This is a lightly edited transcript of the May 8 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.
Perry Bacon: I’m Perry Bacon. I’m the host of The New Republic show Right Now. I’m joined by two great political scientists. Hakeem Jefferson is at Stanford University. Jake Grumbach is at the University of California, Berkeley. It’s afternoon for them, just barely—they’re on the West Coast. I’m glad they’re joining us today.
These are two people I really enjoy talking to, but we’re talking to them at a time that’s not that great. Literally about an hour ago, Tennessee voted to eliminate their majority-Black congressional district. You’re seeing Alabama, South Carolina, a bunch of states talking about doing that after the Supreme Court ruling last week further gutting—almost invalidating—the Voting Rights Act. So we’re going to talk about the fallout from that and what it means for Black representation. Thanks, guys, for joining me.
Hakeem Jefferson: Thanks for having us. Glad to be here, Perry.
Bacon: Hakeem, just talk about that first of all.
Jefferson: Out of the gate, man. Out of the gate. Go ahead.
Bacon: The question I want to ask you all specifically is: Alito, Roberts, the Supreme Court is basically saying that Black people are Democrats, so gerrymandering is about partisanship, and so it’s fine if we get rid of all the Black congressional districts because those are just Democrats. And the Republicans won the majority in those states, so they get to draw the lines. So why does it matter that Black representation goes down in these states?
Jefferson: Thanks again for having us, Perry. I’m going to let Jake, because Jake had some insights that I thought were just right on the money in the piece he wrote—so I’ll let Jake talk about the sort of foolishness of the court’s thinking when it comes to partisanship and race, given what we political scientists, I think, and the broad public know about the overlapping nature of partisanship and race in the U.S. So I’m going to let Jake set the groundwork for that.
But at the top: the Voting Rights Act is perhaps the most effective—if not one of the most effective—pieces of legislation in the country’s history. The sort of post–Civil War amendments were meant to enshrine these rights for Black folk. But we know, across the American South in particular, there were these attempts to burden the franchise for Black people. The Voting Rights Act comes along and helps to ensure that Black people got to enjoy access to the ballot without the burdens that lots of local jurisdictions tried to put in front of them.
And so it just so happens I’ve been reading this work by political scientist Katherine Tate. And she, early on, was thinking about: what’s the reason that we might care about Black political representation? What does it matter? And so we have these expectations that Black representatives—who descriptively represent Black constituents—might have preferences, might have priorities that differ from their white counterparts.
And so we might expect, for example, that if Black representatives have life experiences that align with Black constituents, they might prioritize issues related to criminal justice. We might remember, for example, the leadership that many Black representatives had in the aftermath—this will sound long ago—of Trayvon Martin’s death at the hands of George Zimmerman. It was Black representatives who really put out the clarion call about whether a young Black man wearing a hoodie should confront death in the way that Trayvon did.
So we might have expectations that Black members of Congress are going to be better advocates for issues like criminal justice or for various redistributive programs. You see in the Senate, for example, Black women really holding Secretary Kennedy’s feet to the fire when it comes to access to vaccines or maternal health—Black maternal health.
And so we might expect that descriptive representation comes with some substantive purchase. And so the decline of Black representation is not only a slap in the face to the progress made for multiracial democracy, but we might worry that it will come with some substantive declines for issues that Black folks care about and that matter to them materially.
Bacon: Let me follow up on one question. So today, the district that was eliminated is in the Memphis area. The representative’s name is Steve Cohen. He is not Black. So talk about that—that kind of just helps explain why that’s a loss as well.
Jefferson: Yeah. So when Congress passed the Voting Rights Act, and we talk about Black folks having the right to select representatives of their choice—that choice needn’t be a descriptive member of the group. It doesn’t mean that—it’s often the case that Black folks who are voting for members of Congress, given residential segregation and the like, perhaps that choice would be a Black representative. But sometimes the choice is to have somebody who has substantive priorities and interests that are aligned with theirs.
And in the context of American politics—as I’m sure Jake’s going to lay out even more eloquently—in the context of American politics, that means, for many and most Black folks, having the opportunity to vote for a Democratic politician and having substantive numbers such that their support for that candidate can get them over the finish line. But I think it’s a really good opportunity for Jake to lay out even more clearly the way that partisanship and race are so intertwined in American life.
Bacon: Go ahead, Jake.
Jake Grumbach: Yeah. Great to be with you guys. Thanks, Perry, for organizing this conversation. Always great to be along with a friend and collaborator—and, unfortunately, at an inferior school slightly to myself—Hakeem Jefferson. But otherwise, excellent to see you.
And I think that’s right. Just to continue on Steve Cohen in Tennessee as a candidate of choice of a racial minority group—that is central to Voting Rights Act Section Two, which just got cut in Callais by the Supreme Court. The idea of a candidate of choice—it can be like a proxy, it’s more likely to be a member of that racial minority group. But Steve Cohen is a long-serving, popular representative with a majority-Black constituency. He’s a Central Eastern European Jewish guy in ethnic background. But you should quickly YouTube him.
Bacon: Just hear his voice.
Jefferson: That’s right.
Jake Grumbach: Yeah. That dude is Memphis. Like you could be like, “Oh yeah, 8Ball & MJG and Three 6 Mafia, and Steve Cohen.” It actually—
Jefferson: He spent time around some Black people. So—
Grumbach: Yeah. You—so he’s a candidate of choice in this way of the Black community of the district.
But taking a step back here, let’s think about what the—Hakeem spoke about the Voting Rights Act as one of the most effective pieces of legislation in American history. It’s also the culmination—like Hakeem mentioned—it’s the enforcement of the Reconstruction Amendments after the Civil War: the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments. The 13th Amendment—ban on slavery. The 14th Amendment—equality under the law, which is really codified in the Civil Rights Act of 1964—
Jefferson: And importantly, birthright citizenship.
Grumbach: Exactly—and birthright citizenship, right? So the 14th Amendment says, unlike the Dred Scott decision of the Supreme Court before the Civil War—that said Black people can never be citizens—this says you’re a citizen when you’re born in the U.S. Birthright citizenship. And citizens and all people on U.S. soil are entitled to equality under the law, to due process, jury of your peers—your people have to be able to serve on juries too. That sort of equality under the law, which was violated by Jim Crow—eventually the Civil Rights Act of 1964 ends that.
And the 15th Amendment is no ban on voting on the basis of race or previous condition of servitude. And the Jim Crow voting laws violated that. And it wasn’t until the 1965 Voting Rights Act—the crown jewel of the civil rights movement—actually enforces the 15th Amendment, and to some extent the 14th Amendment as well.
That said, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 has different sections. Section Five of the Voting Rights Act was the preclearance section. This said former Jim Crow areas—counties and states—if you’re going to change your voting laws or redistrict, you’re going to have to pass that through the U.S. Justice Department. And at the time under Obama, when this is being litigated, it’s Eric Holder as attorney general. He gets to say, You’re thinking about changing your voting laws? Is this going to suppress votes? Is this some sort of small version of Jim Crow? You have to review this with us.
The Shelby County [2013] Supreme Court decision ends Section Five with a similar logic. John Roberts says basically: racism’s over, Section Five is done, no more preclearance. We see a wave of election law changes by state legislatures and the changing of voting procedures—purges of voter rolls. The things you know as voter suppression in the 2010s come after the Shelby County decision.
But then Section Two—what it says: Section Two is the vote dilution provision. That’s mostly about redistricting, and it’s been sort of interpreted in subsequent judicial opinions. There’s a standard, and that standard is what we talked about—that racial groups, and particularly racial minority groups, have the ability to select their candidates of choice, and that they’re not blocked from voting, registering to vote, and then voting for those candidates of choice.
And that the district system is not set up in a way to constantly have a racial majority group—usually white people, but it depends on the place—block those candidates of choice through overwhelming voting against them, either at the primary or general election, such that those candidates of choice of the racial minority group get to be in office. That is the standard of Section Two. The Supreme Court in Callais ended that.
Now, what are the long-term ramifications of ending Section Two here, when we think about redistricting? Partisan gerrymandering—that is, a state legislature who controls districting—this is very unique in the U.S. system. State governments draw districts and determine voting laws for the most part, within the Voting Rights Act, whatever the Supreme Court says is allowed of something like the Voting Rights Act which is Congressional legislation and the Constitution. So that’s unique—around the world, it’s usually the national government that regulates voting and elections and districting, not states. But states do it.
Partisan gerrymandering has long been legal. You can actually say, we are setting up this map to maximize the seats from my party and minimize the seats of the other party. The only thing you couldn’t do is racially gerrymander. If in that partisan map, racial minority groups that are a coherent community, that vote cohesively for candidates of choice, that repeatedly choose candidates that they support in majorities—those candidates have to be able to take office. So you can only partisan-gerrymander so much.
The racial Voting Rights Act Section Two blocks the extent to which you can gerrymander by saying, No—Black, Latino, Asian American, Native Americans in cohesive communities have to be able to elect their candidates of choice. With that falling away, what we now have—especially in the U.S. South—is that you can fully do Republican gerrymanders without having to think about the many hundreds of thousands and millions of Black voters electing their candidates of choice. This allows more extreme Republican gerrymanders, and it’s going to allow more extreme Democratic gerrymanders in blue states.
So that’s the outcome, and the biggest casualty is Black representation. For the parties, it’s going to mildly help Republicans, but Democrats can gerrymander more effectively too now, so it’ll even out a little. The big casualty is Black representation—to some extent Latino representation in other parts of the country, but mostly Black representation in the South is the casualty here for the long term.
Bacon: Let me follow up on the blue state part. I don’t think—
Grumbach: There can be many more effects of this—
Bacon: The blue state part—I don’t think I fully understand. Explain how blue states could reduce Black representation. Is that what you’re saying? Explain that a little bit.
Grumbach: Yeah. So in blue states there’s less racially polarized voting because the racial groups tend to vote more similarly. There are still racial differences in voting in blue states, but in a state like Illinois, Black and white liberals—they vote more consistently. There are still big differences, like Hakeem said—different priorities. But it’s not as different as when you go to a Deep South state, where it’ll be 90 percent of white people vote one way, 90 percent of Black people vote another way.
In a state like Illinois or California or Massachusetts—Black people in Martha’s Vineyard—that is not how racial voting works in the Northeast or West Coast or Midwest. That’s not how Detroit looks. Atlanta, even in the South—urban white people in Atlanta are not voting 90 percent against the Black people, and Black people are not voting 90 percent against those.
What I mean there is: if you wanted to maximize the number of blue seats in a state, what you want to do is get every district to have 51 percent blue voters and make the Republican voters have no ability to set seats. What that does is chop up cohesive racial groups more than otherwise would.
So I would say it’s not going to be as significant as the hit to Black representation in the South. But we will see a little bit of an increased ability—and we’ll see how Democrats play this and how the maps end up. The idea that now you don’t have to worry about racial minority groups just opens up the types of maps you can draw on the basis of partisan goals.
Bacon: So the Supreme Court is ignoring race, or prioritizing partisanship—do you view them—yeah, I guess that’s the question. Are they pretending race doesn’t exist, or are they saying party is the thing that divides us today?
Grumbach: That’s right. So Hakeem alluded to this. A big part of the logic of the ruling is they’re saying: now, to prove vote dilution under the Voting Rights Act, it’s going to be a really near-impossible standard. You’re going to have to say, in places where it’s just Democrats or just Republicans, we have to find that the white and Black people and Latinos and Asian Americans and Native Americans vote systematically differently, right—including in general elections.
In the South, that’s basically saying you have to hold constant, or control for, party and find racial differences—systematic racial differences in voting—even within the same party, in places that are very polarized by party and also by race, like in the Deep South. That’s basically going to say: you found the two white liberals in some Deep South county that tend to vote with the Black people in a Democratic primary, and because they’re voting with the Black people, we have to ignore all the 90 percent of white people voting against the Black candidates, because they’re from a different party.
The logic is wacky, but you can see where it comes from. Their theory is that somebody votes on the basis of race or on the basis of party, right—and that historically, there are partisan forces and there are racial forces. But this is a pretty common misconception. In people’s own development of their own politics—when you were growing up and coming of age politically and deciding which party do you think represents you more, which party do you take—maybe there’s a lower-level office, you don’t really know what the comptroller does, but you see a D or an R next to their name—how did, in adolescence, you come to think of which party represents you better? It has something to do with race, civil rights, the legacies of the parties representing different racial groups. Race and party are not this separate thing. Race drives how the parties organize themselves and how people identify with the parties.
So it’s not a “control for party” story—it’s actually that party is a mediator, or an intermediate step between [race and voting behavior]. For that reason, this “control for party” thing—sadly, when my—I, like other political scientists, have really played into that—is a fundamentally problematic and just fallacious way to think of the process of partisanship and race throughout history, or within individual decision-making models.
Jefferson: And we see it in all the structural ways that Jake has laid out in terms of vote choice. But we also see it when we try to explain party ID. So I’m just thinking here—if you were to run some attitudinal models and you’re just trying to explain variation in Black partisanship or white partisanship, on either side you’re going to see relationships between that partisan outcome and racial attitudes.
So in the case of white Americans, for example—imperfect though it may be—one of the things that will consistently help you explain white support, say, for the Republican Party or for the Democratic Party is what they think about Black people. What we scholars call their racial resentment attitudes. And on the side of Black folks, one of the consistent predictors of Black support for the Democratic Party is identity centrality—that is, how important is being Black to their identity?
And it just provides some empirical support for this point that Jake was making, which is that—when Black people think about—people sometimes try to oversimplify Black support for the Democratic Party, as though Black folks aren’t making a real, calculated choice here—of course, between two imperfect options. But when many Black folks think about their support for the Democratic Party, it is because they perceive that, though imperfect, it is the party that most advances Black interests.
Now, we’ve seen declines in the level of Black support for the Democratic Party. But these Black folks still aren’t overwhelmingly running to identify as Republicans. If anything, they’re putting the Democratic Party ID on ice, in part because many of them—perhaps especially some young people—are concerned that the party is not advancing Black interests. So it’s just to say that we can’t think about partisan choice, or outcomes related to partisan choice, without thinking about race—even as the Supreme Court in all of its decisions these days wants to convince us that race doesn’t matter. All of the sort of survey evidence and the like that we have would suggest otherwise.
Grumbach: I was just going to say that in the Trump era, it’s not like—it wasn’t surprising that Trump got more Latino voting. Yeah, sure, he got maybe 45 percent of the Latino vote. It’s not surprising that Black support for the Democratic Party in 2024 is at 90 percent, whereas for Obama it was in the mid-90s. You know, there are some fluctuations. And it’s not unsurprising that white support for Trump is at 60 percent, whereas in some elections white people supported Republicans at the high 60s. But think about a 60–40 election. If a president won 60–40, you’d be like, That’s the landslide of the century.
A 20-point gap, and we’re saying… the levels of actual racial sorting in the electorate are just actually high in raw terms. Even though it’s interesting that the presidential candidate who said Mexicans aren’t bringing their best and were criminals and rapists got a solid 45 percent of the Latino vote—that’s very important to understand. At the same time, 55 to 45 is a big gap. It’s still a very racially sorted electorate.
And furthermore, what Hakeem said that’s so on point is: even if there was a little bit of de-racialization in the electorate, with racial groups not being quite as sorted into the parties as before, it’s still very sorted. Racial attitudes are more predictive now than ever. So Latinos who voted for the Republican Party recently tend to be the racially conservative Latinos. The most predictive thing for naturalized immigrants that became U.S. citizens and now vote—the most predictive survey question is the racial resentment index.
Saying, Hello, new Asian American voter, naturalized Latino American—what is the most predictive attitude? It’s: do you think Black people are poorer than white people because they’re lazier and don’t work as hard, or because of discrimination? Your answer to that question is the most correlated with your vote choice. So racial attitudes are more related to vote choice even as groups change.
And when people are shocked by that and saying, How? But more Latinos voted Republican in 2024 than before, so it’s not about race—I’m like, you haven’t met a lot of people of color if you’ve never heard people of color say other people of color are lazy. Especially a different group of color. I’m like, you’ve never been in the barbershop. That is just so central to how people organize their thoughts about society—even people of color.
Jefferson: Totally.
Bacon: So looking forward, I want to drill down a little bit in the sense that it is likely the case that we’ll have a House majority that the Democrats control after November. We’ll also have Tennessee have zero Black representatives, South Carolina maybe with zero, Alabama down to one, Louisiana down to two. So what does it look like?
Because on some level, Black people support a Democratic House—let’s put it that way. On the other hand, Black representation will go down. So Hakeem, talk about that effect: if we have a Democratic-controlled Congress that has fewer Black members, no James Clyburn in leadership, but it’s still a Democratic majority Congress—what is the difference? How is it different than it would be if the pre-VRA Section Two were still in place?
Jefferson: Yeah. One of the things that we know from the descriptive representation literature—and again, not to hawk the book again, but I’ve been reading it, so it’s top of mind—but it’s a little dated now, and I don’t have evidence from more recent years about this. One of the things that Tate observes in this work, Black Faces in the Mirror—which is, talk about relevant, it’s about Black representation—one of the things that she observes in the second part of the book, where she’s thinking about Black evaluations of Congress, is that Black people have slightly more positive views when they’re represented by Black electeds.
And again, I want to caveat that by saying I don’t know if this holds up in the contemporary era. But I think that’s what we know from the descriptive representation literature: people perceive institutions as more legitimate, as fairer, as more likely to give them outcomes that they desire, when they have descriptive representatives.
Now, I do want to caution—and I know this is a group of us who like some complexity and nuance—that descriptive representation isn’t the end-all, be-all of what people need, right? It is not the case that mere descriptive representation gives good material outcomes. I live in Palo Alto, not too far from San Francisco, with a district attorney who is a Black woman who very proudly supports tough-on-crime policies and the like.
But I think what we will observe is a continued decline in Black people’s perception of the legitimacy of political institutions—namely Congress, in this case—as their representation declines. And I think at some level we’ll observe this in the kind of levels of advocacy we observe.
Bacon: I feel no need to ask—is your family in the Clyburn district?
Jefferson: Yes. Yeah.
Bacon: Just to boil down specifically: what does that look like when the—whether you like Clyburn or not, he is a Black voice for that community. What do you think the impact of that loss is? Because he is likely to lose—potentially his seat is gone as well, potentially.
Jefferson: Yeah—I mean, I have so many memories of Jim Clyburn being very present. His sister-in-law, for a small time, was my piano teacher. I quit piano, though. He was recently on campus, and he and I took a photograph together. And the way that this stuff works on the ground is people just know the guy. I don’t think that people are following all the sort of machinations of what he’s up to, but they perceive—and I think they’re right about it—that they’ve got a powerful representative who has a drawl that is familiar to them, who just by sense of his similarity has their interests at heart.
And I think we forget that people contact their members of Congress for any number of things, and the perception that one can be in touch, that one can reach out when they’re struggling with the sort of ordinary stuff of life—I don’t know that we have great evidence of this empirically, but you might expect that that declines when the person is different from you, even if that person has otherwise similar preferences.
Symbolic representation and descriptive representation—we shouldn’t put all of our weight on it. But we know that the way that people think about their citizenship, the way that people think about their place in a broader polity, is in part a function of how much they see themselves represented in the governing bodies of society. And so I think a Congress that has fewer Black representatives—fewer people who look like Jasmine Crockett or Jim Clyburn, and the list goes on—is a Congress that will have an even tougher time convincing Black folks that it’s a legitimate political institution that is advancing Democratic goals. More small-d democratic goals.
Bacon: So we’re in gerrymandering season right now. Jake, are you back?
Grumbach: I’m back. And I want to talk about Black representation on Hakeem’s last answer.
Bacon: Say it again.
Grumbach: Sorry, my iPhone overheated, but I would love to jump in on Black representation.
Bacon: Sounds good. Then we’ll move on to something else. But yeah, go ahead.
Grumbach: No, I just wanted to say: when we think about the Congressional Black Caucus and Black representation in Congress right now, we have to think about the triumphs and the serious limitations.
So the triumphs first. On my mom’s side of the family, my grandfather was the editor of the Chicago Defender—the preeminent Black newspaper at mid-century. Getting Thurgood Marshall onto the Supreme Court under LBJ was the triumph of his life. Reporting on it and being a hack hounding LBJ and the Democratic Party through the Black press to get Thurgood Marshall on the court—that was everything.
And then Black congressional representation represented the end of American authoritarianism and apartheid in the South—to have majority-Black areas, states that are 30, 40-plus percent Black, get their first Black representation since Reconstruction, right? Since the Northern Union military under Lincoln occupied the South and said, You have to allow Black voting for those 12 years. This is a triumph.
And still to this day, that generation in my family is very interested in descriptive representation—and it is a triumph. They remember the days before that, where even Bill Clinton in 1992 going on Arsenio’s was a big deal, in terms of—it was so new to be represented as your whole person in that way. Culturally, linguistically, the idea that Black people are human beings too and deserve representation—this was so basic, such a triumph.
And then I’ve got to say the limitations, though. Like Hakeem said, descriptive representation is not a perfect predictor. Clarence Thomas was a key figure behind the rollback of Black representation, period.
So that’s the first—it’s not a perfect predictor. It’s actually quite an imperfect predictor. And the Republican Party has changed a lot. They know this, and they’ve run an increasing number of MAGA Black candidates that Black people do not vote for, but it scrambles the brains of descriptive representation differently.
Second, young Black Americans are not as interested in descriptive representation as the Boomer and Gen X generations were—and beyond that, the Silent Generation and returning Black veterans. And that’s in part because they see the parity in representation. Now, Black representation in Congress is proportional to the Black population. It’s a triumph, but it has not delivered material equality. The racial wealth gap is greater than it’s been in centuries.
This is the precarity of the Black middle class—the fact that the 2008 financial crisis destroyed half of Black family wealth. Things like war and imperialism that young Black Americans see, and they see a similar logic of racial hierarchy in imperialism and colonialism around the world. This is a reason why age polarization in Democratic Party primaries is big among Black voters. Young Black voters and older Black voters vote very differently in Democratic Party primaries, and we need to listen to these young Black people who were very central in Black Lives Matter and have a different orientation. It’s a different wave of Black politics.
The third thing is—and we have to be real about this—the Congressional Black Caucus, Black representatives in Congress, are 10 of the 15 oldest members of Congress. And they have very serious health issues, and they do not have successors. Even if the Voting Rights Act Section Two stayed and they had these Black districts, many of these members of Congress—I don’t know what happened. There is not a generation lying in wait that they have cultivated, and it’s in some cases become a very personalistic fiefdom in a safe district that is not always aligned with the interests of the Black community more broadly.
And Black Americans are the most—this, you’ll get this twisted, because people try to do this bait and switch in punditry. They’ll say white liberals—self-described liberals or white Democrats—are sometimes to the left on some policy issues of Black Americans. But they do this—it’s only if you subset white people to the leftmost white people. They are somehow to the left of all Black people on average.
And it’s, no. But if you actually look at racial groups in the U.S., Black people are the leftmost on every issue—criminal justice on downward. And we have to remember this—Paul Frymer’s book, Uneasy Alliances, on captured constituencies was about Black people, because of this, being a captured constituency in the Democratic Party. And that’s why swing voters are doubly valuable in these states. But a Black voter whose choice is Democratic Party or bust is not a credible threat to the party in the same way.
And just saying here—this is a thing where we actually have to demand the most from Black representatives and not give them a pass because of descriptive representation. And this is a moment where, with gerontocracy and with aging leadership and a new authoritarian moment, we have to ask these representatives to really step up.
Jefferson: And step down.
Perry Bacon: So we’ve had—we’re in a gerrymandering festival right now where Virginia moved to make eight of their nine districts Democratic even though it’s a closely divided state. I think Florida’s going to be 24 to four. And now Tennessee will be eight to zero or nine to zero—I’ve forgotten which one.
Are we saying that a Democratic-gerrymandered state and a Republican-gerrymandered state—are we saying that what happened in Tennessee is different than Florida or Virginia because they’re killing off Black districts specifically and targeting them? Is that qualitatively different for you all than what’s happening in, let’s say, Montana—if they gerrymandered an all-white Republican state, or a Democratic state—is this fundamentally different because of the majority-Black districts and the history we’re talking about?
Jefferson: I think this is more in Jake’s wheelhouse, but I’ll just say this quickly: we signed on—now what feels like a long time ago—to public letters. In fact, we led public letters in support of legislation that would just weaken this ability to do this kind of gerrymandering, period. I think no one thinks that this is good for democracy to have this kind of gerrymandering happening, whether it’s happening from Democrats or whether it’s happening from Republicans.
So I just want to put it on the record that my own politics—and if I recall, because Jake signed on and helped to lead the letter-writing campaign to convince Democrats to advance this legislation—Perry, I think that we’re in a bad equilibrium for democracy. This kind of tit-for-tat, what game theorists would have expected. I’ll just put it on the table: I don’t think that the argument is that any form of this is good for democracy. But I’ll let Jake take the particulars of the question.
Grumbach: No, that’s right. So HR 1—that big democracy reform in the Democratic Congress—the post-AOC, Squad-election 2018 comes in. Their first piece of legislation, HR 1—that’s why it’s called House Resolution One—was a democracy reform: the John Lewis Voting Rights Act stuff, stopping voter suppression, more resources for election security, and also a ban on partisan gerrymandering. Because Congress can just say, No state can draw districts in a partisan way that’s unfair to voters of both parties. That’s obviously good.
But without that, you don’t want one-sided warfare, right? An arms race where both sides are doing it gives an incentive for both sides to say, “Let’s both stop this with new rules on both of us.” So still support that—that’s coming back into the agenda. At the same time, I will say, yes, there’s something different historically.
Partisan gerrymandering is incredibly consequential. Some post-Dobbs decisions that allowed states to ban abortion—those abortion bans in some states are only sustainable because partisan gerrymandering gives a minority of voters, typically in more rural areas, the ability to set the majority of the state legislature over the will of a pro-choice majority of voters in order to ban abortion. That’s an example of the consequentiality of partisan gerrymandering. It makes policy in the state more out of step with the will of the majority. Very important.
At the same time, there is something—given the long struggle over American democracy—that has been centrally about Black representation and voting rights. Black Americans have been the vanguard. Any push for democracy in the U.S. has been—the vanguard has been a Black democracy movement that has provided—the Voting Rights Act Section Two benefits all types of groups, right?
Just like the Civil Rights Act benefits white women and all types of things. Black American movements on this—and Black Americans, if you survey Americans, the only constituency who place a priority on things like voting rights and the rules of the game of democracy as an issue in and of itself—not just to get better gas prices and stuff—it’s Black Americans.
There is something really special and really consequential about ending that Voting Rights Act triumph of Black representation that paid off. This is no ordinary love. Sade was like—basically, these Black movements were really about—it’s not an ordinary movement. It’s actually a movement that translates into gains in democracy and equality for everyone, and that’s a kind of unique thing in world history. And that’s why every movement around the world emulates the Black American civil rights movement of the mid-20th century.
Jefferson: Yeah. I just want to say very quickly—as Jake was talking, I was thinking about a conversation that Jake and I had just this past Friday in person, where we were thinking about the magnitude of the efforts to undermine and to walk back this kind of progress that we know is targeted at weakening Black political power.
And we’re in an industry and a discipline that at times has seemed to lose focus on that as the objective. Our discipline—political scientists have often fallen prey to these arguments about, does voter ID do this thing, does it affect turnout of that thing? And the bigger goal has always been to undermine Black political power. We—of course, we hear some scholars, often scholars of color and Black scholars in particular, using that language to describe these efforts, small though they sometimes seem.
But I think what this moment really forces me to think about is how to talk about what it is we’re observing. And I think Jake is exactly right—this is such a clear attempt to undermine Black political power. When we think about it that way, asking, Does a voter ID law impact turnout?—it just seems like the wrong question, because the attempt to suppress Black turnout in the first place is part of a larger package of a long-standing attempt to undermine Black political power. And so if anything, I hope the moment gives to scholars and practitioners a different vocabulary—or maybe an old vocabulary—to describe what these folks are up to.
Bacon: Let me close with this subject. You both talked about this idea of Black political power, and we are watching a Supreme Court, an administration—and really, we’ve had five years of this. But I guess the question I’m getting at is: it’s not that I don’t view this as a partisan project at this point, if only because I watched so many universities eagerly kill off any diversity initiatives they had—and they seemed like they almost wanted to, on some level. I watched how many liberal columnists were eager to attack Ibram Kendi and pile on.
So in some ways, if you all are saying we’re seeing a pushback against Black political power, isn’t that one going to win—because it includes all white Republicans and most white Democrats? Or a lot of white Democrats. I’m concerned that all racially conscious policy is being eliminated, and I don’t see that ending, because it seems like that is supported by all Republicans and many Democrats.
Jefferson: I think we’re in a long winter. I think this is a long winter of racial backlash at all levels, across any number of institutions. And Perry, I think you’re right to put your finger on it that yeah, you see a lot of white liberals who might push back against the most egregious forms of this racial backlash. But we should be attentive to the places of agreement between otherwise liberal white people and white conservatives when it comes to race—so often in the language of racial preference, or racial advantage, or the perception that Black folk and other racial minorities are getting goods that they shouldn’t get.
I think what it demonstrates is what Black people and people of color broadly know, if only by way of experience, which is that race is one of these peculiar areas where things like liberalism can fall by the wayside. And it does mean that you’ve got this sort of weird coalition of folks who are at least on the fence about how explicit the remedies for racial oppression ought to be. And that does make me nervous. I think if we were to advance legislation in Congress, most white Democrats would support legislation that protected Black civil rights and Black voting rights. But I think it is telling that among the white public, race is this area where you see some degrees of compromise that might worry us.
Grumbach: I would say, thinking about the ups and downs in history of this—including since the Voting Rights Act—is very instructive. And the Civil Rights Act, where in the ‘70s we know the stories of the attempt to actually integrate schools, including in the North through that implementation, was different than just during the Civil Rights Act in theory—Black people can join the schools.
That’s one. Then we had actual affirmative action and affirmative action debates, including quotas and actual saved spots—like the equivalent of handicapped parking spots, but for Black people or for women or for Native American individuals. That was battled over. Then it wasn’t quotas—that was ruled unconstitutional. Then it became about: can you take into account things like racial experience, identity-based experience in a setting—getting into schools or jobs or things like that, or preferential contracting in public contracts?
All of these things have been battled over. The thing that I think we mistook is that there are some things that won’t backslide that far, right? Yeah, sure—affirmative action, you can try that, that’ll fall back, whatever. The basics of the Voting Rights Act, especially Section Two—that was not something I had on my bingo card. Whereas we had seen a lot of backlash to the equivalent of much more materially substantive DEI—essentially real affirmative action.
So what I’m saying is: in this racial backlash that we’re in—this sort of anti-wokeness and all this stuff within firms, within law schools and all types of institutions—the first thing is that whatever racial progress was made in 2020 has rolled back. That’s one thing, and I think that’s a big thing.
We didn’t know—or I didn’t think—it would backslide this far.
Jefferson: Yeah, I was about to say: who’s included in this “we”?
Bacon: Are these things—in fairness—are those things related, though? Once you have—it’s clear that you can break—like, once—isn’t John Roberts and Alito saying, Oh good, since white liberals no longer care about diversity anyway, we can go a little further? I know they want to just strike the Voting Rights Act down—they’ve wanted that their entire lives. They’re not denying that. But—
Jefferson: I will say—but Jake, one second—’cause Jake and I agree on about 98 percent of everything, so we need a little bit of friction here. And so I’ll gin up some friction only to say that this is the natural, logical end state. All of this is about power—which I know my brother Jake understands.
The DEI walkbacks, the fights over all this stuff in places like the ones we inhabit—universities—the fight over the 1619 Project. I’m not saying anything that Jake doesn’t already know. But all of those fights—sometimes as silly as CRT, as silly as they appear—they’re about discursive power, they’re about social power, they’re about power in the boardrooms.
And the Voting Rights Act and the like are just about a different domain of power. But for me, the through line is that this is always a question of who gets to wield power in a given domain. And so when we see all these white folk—including some white liberals—saying, Yeah, get rid of all this talk about diversity and all this stuff about Black people and all this, it’s a logical next step that they are not as on board as we might want them to be with the ascension of Black political power.
And there’s nothing that enshrines the right of Black people to wield political power in this country more than the Voting Rights Act. And so this is just a natural end state of this hellscape of trying to advance white political power at the expense of Black political power. That was my ginning up a fight with my brother Jake, who agrees with everything I just said, of course.
Grumbach: Yeah, I would say to this—I like that take. I think one is—I do think in woke 2.0, understanding that people of color—like, I think this is a conversation we’ve also had, Hakeem—you can define white politics as including non-white people too. In this way, that’s one way to square that circle. And I do think it’s worth thinking about that.
And I also think in this—like, the white liberal in mind I think you’re painting is the one that symbolically was supportive of some stuff that was convenient but doesn’t actually want any material changes to anything, and has a signaling sort of thing, a sign of In this house, blah blah blah, but doesn’t actually want to live next to Black people, doesn’t want to have their kids go to school with Black people, doesn’t want to do all that.
I also think, when we think this through, that has taken over. Where I’ve seen, actually—when you go to different parts of the country, those places that are much more racially sorted, like I talked about—those blue areas where our viewers and listeners tend to be in metro areas—when you get outside there, I saw what it was. When you go to places in the Deep South, where if it’s not MAGA and it’s political, it’s all Black people. And you see a white person—that white person is in a different place. It’s just really interesting. And I’ve come to more recently think how different it is.
I’m from the Bay and live in the Bay Area—and how different that politics is, where white politics is very clear in those areas, and you’re betraying white politics by going there—in a way that in these sort of liberal metros, it’s not the same. So it’s just a broader context of where we’re at now.
Jefferson: I think that’s right, Jake.
Grumbach: And building—and these, how these coalitions are built and things like that, and how we understand these racial coalitions—I think that’s just important. And I think right now, racial politics—the real thing is racial politics is just incredibly predictive.
There are some ironies of this time period. The racial resentment index—you talked about that the Democratic Party got more left on a lot of things over the 2010s. Race being one of them, and civil rights. But also, to some extent, Biden was more pro-labor and things like that. And affluent white liberals voted in larger numbers in the suburbs. It’s a very interesting thing.
And there’s a lot of signaling and not substantive depth to this. But also—it’s just, we’re in a fascinating, uncertain moment. This wasn’t to push back on anything Hakeem said, as much as to just say: the future is going to be very interesting.
Jefferson: I agree with you on this.
Grumbach: Electoral politics is very volatile, and we don’t even know how—to the extent they’ll do some real backsliding on these next elections going forward, and we don’t know the districts yet.
And Louisiana—like Perry said earlier—Louisiana is canceling an ongoing election with tens of thousands of votes already cast, to redraw its districts, eliminate a Black district, and redo the election with less Black representation. This is so volatile. I want to send that message too—we have a lot to do.
Jefferson: I agree. And an image that I saw yesterday that heartened even this skeptical and cynical soul is in Tennessee, where you saw images of all of these white folks marching—I believe it was up the statehouse steps and that sort of thing. I think this point about volatility is so key, Jake—we just don’t know how this stuff is going to play out.
One of the things that I will say is, it’s so interesting to observe—you’re talking about some of this older leadership and the like, in these different periods of American history. It is so interesting if we think about the march that got us—at least played an important role in getting us—the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Another feature of the Black politics canon that we’ve both alluded to is just the way that political incorporation has changed the nature of how Black politics is expressed. And I already hawked Katherine Tate’s Black Faces in the Mirror, but the other book that I’m looking at on my desk is her book From Protest to Politics—what it means that Black people and Black political elites have been so incorporated into party politics, and how it just changes the nature of the way that Black people demand rights.
And so that’s all to say: the Supreme Court just undermined, just defamed the crown jewel of the civil rights movement—the 1965 Voting Rights Act. If we were at a different period of time, Black political elites would have responded, I think, differently. You would have seen a much more animated response. And I think one of the things that has really stood out to me is that—and of course, I’m exaggerating perhaps for effect—but what stood out to me in the aftermath of this severely consequential decision from the court, that is so about race and Black political power, is just the weakness of Black political elites in this moment. You just don’t—and maybe I’m looking for something that mirrors the—
Bacon: What do you mean?
Jefferson: Here’s what I mean, Perry—and maybe I’m looking for something that mirrors more the moment out of which the Voting Rights Act came, and maybe that’s a foolish thing to look for. But I think I’m looking for something, and I’m just at my core an ordinary person out in this political world. I think I do want greater expressions of anger and calls for mass political organizing, and for a political project. And maybe I’m looking for that from the wrong people—perhaps this is the role of ground-level activists and not the work of Hakeem Jeffries or the Black Caucus.
But I think I’m looking for something, Perry, that just sounds different, that sounds more urgent, that sounds like it understands how critical this is. And again, I’m not saying that they haven’t expressed anger, disappointment, disbelief. But I think I am looking for something that sounds the alarm a bit more than what I’ve heard—and perhaps I’ve just missed it. But I think I am looking for something that sounds a little more like: this is a five-alarm fire emergency, and we should all be in the streets like yesterday. I think that’s what I’m looking for.
Bacon: I know we’re getting to the end here, and Jake’s got to go, but let me make two points in response to that. The first one is—and I think Jake got at this a little earlier—the Black politicians are now embedded fully in a Democratic Party hierarchy, and the Democratic Party decided the last five years that talking about race is bad. They decided there was a backlash to BLM—not sure if that’s there. They decided that Kamala lost in part because she’s Black. So I think that’s part of it—the—
Jefferson: Political incorporation, yeah.
Bacon: Yeah. And the other part is, I would distinguish between—Fair Fight Action, Black—there are groups, Sherrilyn Ifill—if you distinguish between—when I look for Black leadership today, I don’t listen to Kamala Harris and Barack Obama. I’m not sure—that was maybe too blunt, but in a certain sense, or Clyburn. The people who can speak on Black interests in a more direct way are often not prominent Black members of the Democratic Party.
Jefferson: And that is telling, I think. I think that’s a telling point, Perry. I’ll let Jake give the last word.
Grumbach: No, I think—I’m in no huge rush—but Hakeem, I think that was so on point. What it speaks to me is the civil rights movement. Yeah, we think of Martin Luther King in his 30s—but that’s pretty young. And also it’s a student group—it’s SNCC, exactly. And students, whether it’s Freedom Riders from the North or Southern students who went to rural Black schools and Rosenwald schools in the rural South—this is a different youth-led movement. And now the relationship between youth and protest politics is very different. There was a youth-led movement the past few years. The Democratic Party and liberal institutions joined in crushing it. It is a signal that that style of youth politics—that may be unwieldy and is not incorporated into these institutions—is not friendly.
And the—the movie Selma makes LBJ seem like such a hard-ass: This damn Martin Luther King again. And that’s partially true. But it is this symbiotic relationship where—Obama said it too—”Pressure me,” right? Politicians have a different role than movement leaders. And I think we’re in a moment of social media, nationalized politics, and a different relationship between youth and social and institutional trust that really needs to be rectified. I think older generations in institutions need to think hard about: you want to come down on this protest because you don’t like it here, but you’ll need youth protests very soon to protect institutions like the Voting Rights Act.
Then the last thing I’ll say: in this new era of nationalized politics and social media, where people do not think in terms of their district representative in the same way—except the older ones, like Hakeem’s point about Clyburn being around—that’s true. I’m from San Francisco, where Nancy Pelosi—it’s, yeah, you don’t really think—for me, Nancy Pelosi is not like she’s Frisco like me—like, I really think of her—
Jefferson: Let me flex—I’ve been to the Clyburn fish fry. I’m telling you.
Bacon: That is a flex. I like it.
Grumbach: And what I’m saying is there’s a different relationship to district representation across the board now, which demands new institutions.
So the Voting Rights Act Section Two going down is absolutely the biggest deal—tragedy, period—for Black representation. But there already was writing on the wall that we needed a new model of representation that’s about coalitions, not your individual district representative. And that’s because in national parties, when you’re in the minority—I talk about Ketanji Brown Jackson as this. This is the Ketanji Brown Jackson theory here: she is probably the most brilliant Supreme Court justice maybe ever—certainly in my lifetime—reading these dissents. Does her role on the court actually matter compared to some replacement in the six–three minority? Yeah, her dissents are so fire, but it would really be different if you had a five–four majority she was on.
So it’s become more true that it’s not about the individual representative. Ruth Bader Ginsburg retiring—she’s an inspiration to women and second-wave feminism. That’s not a big deal if you actually lose Roe and you actually just lose, right? It’s the same in state legislatures and in Congress. And for that reason, we need a new model that will be faithful to all coalitions—a one-person, one-vote standard, like the Voting Rights Act is about. But in this new era—the Voting Rights Act was in a different, depolarized era where there were Northern pro-civil rights Republicans. This is not the era anymore.
A new model will be about the one-person, one-vote standard in coalition—something like proportional representation that says it’s not about just being represented by an individual. We need to think about percentages of Americans—Americans want this direction, that direction. That would actually make Black people not a captured constituency within the Democratic Party, but actually pivotal in coalition. Say, we actually on this issue can coalition here, on this issue coalition there. That would be a different model that would match the times we’re inside. Encourage everybody to think about reforms Congress can do—like multi-member districts for proportional representation—to break out of this idea that your personal representative is the main thing, when actually what matters is who controls the levers of government right now.
Bacon: It’s a great conversation. I have three threads of other conversations I want to get into, but we’re going to stop here. We need to get Deva Woodly, for sure, because I think she has some good insights on what we’re talking about here. Hakeem is at Stanford—he’s on Bluesky, though, if you want to hear some great insights about politics and race and the connections. I think Jake is on both X and Bluesky, and also writing a lot for the Adam Bonica blog—what’s that called?
Grumbach: Data for Democracy.
Bacon: Data for Democracy. Which is an excellent data journal, yeah. With Bonica. And generally, just a lot of writing.
Grumbach: Thanks so much, Perry.
Jefferson: May I just flag one thing, Perry, for your audience? On May 18th—I’ve been talking a lot about Katherine Tate’s work—on May 18th it’ll be available for streaming on Zoom while it happens, 4:00 p.m. Pacific Time. I’ll be in conversation with Katherine Tate, who literally wrote the book on Black representation—why it matters and the like—and Corey Fields, who has done some really amazing work thinking about Black Republicans. And so if you’re interested in that, just Google—I’m sure it’s easy to find—”Black Politics and American Democracy, Stanford.” You should be able to find it. I’ll send the link to Perry so that he can add it to the comments. All right.
Bacon: Thanks, guys. See you soon.
Jefferson: Thanks, Perry. Be well.
Grumbach: Take it easy.
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