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Notes -
In one of the more anticipated decisions of this term, the Supreme Court (6-3 on ideological lines) has struck down the second Louisiana majority-black district. They did not rule categorically that race may not be used as a factor in redistricting decisions, but they did rule that if a redistricting decision could be explained by a partisan gerrymander rather than a racial one, there was no case.
In practice, if taken seriously by lower courts, this pretty much destroys nearly all Section 2 Voting Rights Act cases, because of the strong affiliation between blacks and the Democratic Party.
Why are Southern black voters so uniformly aligned with the Democratic Party? Did something happen? I was led to understand that race relations in the South were actually great and reports of interracial discord were Yankee propaganda.
My understanding is that it is more a Urban vs Rural issue than a race issue, with the current status quo being that the urban populations of cities like Atlanta and Charlotte are distributed across congressional districts in such a way that it allows the Democrats to be competitive across multiple seats. Where as in an alternate map where the urban core was one district and the surrounding suburbs to the east and west were two others, the Democrats would essentially gain a "safe" seat at the expense of no longer being competitive in the others.
See this proposed map that has been making the rounds on X.
https://x.com/NewsWire_US/status/1978495533229428823/photo/1
That doesn't answer the question of why Southern black voters are so strongly aligned with the Democratic Party. Or why Southern white voters are so strongly aligned with the Republican Party - e.g. in 2023 Brandon Presely got 22% of the white vote in MS, which was an exceptionally good performance (Biden got 17% in 2020 and Obama got even less in 2012).
(It must also be noted that the Deep South has a large rural black population - appealing to rural/urban splits doesn't resolve the problem)
Southern Whites vote strongly republican due to the moral majority- this is the moment when the Southern White vote actually became disproportionately republican. We don't see it because Reagan won everywhere but the south was still a dem stronghold into the late eighties.
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