Democratic Reps. Terri Sewell (left) and Shomari Figures of Alabama appear at a voting rights rally in May on the steps of the state's Capitol in Montgomery, Ala. Jake Crandall/USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect hide caption
A U.S. Supreme Court ruling this year that further weakened the Voting Rights Act raised the possibility of a record drop in Black representation in Congress.
But a Democratic blue wave in the midterm elections helped forestall such a decline for now.
Most notably, Rep. Shomari Figures, a Black Democrat, won reelection despite Alabama's Republican state leaders making his district far more GOP-leaning after the court's decision.
Black representation in the U.S. House is still slated to decline next year, according to an NPR analysis. The incoming Congress is set to include 60 Black House members, including nonvoting members, down from 63 in the current House. That's just one away from the record loss of four Black representatives after the 1876 election, around the end of the Reconstruction era.
In addition to the unprecedented mid-decade redistricting fight, the usual churn of politics, including members retiring or running for higher office , contributed to next year's falling tally.
But high Black voter turnout, especially in the South , fueled Democratic wins that have offset the upcoming decline in the number of Black members of the House.
Voting rights advocates and redistricting experts warn, however, that the redrawing of district lines in the coming years, including after the 2030 census , continues to pose a threat to Black representation in Congress.
Heading into this year's midterms, Figures faced tough odds of keeping his House seat in Alabama, where voting has been racially polarized between a Republican-supporting white majority and a Democratic-supporting Black minority.
Figures joined Congress after the 2024 election as the first Black representative of the state's 2nd Congressional District. As part of a long redistricting battle, a lower federal court had ordered the district to be drawn to include a Black population large enough to have a realistic opportunity of electing their preferred candidate.
For the midterms, though, the Supreme Court's conservative majority allowed Alabama's Republican-controlled legislature to redraw the district. That ruling came weeks after the high court released its landmark decision in Louisiana v. Callais , which weakened the Voting Rights Act's protections against racial discrimination in political mapmaking.
The new lines of Alabama's 2nd District, the lower court had previously found , were "tainted by intentional race-based discrimination" and would "afford Black-preferred candidates zero chance of winning there." Based on the redrawn map, Figures appeared to be on track to leave Congress like Rep. Cleo Fields , the Louisiana Democrat who decided not to seek reelection after the Supreme Court's Callais ruling struck down the Black opportunity district Fields represents.
"It took a remarkable level of turnout in order for [Figures] to be able to win," says Cliff Albright, co-founder and executive director of Black Voters Matter. "Some are calling it a blue wave. For us, particularly here in the South, we're calling it a Black wave because what we saw was the Black electorate's been motivated by the attacks on our voting rights, by the gerrymandering that was taking place."
New voting maps in Texas and Florida led to the undoing of some Black-represented districts, but Democrats' sweeping victories in other states are helping to counteract those losses.
North Carolina's GOP-controlled legislature redrew the district of Rep. Don Davis, one of the state's three Black representatives, but Davis defended his seat. And two incoming Black House Democrats — Cyril Jefferson and LaKesha Womack — flipped districts long represented by white Republicans.
Democratic socialist Reps.-elect Melat Kiros in Colorado and Donavan McKinney in Michigan are also adding to the tally .
And Democrats are set to take control of statewide offices and legislative chambers in Texas and other places that were long-standing Republican strongholds.
By breaking the GOP trifecta in Georgia , for instance, the blue wave lowered the redistricting threat facing the state's congressional districts represented by Black Democrats. Last week, Georgia's outgoing Republican Gov. Brian Kemp announced he will not call a special session on redistricting before handing the office in January to Gov.-elect Keisha Lance Bottoms, who will be the country's first Black woman elected governor .
Rep. Don Davis, a Democrat from North Carolina, speaks at a 2024 campaign event for then-Vice President Kamala Harris in Greenville, N.C. David Yeazell/AP hide caption
But Albright, of Black Voters Matter, sees this year's midterms as unique.
"What happens two years from now or four years from now, where it's not the same wave year, where there's not the same economic realities across the country, where you don't necessarily get the same number of white voters that decide, 'Oh, I guess I can vote for this Democrat'?" Albright says. "It's simply not sustainable for Black voters to be carved up and have our voting power that diluted and for it to not have an impact over a more sustained period of time."
And while midterm successes are leading some Democratic politicians to declare a generational shift in U.S. politics, Kareem Crayton, a redistricting expert and vice president of the Brennan Center for Justice's Washington, D.C., office, is taking a more wait-and-see approach.
"This sounds a lot like what people said in 2009 after a lot of massive change happened, including in the South, with the election of Barack Obama. And it wasn't two years later that people sat in a haze, looking at returns that pretty much wiped out many of those changes that favored Democrats, including Black Democrats," Crayton says. "It could be that this is a start of a generational shift, but it might not be. And if you're thinking about how rules ought to be crafted, I think the cautious approach is always the preferable approach in making certain that rights under the worst conditions are protected as opposed to the most rosy scenarios."
Crayton says current redistricting rules, shaped by the Supreme Court's decisions in Callais and other cases , set up the potential dismantling of more opportunity districts for Black and other racial minority voters in future years. This past year's redistricting rush was limited partly because the Callais ruling came too late for many states to redraw their maps in time for the midterms.
"I think people who are looking at the recent Supreme Court decision around Callais and how it would be implemented always understood that the greatest reaction to that would not be in 2026, but would be 2028, 2030 and onward," says Dedrick Asante-Muhammad, president of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, which tracks Black representation in Congress .
And that reaction is likely to reach beyond Congress , adds Janai Nelson, president and director-counsel of the Legal Defense Fund, which represents a group of Black Louisiana voters in the Callais case.
"When we look at state legislatures, when we look at city councils, when we look at school board maps and we look at any other elected office that relies on districts, those have largely been untouched by Callais up until now," Nelson says. "But as we enter a new state legislative process where these maps may be redrawn, then we might see devastating impact in electability by Black voters across the country and especially in the South."
There's no redistricting, however, for U.S. senators. And on that side of Capitol Hill, Black representation is on the rise. The blue wave of the midterms has lifted the number of Black senators in the new Congress to a historic high of seven. They include Illinois Lt. Gov. Juliana Stratton and fellow Democrat Scott Colom , who is set to become the first Black senator from Mississippi since Reconstruction.
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