Democrats are about to lose a key piece of their electoral power and won’t be able to win it back with gerrymandering, a new analysis warned.
“The loss of Black representation in the South cannot be offset with a few more liberal white representatives from Wisconsin,” Elie Mystal, The Nation’s justice correspondent, wrote in a Friday piece. “The inability of Black people in Memphis to elect a fighter like Justin Pearson is not mitigated by spitting out another corporate Democrat from Hoboken.”
Mystal examined the electoral landscape in the wake of the Louisiana v. Callais Supreme Court decision that gutted protections for Black voters’ voting power and has sparked a redistricting war, especially in the South.
“Republicans are aggressively moving to gerrymander away the Congressional Black Caucus and eliminate Black voting power in red states,” Mystal wrote. “It is largely too late for the Democratic Party to stop this race toward the racist bottom.”
Democrats adding seats in blue states is “doable,” Mystal continued, but “I don’t want people to miss what is still being lost even if Democrats can pull off these gerrymanders.”
The problem is “You can’t restore that power by creating new districts where very few Black people live,” Mystal explained.
He added that Black “interests cannot be adequately served solely by white Democrats gerrymandered into suburban districts in the North. Some of those interests cannot even be adequately served by Black Democrats elected from majority-white districts.”
The post Dems warned they’re about to lose something no gerrymander can ever replace appeared first on Raw Story.
