After the Supreme Court's April 29 ruling struck down Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, Republican legislatures across the South moved within days to redraw congressional maps. Tennessee Republicans carved Memphis's majority-Black congressional district across three separate districts — a move that will, as the Bulwark reports, likely leave Black Tennesseans without a voice in Congress for the first time in decades.
Said Derrick Johnson, president of the NAACP: "In many Southern states, party affiliation is simply a proxy for race, and everyone knows that."
Said Rickey Cole, former chair of the Mississippi Democratic Party: "We haven't had boots on the ground among white voters in Mississippi for probably close to two generations."
The speed with which Southern legislatures moved after the Court’s April 29 ruling should not have surprised anyone who knows this history. The pattern is almost mechanical: a federal protection is weakened or withdrawn, and state governments act within the opening before any remedy can be organized.
It happened in 1876, when the Compromise ending Reconstruction withdrew federal troops and within a decade the Mississippi Plan — poll taxes, literacy tests, grandfather clauses — had effectively nullified the Fifteenth Amendment across the former Confederacy. It happened again in 2013, when Shelby County v. Holder gutted the preclearance requirement of Section 5. Within hours of that ruling, Texas announced it would implement a voter ID law that had been blocked under preclearance. Within months, North Carolina passed what a federal appeals court later called a law that “target[ed] African Americans with almost surgical precision.”
The 2025 ruling on Section 2 is the third leg of that stool. The Court has now removed both the prophylactic tool (preclearance) and the remedial tool (Section 2 litigation). What remains of the VRA is largely ceremonial.
The carving of Memphis across three districts is not an improvisation. It is a textbook application of “cracking” — a technique as old as partisan cartography itself, refined by Southern Democrats against Black voters after Reconstruction and now applied by Southern Republicans in the post-Shelby, post-Section-2 landscape. The goal is identical across 150 years: dilute the concentration of a disfavored electorate until no single district can produce a representative of their choosing.
Representative Justin Jones, on the Tennessee House floor, invoked Bull Connor and George Wallace. The historical analogy is pointed. Connor and Wallace were also operating within what they considered the law of their moment — until federal intervention changed the terms. The difference now is that the federal intervention has run in the opposite direction.
Democrats facing these new maps are rediscovering a tension that has recurred throughout the party’s history in the South: the gap between a national coalition built on civil rights commitments and the electoral arithmetic of majority-white rural districts.
John Bel Edwards — the Louisiana Democrat who won back-to-back gubernatorial races in 2015 and 2019 by taking pro-gun and anti-abortion positions and winning roughly 30 percent of the white vote — comes up repeatedly in the reporting as the model. But as Alabama pollster Zac McCrary notes, even Edwards-level white crossover, sufficient to win statewide in a state with a 33 percent Black population, is not sufficient math for a gerrymandered congressional district engineered to be 70-plus percent white Republican.
The harder truth, which Cole states plainly, is that Democrats have not built organizing infrastructure among white rural voters in Mississippi “for probably close to two generations.” Infrastructure does not appear on a six-month timeline. The party is being asked to rebuild in terrain it abandoned during the same decades it was relying on VRA protections and majority-minority districts to produce its Southern House seats.
Six states — Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, and Louisiana — are in various stages of post-ruling redistricting. Final congressional lines are not yet set in all of them. The window between now and the 2026 filing deadlines is when the permanent damage will be measured.
The candidate recruitment question — whether the national Democratic Party will make space for Edwards-style candidates who deviate sharply from national party positions on guns, abortion, and immigration — is not an abstract ideological debate. It is a structural question about whether a party that has outsourced its Southern representation to federal voting rights law for sixty years can rebuild a political operation in the absence of that law.
The Court has, for the third time in fifty years, handed that question back to the states. The states have already answered.