican-controlled states.
• 3:10
  At that higher level, two hundred and seventy thousand dollars a year had to cover an entire state. Six days later, the DNC removed Atlanta from its shortlist for the twenty twenty-eight convention.
• 3:21
  Boston, Denver, and Philadelphia remained. The party gave no reason. Mayor Andre Dickens learned from the press and accused Democrats of abandoning Atlanta, the South, and Black voters.
• 3:32
  Ken Martin said the puck was heading south. Six days later, his party took Atlanta off the ice. A convention would not restore Memphis' district. Neither would a larger check by itself.
• 3:43
  But the choices reveal what voters are being asked to accept. Republican legislatures redraw their representation while Democrats describe a limited investment as historic.
• 3:52
  Watch the maps and the organizing, not just the promises. A party cannot keep asking Black Southern voters to rescue it while treating their home as somewhere else.
• 4:02
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