There was a time, a time not so long ago, in which the entire American electorate were white men. It’s not an exaggeration, and maybe only a tiny embellishment- Only around 95 years ago, Jim Crow laws were still on the books and women weren’t allowed to vote. It would be over 30 years after that until de-segregation really began, over 35 years until the first Civil Rights legislation passed, and 45 years until LBJ pushed through the last of his Civil Rights legislation. Even after 1965, America’s electorate remained majority male and overwhelmingly white for a while. In 1988 the electorate was 85% white. Even in 2024 the electorate is 71% white, and that plays out a lot more drastically than you’d think. Outside of the 148 majority-minority districts, the electorate is probably still 80-85% white nationally. Democrats hold 122 of their 212 seats in those majority-minority districts.

The truth is that Democrats were benefitting from the Voting Rights Act and it’s future interpretations, which forced the creation of majority-minority seats, especially Black seats, to improve representation. If only 29% of the 2024 electorate was non-white, and we assume that’s fairly standard, one could say that just based on math that only around 126 seats should have been majority-minority, or about 22 less than exist in the current House. Given that Democrats were winning 82% of these seats, Democrats were probably winning an extra 18 seats simply because these seats existed. So under the current House math, if we adjusted the number of majority-minority districts down by 22 and made those districts majority white (where Democrats win 31% of seats, almost all of which are in the north and West), Democrats would lose a net of 11 seats. They would have 201 seats, and probably not be in a position to take the House back in 2026, given the success of today’s partisan gerrymanders.

Of course, we have to be realistic about yesterday’s ruling and the direction the courts have been moving since at least Roberts took over, if not frankly earlier. Mandatory majority-minority districts are on their way to extinction, as even just today Louisiana delayed their primaries so they can re-district. Republican states, especially in the South, will begin dividing up deeply blue areas and putting them into seats where they can never win, and you will see majority-minority seats in places like Memphis, New Orleans, and Charlotte begin being cut to pieces, as happened in Nashville already, and states like Mississippi and Alabama drawing Democrats down to one or no seats they should ever win in the House. The reality is that it won’t just be a reduction from 148 to 126 majority-minority seats, but likely much more. The reality is that you should assume they will cut as many seats as you can imagine from a block of seats that they do not win, particularly with no threat of the court stopping them.

Here’s the thing though- it won’t just be Republicans in the South doing this. Democrats are not going to simply surrender and give up the political fight for good, and accept being a 180 seat minority caucus for eternity. So what will they do to fight back? The only thing they’ll think they can do strategically. Whereas you have seats like Dwight Evans in Philadelphia’s PA-3 that are majority-minority and 90% Democratic, they are just one seat. Why leave NJ-10 as one blue seat when you can carve it up and combine it up with NJ-11, NJ-7, and probably a couple more, and have five seats the GOP can’t even win on their best year? Democrats in Blue states will start carving up safe majority-minority seats to gerrymander Republicans completely out of their states forever. And of course, this will make Black, Latino, and Asian populations in those districts less powerful in every one of those new seats than they were in the single old seat. These new seats will have increased white voting power, even if they are white Democrats. Statistics tell us that majority white districts don’t very often (although not never) elect minority members of Congress. And so the Congressional Black Caucus will not only lose members in deep red states that want to get rid of them. They will also lose members in deeply BLUE states and areas that actually don’t mind electing them now. The Democratic Party’s elected members of Congress will increasingly be white, or at a minimum be made up of members whose politics have to cater to their majority suburban white electorates. It will re-center Democratic politics in this way. It will also have a profound impact on Presidential primary math, where a large bulk of delegates are elected at the district level. Increasingly, Black voters will not be as determinative over that process either. The last time Democrats nominated someone with weak or tepid Black support for President was 1988, for reference.

Now, before you go and make a presumption about how Democrats feel about this, I want you to stop for a second and look around. The PodSave America bros spent yesterday crowing about Ken Martin not releasing an autopsy from the 2024 election because they think it will show that Gaza was “the factor” in that election. Janet Mills was forced to drop out of the Senate race in Maine, handing the Democratic nomination there to a white guy who looks and talks like a Nazi. Here in the Lehigh Valley, Elizabeth Warren is swooping in from out of state to endorse a deadbeat who has no core Democratic values. Bernie Sanders has talked more about oligarchy in the last 24 hours than Civil Rights. I think we have to call some things for what they are- Democrats were turning away from their core Civil Rights message anyway. Democrats felt that their two most loyal groups of voters, Black voters and Jewish voters, were too far from the median of the electorate when picking Democratic nominees. Democrats were already moving this way, and the response of some of them to this potentially ground shifting court decision gives away the game- they were ready and fine with this happening. No, they probably don’t love that voting rights are being gutted, but this does make the strategic move they wanted to make a lot easier. Now when they crack many of these majority-minority districts and dilute their voting power, they can say they were forced to by reality, not because it was a choice over the kind of party they wanted. Sure, there will still be some non-white folks winning Democratic elections, a portion of the base feels good about voting that way, but they will be candidates who cater to white liberal/progressive activists, which is exactly what the DC Democratic establishment had already decided was where they wanted to be. Now they can get there without spilling any blood on their own.

Really the only two guardrails on Democratic politics and keeping the party somewhat sane are organized labor (particularly the building trades) and Black and Latino voters. They are the two groups who were the most steadfast behind Joe Biden in the 2020 Primaries and represent the groups that are actually most moderate in the party. One has been shrinking in numbers and has been harmed by numerous Supreme Court decisions in recent years, and now the other is simply going to be bleeding political power from now until 2031, at the least. Then things will begin to settle into the new norm I describe above. Democrats will increasingly begin re-centering white activists over Black and Latino base voters. Messaging will change. The kinds of candidates who win will change. Democrats will look and sound a lot more like Jennifer Welch than Jim Clyburn. The Democratic Party will be fundamentally different.

I’ve been very critical of the Democratic Party in recent years for perhaps leaning too hard on the 48% of the vote we get now. This would be a course correction that would actually make things worse. One of the presumptions many white Democrats have is that if we talked more about class, and less about identity, we’d win more elections. You may have a point about identity costing us as many votes as we get, but the first part is silly and completely misguided. White Republicans only hate one thing more than Democratic minorities- white Democrats. The entire Republican Party at this point splits into two groups- folks that hate everything liberalism/progressivism stands for and want it eradicated, and people who know their party has a good few lunatics, but think the Democratic Party is batshit crazy. None of them are clamoring for the socialist revolution. People voting Republican right now aren’t coming over to the Democratic Party because we re-brand a bit. Here’s the thing though, some of the folks voting for us now will either flip on us or just not vote. It doesn’t take much to insure we’re a minority party for the foreseeable future. One out of every twenty might be enough, 15% is a sure thing. Much of the argument for the party going populist has been that “almost all” of the Democratic voters would stay. Sure, maybe. Almost all means 20 more years of losses. It’s kind of funny, because we last went through a puritanical reformation after Civil Rights passed and we lost the 1968 election. We moved far left/anti-war left in 1972 and got absolutely throttled. In fact we got blown out in every Presidential election but one after 1968 for the next 20 years. And then we moderated towards our current version and won the popular vote in all but two Presidential election for 32 years. When a white dominated electorate is faced with a purely ideological question, why would they pick leftism? Let’s be honest, they never have in our history. Who is to say that some of the *white* Democratic voters we have right now will even like a Euro-populist left political party. Again, we were founded on a tax revolt.

Let’s be honest. Most of the DC Democratic Party thinks after Hillary and Kamala that women who unapologetically talk about Civil Rights and social issues are going to lose. That is the legacy of 2024, and at least for a while it will guide how much of the “braintrust” down there operates. They’ll look for every mediocre, just-good-enough white guy Governor they can find to run in 2028 and try to convince us we want them. Before yesterday, they were likely to lose. Now I can’t predict 2028 for sure, but I think we can see the longer term trend. Perhaps Joe Biden’s administration was not something we could sell to America, so it was bad for the country. Where we’re almost certainly going now though is likely to be just as bad, and have far less positive outcomes. Democrats will become as unserious and unhelpful as the GOP, and probably begin following carnival sideshow freaks in cult like fashion too. In a word, this is the hell we have waited for. Welcome to the show.