U.S. President Donald Trump speaks to members of the media as he arrives at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland, U.S., May 20, 2026. REUTERS Evelyn Hockstein
President Donald Trump and his conservative Supreme Court, which recently gutted the 1965 Voting Rights Act, has in theory disempowered Black voters — but he may actually have stirred them to action.
“Democrats may have been rightly apoplectic with the Supreme Court’s ruling gutting Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act—and the rush to carve up the electoral power of black voters in the South that followed,” wrote The Bulwark’s Lauren Egan on Wednesday. “But in the short term, they have begun to see political opportunity.”
Egan observed that operatives in gubernatorial and congressional elections say Black voters seem to be galvanized by the decision, perceiving it as part of a systematic attempt to disenfranchise them and wanting to reclaim their political agency.
“The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee provided me with a list of eighteen districts they’re eyeing in which black residents make up between 12 and 33 percent of the voting-age population,” Egan wrote. “Some districts on that list, like North Carolina’s 1st Congressional District, are swing seats that Democrats are defending. But others—like Virginia’s 2nd district, Ohio’s 10th, Michigan’s 10th, and North Carolina’s 3rd—are critical pickup opportunities. The DCCC believes that historical turnout among black voters could be the difference in flipping those seats.”
Former Rep. Elaine Luria, who is currently running to reclaim her old congressional seat in Virginia’s second district, told Egan that “People are very upset. This is a district where one in five or four voters are African American. . . . All of this was just a very emotionally charged combination of things, and we’ve certainly been hearing about it everywhere we go.”
In addition to gutting the Voting Rights Act in their ruling for the case Louisiana v. Callais, the Supreme Court has reaffirmed the ruling in cases like Allen v. Milligan. On the latter occasion, as Slate legal analysts Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern argued last week, they further entrenched the precedent that states cannot try to fight racism when drawing up congressional districts.
"Although the supermajority described its handiwork as a straightforward application of April's decision in Louisiana v. Callais," Lithwick and Stern wrote, "Tuesday's decision dramatically expands the scope of that ruling. It is not a mere aftershock from Callais, but a separate earthquake of the same or perhaps even greater magnitude. Following years of twists and turns in the legal system, this case has become the vehicle by which the Court's conservative supermajority not only applies its own brand-new 'updates' to Section 2 of the storied Voting Rights Act of 1965, but also, sweeps what remains of constitutional protections against discriminatory voting practices out the back door."
The legal analysts added, "It commits these crimes in an unsigned, blithely dismissive order that lacks any substantive reasoning, as it pretends to be honoring some jurisprudential lodestar it celebrates as 'our colorblind Constitution.'"