Want more Black representatives? Elect more Democrats.

I ran the numbers on redistricting after the Supreme Court's decision on the Voting Rights Act. The Black representation trade-off is mostly a myth.

We don’t do much legal analysis here at Silver Bulletin. Part of it is that it’s not really my area of expertise. If we’re being honest, it’s also that I tend to find takes on the Supreme Court from the “usual political types” to be annoying, and I don’t want to emulate that.

But we do, of course, perform statistical analysis at Silver Bulletin. And that’s the lens through which I’m going to approach the Supreme Court’s Louisiana v. Callais decision last week, which reduced the power of the Voting Rights Act. Whether the Court “gutted” the VRA or this was more of a compromise is variously interpreted by different legal analysts, and I’m not inclined to referee that debate — although I will say my prior is that the current court seems to have very little interest in putting any constraints on how districts are drawn.

The practical upshot is this: the decision will allow Republicans to district out some Democrats in majority-minority districts that were previously protected by the VRA. Because we’re fairly close to the midterms, some of the impact will come this year and some will come in 2028. After Virginia passed a referendum last month that will allow Democrats to conduct a partisan redistricting of the state, it had actually looked like Democrats might come out ahead from the mid-decade redistricting war touched off by Texas. Now, the map will probably have a slight Republican bias — although probably not enough to overcome what looks like a strong political environment for Democrats.

The other implication is that the redistricting wars will continue in 2028, presumably with both parties getting even more aggressive. Weakening the VRA does provide one silver lining for Democrats, however: they also have their own districts in blue states where there are far more Democratic voters than they need to essentially guarantee winning every election. Many of these districts are majority-minority or close to it. With fewer legal hurdles and a demonstrated willingness to go maximalist, they’re likely to draw much more aggressive maps in states like New York and Colorado prior to 2028. Even in California, where Gavin Newsom’s new map is expected to reduce the number of Republican seats to around 4, Democrats could go further, packing Republican voters into as few as 1-3 districts — or even zero Republicans if they’re willing to tolerate some ugly, spaghetti-string maps.

But Democrats in states like Maryland and Illinois have expressed a different concern: maximally aggressive districting could reduce the number of Black and other minority members in Congress. I’m not here to police this preference as a moral claim. Representation is important. Losing out on seats because you want more representation isn’t a price I’d pay, but my opinion doesn’t count any more than any other citizen’s.

However, I believe the empirical assumptions behind this presumed trade-off are faulty. Before I show you the math, the basic intuition is this: One of the best ways to have more minorities in Congress is simply to elect more Democrats, since Democratic members are far more likely to be members of racial or ethnic minority groups. Almost half of current Democratic members of Congress are Black, Hispanic, Asian American or Native American, as compared to under 10 percent of Republicans.

Post-Callais, redistricting in red, Southern states will almost certainly reduce the number of Black members elected to Congress — and also, of course, the number of Democrats. But this is not necessarily true for blue states. In fact, carefully drawn maps could actually increase minority representation in Congress without any real trade-off in the expected number of Democratic seats. I’ll show you an example of this below.

This will get slightly technical with a bunch of charts, which is why I’ve unfurled the Model Talk banner for the first time in a while. To keep the scope manageable, I’ll focus on Black voters and Black members of the U.S. House in this analysis. (I wouldn’t necessarily assume that other groups follow precisely the same patterns.)

The statistics of Black representation in Congress

James Clyburn, shown here with Gavin Newsom, isn’t likely to be redistricted out in November, but his seat could be targeted by Republicans in future elections. Getty Images.

As of the 2024 election, 60 of the 435 voting members¹ of the U.S. House were Black. That’s 14 percent, actually more than the Black share of the U.S. population.

Black representation in the U.S. Senate has historically been much lower, however, which leads to understandable concern that only electorates with a substantial Black population will routinely elect Black representatives.

But in the House, the pattern is a little bit more linear than you might assume. It’s true that districts with a Black population share of 40 percent or more are highly likely to elect Black members. But there’s no hard lower bound. In districts that are between 20 and 30 percent Black, 27 percent of U.S. House members are Black. There are also 9 Black members from districts with Black population share of 10 percent or lower — but since there are a lot of such districts, that represents only 3 percent of the possible seats.

This also gets complicated by the fact that the Black share of a district is strongly correlated with its tendency to elect Democrats. So let’s look at that too, this time comparing Kamala Harris’s margin in each district against Donald Trump in 2024 to its share of Black representatives.