Black Voters Power Figures’ Win in Redrawn District as Southern Results Send a Message to Democrats

More than six decades after she marched as an 8-year-old girl on Bloody Sunday in Selma, Sheyann Webb-Christburg stood in Montgomery on election night and celebrated what she saw as a turning point. U.S. Rep. Shomari Figures, the Mobile Democrat whose district had been redrawn by Republican lawmakers to make his reelection harder, had just won a second term.

She said she thinks a new movement has started.

Figures’ victory in Alabama’s 2nd Congressional District was one of several wins for Black Democrats across the South in Tuesday’s Nov. 3 midterm election, results that party leaders and activists are reading as a message, both to President Donald Trump and to a Democratic Party that some say has underinvested in Southern voters for years.

A win in a district built to be harder

Webb-Christburg was among the civil rights marchers attacked on the Edmund Pettus Bridge on Bloody Sunday in 1965, months before President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law. On Tuesday night she celebrated a political victory for Black voters and others who refused to accept the recent weakening of that law by the U.S. Supreme Court and by several Southern state legislatures.

Republicans reduced the voting-age Black population of Figures’ district from 48% to 40% under the new map, and the district was one that Trump carried by double digits two years ago. Figures, 41, did not shy away from running and did not dwell on the circumstances while campaigning. Instead, he focused on voters’ economic struggles and broader frustration with the president.

Figures said people are just tired of the lack of decency, integrity, and honesty.

Strong turnout among Black voters helped carry him over his Republican opponent, state Rep. Rhett Marques of Enterprise. As South Alabama News reported, Figures won with 53.8% of the vote to Marques’ 46.2%, according to unofficial returns. His victory was propelled by heavy turnout in Montgomery, a predominantly Black city and Democratic stronghold, where some polling places had lines that stretched for blocks during much of Election Day.

The Voting Rights Act backdrop

The election came months after the Supreme Court’s decision this year that sharply weakened the Voting Rights Act and allowed Republican-led states to redistrict in ways that reduced Black congressional representation. Congressional Black Caucus leaders had warned that they could lose as many as 19 seats, roughly a third of their membership.

With votes still being counted, their potential losses nationally appeared to fall well short of that figure.

Party leaders and activists framed the results as a rejection of Trump and of the court’s ruling. LaTosha Brown, co-founder of Black Voters Matter, said the president’s second-term crackdown on diversity initiatives and his efforts to limit how the federal government tells the nation’s history on race and civil rights also motivated Black voters.

Brown said they can smell, see, and feel racism, and know how to respond to it, adding that their survival has been based on their ability to resist, respond to, and navigate around it.

Harris: “A huge wake-up call”

Former Vice President Kamala Harris, the first Black woman to hold nationwide office, said the results should be a huge wake-up call for the Democratic Party.

Harris said Wednesday that she has long believed they have failed to put resources into Southern states because of a misdirected perception of who the people in those states are and what they want.

A historic night in Georgia

The surge in Black turnout helped Keisha Lance Bottoms become the first Black woman in U.S. history elected governor. Black women also won races in Georgia for attorney general, secretary of state, agriculture commissioner, insurance commissioner, labor commissioner and school superintendent.

Voter survey data showed a striking shift among Black men. About 9 in 10 Black men in Georgia voted for Bottoms, compared with roughly three-quarters who supported Harris in her 2024 presidential loss to Trump. In Clayton County in metro Atlanta, where about two-thirds of residents are Black, Bottoms received almost 86,000 votes, about 13,600 more than Democrat Stacey Abrams, who is also Black, received in her 2022 race for governor.

Bottoms, who did not face redistricting challenges running statewide, also focused her campaign on the economy and on helping voters of every background. But she embraced the significance of the moment, noting that she traces her family lineage to an antebellum plantation in Crawfordville, the Georgia town that produced the vice president of the Confederacy.

She said tonight should remind everyone that no matter what community they come from, Georgia is not defined by one moment or one person, but by all of them, and she will be a governor for everyone in the state.

A broader shift in the numbers

Polling and Election Day results showed an increase in Black turnout and support for Democrats compared with recent election cycles. The change among Black men was large enough to move Black voters overall: about 9 in 10 Black voters supported the Democratic candidate in their local U.S. House race this year, up from about 8 in 10 who backed Harris in 2024.

Support among Black women stayed steadier, largely because they were one of the few groups that did not shift meaningfully toward Trump in 2024.

Elsewhere across the South

North Carolina: U.S. Rep. Don Davis, a Black Democrat, won reelection in a district Republicans had redrawn to favor the GOP.

Mississippi: In the state where Black residents make up a larger share of the population than in any other, Democrat Scott Colom was locked in a razor-thin race with Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith. Mississippi has not sent a new Democratic senator to Washington since the Jim Crow era. Colom said Wednesday that unlike people across the country who might be surprised, their campaign, volunteers, and the people of Mississippi are not surprised.

Florida: Democratic Senate nominee Angie Nixon, a progressive who identifies as a democratic socialist, had been largely written off by national party leaders in a state where Republicans won by nearly 20 percentage points four years ago. She lost by fewer than 3 percentage points.

Louisiana: Trump-endorsed Rep. Julia Letlow, a three-term congresswoman, narrowly won the U.S. Senate race over Democrat Jamie Davis, a Black farmer who began his campaign with almost no statewide profile. In a state Trump carried by 22 points in 2024, Letlow won by fewer than 2 percentage points. Davis raised more than $4 million from individual contributors, but his campaign said it received nothing from the Democratic National Committee or the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. Louisiana Democratic Party Chair Randal Gaines, who said he sought national party money, put it bluntly, saying they were within striking range of victory and additional funding would have guaranteed it.

Tennessee: Not every race ended in celebration. Tennessee Republicans split a congressional district representing Memphis, a majority-Black city, into three. Democratic state Rep. Justin Pearson ran in one of them and conceded a close race that had not yet been called. Amber Sherman, lead Tennessee organizer for Black Voters Matter, which helped educate voters about congressional representation, said they knew from the beginning the race would be extremely close. She said higher turnout across the South showed that Black voters believed the redistricting was wrong and racist.

Abrams: Underinvestment “throttles” the party

Stacey Abrams, who lost two races for Georgia governor, said this year’s results, both the wins and the losses, validate what she has argued for nearly two decades about investing in organizing in Southern and Sun Belt states.

She said of losses in Louisiana, Florida, and Tennessee that they weren’t talking about massive margins, and that when they underinvest, especially in states with significant populations of color, they throttle their own ability to expand the map.

A long arc of representation

After slavery was abolished, Black Americans entered Congress and other elected offices during Reconstruction, but disenfranchisement, violence and discriminatory laws severely eroded that representation for generations. Now, more than 160 years after Reconstruction and 61 years after the Voting Rights Act, Black officials are increasingly winning statewide offices where they represent diverse coalitions of voters.

What it means for Alabama

For south Alabama, the most immediate result is that Mobile will continue to be represented by Figures, a Mobile native, in a reshaped district that stretches from the Port City into Montgomery and the Wiregrass. Nationally, the results are likely to fuel an argument within the Democratic Party over whether money and organizing resources should shift toward Southern states that national leaders have often treated as out of reach.

For Webb-Christburg, who marched in Selma as a child, the meaning was simpler. A new movement, she said, has started.