Debbie Wasserman Schultz and the Democrats’ New Voting Math

Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s reelection bid in a historically black congressional district in Florida is spotlighting a new electoral dynamic following the Supreme Court’s ruling against racial gerrymanders. Mrs. Schultz faces what NBC News calls a “backlash” for running in the district. One of her rivals in the Democratic primary, Elijah Manley, laments that “I didn’t think a white Democrat would be the one to take away a black seat.”Mrs. Schultz’s choice of where to run comes amid a redistricting wave ahead of the midterms. New voting maps “forced Democratic candidates in Republican-led states to make rushed decisions about where to run based on cold electoral math,” the Times reports, “as the number of winnable districts has shrunk.” Yet the racial undertones in Mrs. Schultz’s race suggest that the bonds between black voters and the Democratic Party could be weakening.The context for this shift is the high court ruling in Louisiana v. Callais against race-based gerrymanders. Republican lawmakers are taking advantage of the chance to make new maps that give their party an edge. Liberals balk that this means “disenfranchising black voters with impunity,” as David Cole writes in the New York Review of Books, suggesting a breach of the Voting Rights Act. Yet this view reflects a misreading of the landmark civil rights law.The Voting Rights Act, after all, was designed to remove hurdles, like literacy tests, to casting ballots. It was never meant to set up a de facto quota system in congressional delegations. In 1982 Congress made this explicit by amending the act to say that “nothing” in the law “establishes a right to have members of a protected class elected in numbers equal to their proportion in the population.” The talk of Jim Crow being revived by Callais falls wide of the mark.Critics of Callais overlook, too, how the GOP had embraced the use of racial gerrymanders in the early 1990s, helping the party recapture Congress in 1994. “Republican state legislators” across the South, columnist Michael Barone reports, had “teamed with black Democrats to create black-majority districts, leaving adjacent seats shorn of heavily Democratic precincts.” Such cynical arrangements are no longer an option after the Callais ruling.Liberals like the Times’ Nikole Hannah-Jones warn that Callais means “the largest decimation of black political power since the fall of Reconstruction.” Yet nothing keeps black voters from casting ballots, and they will remain as potent a bloc as ever. A shuffling of district lines could prove a moment for blacks to weigh whether their votes are being in effect taken for granted by the Democrats, a question Dan Balz not long ago asked in the Washington Post. “Democrats count on huge black turnout, but has the party delivered in return?” read the headline over the Post’s story. In many cases, Mr. Balz reported, the answer has been no. That could change, though, as more black voters find themselves in racially mixed districts after Callais. If the black vote comes back into play, Republicans will have a chance to try to reconnect with a demographic bloc that was once synonymous with the GOP.Biracial voting blocs were a hallmark of the Reconstruction-era South, historian C. Vann Woodward chronicled, especially the “old Populist coalition of blacks with white workers and small farmers.” As late as the 1960s, Jackie Robinson was a reminder of the strong black contingent within the GOP. If the Callais ruling invites a loosening of the Democratic Party’s hold on black voters, Mrs. Schultz’s race could prove a harbinger to watch.

Debbie Wasserman Schultz and the Democrats’ New Voting Math

Debbie Wasserman Schultz and the Democrats’ New Voting Math

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