A VoteHub analysis found Republican redistricting efforts after the Supreme Court gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act in late April have driven higher Black turnout in southern counties and pushed those counties further left. VoteHub tracked 78 Black belt counties and reported that all but one shifted left in partisan turnout compared with 2024, with majority-Black counties voting after the Louisiana v Callais decision showing a surge in participation. Republican legislatures in Louisiana, Florida, Tennessee and Alabama quickly moved to redraw congressional maps, Louisiana disregarded earlier votes until it could redraw maps, and the Mississippi governor has urged a pre-midterm redraw. Alabama produced some of the largest effects: Greene County surpassed 50 percent turnout in the primary, a turnout differential of 27.6 percentage points, and Bullock, Lowndes, Macon and Montgomery counties recorded significant turnout gains. In Louisiana Black voters made up 35.7 percent of the primary electorate despite constituting 32.1 percent of the population, and 30.9 percent of Black voters cast ballots in the primary, 3.2 points higher than white voters. States that held primaries before the Callais decision, including Mississippi and North Carolina, saw majority-Black counties outpace statewide turnout by only 1.1 points on average.
