The number of Black representatives from the South is set to plunge after the Supreme Court weakened the Voting Rights Act. So one might assume that minority representation in Congress had always depended on what the court called “race-based redistricting” — drawing districts with the express intent of creating a Black or Hispanic majority.
But that assumption would be wrong. A race-neutral, nonpartisan redistricting process could create just as many House districts where the candidate preferred by nonwhite voters — usually a Democrat — would be favored to win.
One way to tell whether nonwhite voters would lose their power in that kind of redistricting process is by looking at computer simulations of hypothetical congressional districts. The algorithms, first designed by a team of political scientists in 2022, try to draw compact districts that respect county and municipal lines. After the Supreme Court weakened Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, we reran the simulations without consideration of race. Using the algorithms to draw new districts thousands of times with those compactness constraints can give a good sense of what neutral maps could look like.
And the simulations yield roughly as many so-called minority-opportunity districts across the South as existed under the Voting Rights Act.
In other words, the act didn’t create minority representation that couldn’t have existed otherwise. Nonpartisan, race-neutral redistricting would still preserve many such districts, even if in a different configuration:
In this respect, redistricting is quite different from other cases where the court has required a colorblind process, like its ruling against affirmative action. In those cases, colorblind standards like the SAT or G.P.A. were thought to put Black and Hispanic applicants at a disadvantage. But a colorblind standard for redistricting would not necessitate a large reduction in Black and Hispanic representation.
These districts are about to disappear anyway, because the Supreme Court has allowed the dismantling of minority-opportunity districts if it’s done for a partisan purpose. Most nonpartisan redistricting reforms could restore these opportunities, even without consideration of race.
Memphis is an excellent example. In the wake of the Supreme Court’s Voting Rights Act decision, Tennessee became the first state to eliminate a majority Black district when it broke up the district around Memphis. It’s true that the Voting Rights Act had protected this district, but a majority Black district would most likely exist even with traditional, colorblind redistricting standards, which call for compact districts that limit the number of times that counties and municipalities are split. By these standards, one would expect a district contained entirely within Memphis’s Shelby County, which is majority Black and holds enough people to form a congressional district.
Out of 5,000 simulations, more than 99 percent create a plurality or majority Black district, anchored in Memphis, even though these simulations are blind to race and even though they’re not strictly constrained by traditional redistricting standards.
You can see variations of those simulated districts here:
Looking across the Deep South, the simulations suggest that most — but not all — of the districts currently drawn to represent Black voters could continue to provide them with a meaningful opportunity to elect their preferred candidates. Unlike the district in Memphis, most of the districts created by the simulations are not majority Black. Instead, they tend to be opportunity districts — where Black voters represent a majority of Democratic primary voters and where Democrats have the edge in the general election. On average, these hypothetical districts are 41 percent Black and would be highly likely to elect Black representatives, even if they’re not majority Black.
Alabama offers an example of what this might look like. For decades, Alabama had a majority Black district stretching from Birmingham to the Black Belt (originally named for its fertile soil). This heavily Democratic, majority Black district would be pretty unlikely without a race-conscious approach.
But the simulations suggest that even without race-conscious maps, Alabama would probably have at least one district where Black voters would have the opportunity to elect the candidate of their choice. The most likely district would be based in Birmingham’s Jefferson County, which contains nearly enough people to form a congressional district. The county is 42 percent Black and voted for Kamala Harris by 11 points in 2024. Black voters in this district would represent the preponderance of the Democratic primary electorate, and the Democratic candidate would be favored in the general election. The simulations create similar opportunities around other medium-sized metropolitan areas with significant Black populations, like Columbia, S.C., or Greensboro, N.C.
There are cases where race-blind mapmaking is much less likely to produce a Black opportunity district. In general, the simulations are less likely to create rural Black districts that lean Democratic, including Louisiana’s Sixth — the district at issue in the Supreme Court’s Voting Rights Act decision. It doesn’t mean these districts are impossible; they regularly occur in the simulations, as there are many compact areas in the rural South where Black voters represent a majority or near majority. But the Voting Rights Act was able to compel the specific combination of those areas to create a district; race-neutral redistricting will not always do so.
There’s another situation where race-blind mapmaking is less likely to produce a Black opportunity district: racially diverse metropolitan areas, like the suburbs around Atlanta. The simulations are much likelier to draw different racial groups together into so-called coalition districts: majority-minority districts where no single nonwhite racial group is predominant.
This can yield even more majority-minority districts than were previously required under the Voting Rights Act. As previously interpreted, the law required the creation of majority-minority districts in instances where a single racial group represented a compact majority. In today’s increasingly diverse country, there are many majority-minority areas where the computer simulations draw a minority opportunity district that wasn’t required by the Voting Rights Act because no single minority group represents a majority.
Taken together, the colorblind simulations can yield as many minority-opportunity districts across the South as existed in 2024.
Of course, the actual result of the court’s decision will look nothing like these simulations. But that’s because states will be ignoring traditional redistricting standards, not because the standards themselves put minority voters at a particularly great disadvantage. States that followed those standards could create a number of minority-opportunity districts without consideration of race at all.
Nate Cohn is The Times’s chief political analyst. He covers elections, public opinion, demographics and polling.
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