Callais Backlash: The South Votes to Escape the Past

Tuesday night was a historic midterm victory for Democrats, on a scale not seen since the Watergate babies stormed into office. Democrats won in Kansas. They won in Iowa and Ohio. They ousted Susan Collins in Maine. But perhaps most importantly, Democrats won across the South. And they won big. They took Senate seats in North Carolina, South Carolina, and Texas, sweeping statewide races in the Lone Star State. And, as of now, Scott Colom looks like he could become the first Black man elected to the Senate from Mississippi since Reconstruction. There are many reasons for these successes: gas prices, tariffs, the widespread corruption of the Trump administration, ICE abuses. But I want to center what I think this election was most of all in the South: a Callais backlash. 

When the Callais decision came down, demolishing the Voting Rights Act, I wrote here at Liberal Currents that the Supreme Court was enabling a “Jim Crow Southernization of America.” And indeed that’s what Republicans across the country and especially the South hoped for, seizing on the new opportunity to further gerrymander already heavily doctored maps. In states across the former Confederacy, Black districts were eliminated or diluted. 

But this week Democratic voters defied these anti-democratic efforts. Incumbents won re-election and challengers routed Republicans in what turned out to be a dummymander in many places. They also fell just short in a handful of other races, including my own home district here in Arkansas. 

I’ve written more than once about the South’s democratic deficits, its struggle to emerge from the legacies of a slave society and subsequent apartheid system. That’s all true, and Callais does threaten to supercharge these problems. But the pro-democracy people of the South, the Black voters and liberals (but especially the Black voters) who live here, know their history. They know that the days of Selma are not really so long ago. And they delivered a resounding message this November that the South wants to move forward and not backward. 

Democrats' gobsmacking wins in North Carolina, Georgia, and Texas only tell part of the story. Across the South, Democratic support rocketed from what had long been dreadfully low figures. Mississippi swung 23 points to the left compared to 2024, with Alabama swinging 22 points. In the Arkansas Senate race, Republican Tom Cotton held on, but nonwhite voters shifted 20 points toward Democrats and white voters shifted left by 16 points. 

Black voters in particular surged across the region. They increased their turnout and grew already strong support for Democrats into eye-popping numbers. In the Louisiana Senate race, Black voters shifted D+12 from 2024 to vote 94% for the Democrat. In Tennessee’s statewide House vote, Black voters moved 10 points left, voting 89% for Democrats. Black communities, angered at the renewed assault on their voting rights, organized themselves to achieve these results. As The New York Times reported:

The turnout also reflects the community networks that Black candidates and organizers relied on to help reach voters and connect frustrations with federal policy under the Trump administration to the effort to redraw district lines at both the congressional and state level.

In the months before the election, those groups packed campaign events, knocked on doors for long-shot candidates and, perhaps most importantly, rallied first-time or reluctant voters to the polls.

In some of the places where Democrats were unable to secure victory, anti-Black gerrymandering was the obvious culprit. Justin Pearson came within 2 points of defeating Republican Brent Taylor for the newly minted Tennessee Ninth. Chris Jones fell just under 2 points shy of unseating French Hill in the Arkansas Second, where state Republicans carved up heavily Black Little Rock. A victory for Jones would have made him the first Black man elected to Congress from Arkansas—not since Reconstruction, but ever. What happened this week didn’t undo Callais, nor did it magically root out the ingrained illiberal and anti-democratic practices that have plagued the South for its whole history. But it did augur something new. 

As happy as I am about Blexas, I take the most hope from Mississippi, where it looks to my eye like Scott Colom will eventually prevail in a razor-thin and drawn-out vote count. Late on Thursday, it was reported that Colom had flipped Forrest County, named after the former Confederate general who founded the Ku Klux Klan. It’s a powerful bit of symbolism.

Mississippi is in many ways the historical heart of Jim Crow, the site of 656 reported lynchings according to the Equal Justice Initiative. That’s more than any other Southern state. It’s the place of the Emmett Till murder and the killings of civil rights activists James Chaney, Andrew Goodwin, and Michael Schwerner. 

Mississippi is not like Texas, Georgia, or North Carolina. It does not have anything like the Research Triangle or cities like Atlanta and Houston. Jackson, its capital and largest city, had a 2020 population of 153,701 for the city proper. Its metro is under 600,000. Democrats cannot build the sustained wins needed to consign MAGA authoritarianism to the shadows without flipping rural, agricultural places like Mississippi. Mississippi is proof that states like Alabama, Arkansas, Tennessee, and Louisiana can be contested. Pro-democracy Southerners are ready to bring this region fully and finally into the bright sunshine—and, with it, the country.

Featured Image is Scott Colom and Mark Vines