|
 |
Hi, y’all. Welcome back to The Opposition, and happy Mother’s Day. After Donald Trump’s first election win, several media outlets committed to hiring reporters who lived outside D.C. This decision arose from a sense that the national media had misunderstood the American electorate in its coverage of the 2016 race, and as a result had missed one of the biggest political stories in a generation.
Fast-forward ten years and you’ll find few newsrooms made good on, or stuck with, that promise.
The Bulwark is different. I’m really proud of our amazing team of D.C. reporters who stay on top of the twists and turns coming out of the White House and the Capitol. But this is an outlet that also values an outside-the-Beltway perspective. We have reporters and producers around the country, including in states where there are big elections this year, like Ohio, Michigan, and Tennessee, where I live. That means that when the Tennessee legislature rushed to pass a new congressional map last week, I was already here covering it. I didn’t have to parachute in to tell this story. And that leads to richer, more nuanced reporting that’s hard to find elsewhere.
I truly believe on-the-ground reporting is an essential part of journalism. And as we’ve seen in the past few days, it’s never been more important to invest in this type of work. The support of our Bulwark+ members makes it possible, and I’d like to ask you to join their number. You’ll get access to all our locked content and be able to join in our comments sections—but you’ll also have the satisfaction that comes with supporting ambitious, independent journalism. Sign up today and your first two weeks are FREE:
–Lauren
A Dem Survival Plan for the Southern Apocalypse
There are no easy paths forward after SCOTUS gutted the Voting Rights Act.
|
| ||||||||||||
 |
WHEN STATE REP. JUSTIN JONES went to the House floor in Nashville last week to speak against Republican plans to redistrict the state, he compared his GOP colleagues to some of the nation’s most abhorrent segregationists.
“You will be in the history books with Bull Connor and George Wallace. And your children will be ashamed of where you stand by presenting these maps,” said Jones.
He wasn’t done. Outside the State Capitol, Jones carried around a sign that read “Fight Against White Supremacy!!” Later in the week, he stood in the halls of the building burning a paper image of the Confederate flag while chanting: “We will not go back.”
Jones’s anger was righteous and understandable and, for his supporters, utterly justifiable. What it was not, in the most immediate terms at least, was effective.
Republicans moved aggressively last week to carve up Memphis’s majority-black congressional district, which will almost certainly leave black Tennesseans without a voice in Congress for the first time in decades.
Tennessee is among a handful of Southern states that have rushed to carve up the electoral power of black voters following the Supreme Court’s April 29 ruling gutting Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. While the response has been shock, anger, and—increasingly—despair among Democrats, a harsh reality is sinking in: It’s going to take more than impassioned appeals to morality and history, like Jones’s, to claw back power in the South.
“It probably fundamentally forces a recalibration of what the Democratic coalition, Democratic electorate looks like in these states,” said Zac McCrary, an Alabama-based Democratic pollster. “It really requires Democrats to think about things and go back to the drawing board in a way that we haven’t had to do in quite some time.”
To get a sense of what that trip to the drawing board will look like, I spent the past few days talking to Democratic operatives and officials in several Southern states, some part of this year’s Republican redistricting wave, others already severely gerrymandered: Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, and Louisiana. The question I asked them was straightforward: How do Democrats compete for House seats in this region when the districts have been drawn by Republicans to overwhelmingly favor their own side?
Although there’s still uncertainty in some of these states about what the final congressional lines will look like, there was widespread agreement among the Democrats I spoke with that their party would have to do things drastically differently.
It starts with the candidates they recruit to run. Operatives repeatedly told me that the party needs to embrace people with political views on issues—whether it be guns, immigration, or various social and cultural topics—that fall substantially outside the boundaries of the national Democratic mainstream. They stressed that this will mean ditching purity tests and elevating people who aren’t hyperpartisan or highly ideological. And, they said, this shift can’t just happen at the state level: It will require buy-in from the national party at large.
“We have to build a broader coalition in all these places, and we have to create space for candidates like John Bel Edwards,” said Steve Schale, a Democratic operative who has worked on races across the Southeast, referring to Louisiana’s former governor. “That’s going to be a huge test for the national party—whether we are willing to not only create the space for those candidates within the coalition, but also create the space in our rhetoric, in our branding as a larger party, to give those people a chance to win.”
Edwards kept coming up in my conversations as the archetypal candidate who could succeed in some of these new districts. A conservative Democrat, Edwards, whose military and rural background had strong regional appeal, won back-to-back terms in 2015 and 2019 in part by taking pro-gun and anti-abortion positions. Some combination of these factors let him make inroads with white voters.
But “inroads,” here, is a relative term. Edwards won roughly 30 percent of the white vote. While that might be good enough to win statewide in a state with a 33 percent black population, it won’t be nearly enough to carry—let alone compete—in these newly gerrymandered congressional districts.