Mid-decade redistricting battles are having an outsized impact on Black voters, who are more likely to have been shifted into new congressional districts in order to create more safe seats for Republicans ahead of the US midterm elections.

By Gregory Korte In six states where Republican legislatures have drawn new districts, Black voting-age residents were as much as 59% more likely to be moved than similar Whites, and as much as 41% more likely to be moved than the statewide average.

Those numbers, from a Bloomberg News analysis of congressional maps, show the new realities of political power after a Supreme Court ruling earlier this year largely gutted protections for majority-minority districts under Voting Rights Act of 1965.

For decades, courts interpreted that law to mandate the creation of such districts in places where a minority group was large and densely packed enough to form a majority, and where White voters consistently voted as a bloc to defeat the minority group’s preferred candidates.

The law led to a flourishing of Black representation that had been largely suppressed since the post-Civil War Reconstruction Era. Since 1965, the number of Black members of Congress has risen from six to 69.

But in April, the US Supreme Court threw out a Louisiana map that created a second majority-Black district in the state, calling it “an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.”The Voting Rights Act, Justice Samuel Alito wrote in Louisiana v. Callais, “does not intrude on States’ prerogative to draw districts based on nonracial factors, including to achieve partisan advantage.”So a handful of GOP-controlled states, at the urging of President Donald Trump, have sought to create more safe Republican seats by splitting up Democratic districts.

In many cases, those districts were majority-minority districts previously protected by the Voting Rights Act. Geographically Concentrated“That’s the game that’s being played,” said Christine LeVeaux-Haley, a political science professor at the University of Houston. “They know what they’re doing, saying that it’s partisan.”In most places, Black and Democratic are nearly synonymous, she said. And because Black voters tend to be geographically concentrated, a legacy of decades of housing discrimination, it is relatively easy to draw maps that push large swaths of them into new districts.

Having fewer majority-Black districts tends to diminish turnout, with some research finding that both Black and White voters show up in higher numbers for each Black Democrat on the ballot.

The change has already ended the career of Representative Al Green, a Black Democrat whose 9th Congressional District in Texas was combined with the 18th District held by another Black Democrat, Christian Menefee. That forced Green and Menefee into a Democratic primary that Menefee won.

Texas’ Republican mapmakers used a tactic known as “packing” to dilute Democratic voting power. After the map change, the Black population in the 18th District went from 33% to 43% Black, and 70% to 78% Democratic, according to an analysis by the Redistricting Data Hub, a nonpartisan anti-gerrymandering group. That left fewer Democrats to vote in nearby Republican-dominated districts. Cracking Memphis Perhaps the starkest example comes from Tennessee. The day after the Supreme Court decision, Trump spoke with Republican Governor Bill Lee to urge him to eliminate the majority Black Memphis-area district.

Soon, Lee signed into law a new map that relied on another tried-and-true method that had been illegal when used to dilute the voting power of racial minorities: “Cracking.”The state’s 9th district — representing Memphis and surrounding Shelby County — had a voting-age Black population of 59%. The legislature split those voters three ways, creating new districts where the voting-age Black population is 27%, 26% and 31%.

Tennessee House Speaker Cameron Sexton, who sponsored the new maps, did not respond to a request for comment. But an expert witness hired by the state to defend a federal lawsuit challenging the maps said there was no evidence that the maps intentionally targeted Black voters, even if they were more likely to be moved.

“Those consequences are also what one would expect from a statewide partisan plan designed to convert an eight-Republican-district map into a nine-Republican-district map,” wrote Michael Barber, a Brigham Young University professor.

A three-judge panel agreed, dismissing a lawsuit this month brought by the Tennessee State Conference of the NAACP, a civil rights group.

“Race and politics are certainly entangled in this context,” the judges wrote. “But we presume legislatures act in good faith when they redistrict.”But states where Republican legislatures didn’t redraw the lines this election cycle saw fewer Black voters moved. Black voters in California, which engineered a voter-approved Democratic gerrymander to counteract Texas, were 34% less likely than White voters to change districts. And in Ohio, where maps were redrawn by a bipartisan commission, Black voters were 66% less likely to move.

Moving voters from district to district can have real impacts on how they cast their votes — especially among Black voters. A 2012 study by political scientists Danny Hayes and Seth McKee found that voters drawn into a new congressional district were more likely to skip the House race on their ballots altogether, and the effect was larger in predominately Black precincts. In redrawn precincts with no Black voters, 3.9% of voters left the House race blank; in all-Black precincts, 8.3% did. That disproportionate impact on Black voters is not new.

Using six decades of redistricting data, political scientists SoRelle Wyckoff Gaynor and Sam D. Hayes found that racial minorities and other economically disadvantaged voters — including blue-collar and agricultural workers — are more likely to change districts. There are consequences for voters when they’re moved to new districts, said Gaynor, a former Republican congressional staffer.

Constituent-service casework can get lost in the shuffle, she said. Members seek out committee assignments based on the demographics of their districts, so minority voters can lose influence at the top levels of policymaking.

“It helps when you have a bigger portion of the district, because now your collective interests need to be paid attention to,” Gaynor said.