Early in 2024, Donald Trump took the stage at the Black Conservative Federation gala in South Carolina. “We love you!” one audience member yelled. “We love you,” Trump responded, adding, “We’ve energized the Republican Party, and we’ve expanded the Republican Party.” At the time, he was right: The share of Black voters supporting Trump had ticked up in 2020 and seemed to be growing. “And they’re going, Wait a minute—there must be a mistake here; they’re saying, Black people must really like Trump. It must be a mistake,” he said. As he looked around at the organization’s leaders onstage with him, he smiled and said, “These guys know it’s no mistake.”
When ballots were cast later that year, roughly 15 percent of Black voters chose Trump over Kamala Harris in the general election, up from 6 percent in 2016 and 8 percent in 2020, according to the Pew Research Center. The gains were mainly among Black men, about 21 percent of whom took a flier on Trump, according to exit polling. Theories for the shift abounded: The culprit was misogyny, or frustration with President Biden and the Democratic Party in general, or the lure of rhetoric about strong families and self-reliance, or the appeal of Trump’s bravado to otherwise-disempowered young men. No one argument could capture the full picture, but the bottom line was clear: Black voters seemed to be moving, however tentatively, toward Trump and the GOP.
Two years later, the picture looks different. According to the Associated Press, about 90 percent of Black voters supported Democrats last Tuesday, up from the roughly eight in 10 who went for Harris in 2024. Strong turnout throughout the country—and especially in majority-minority counties in the South—helped secure historic wins for Democrats. In Georgia, where Keisha Lance Bottoms became the first Black woman to be elected governor of any U.S. state, the share of Black midterm voters who went to the polls last week reached 54 percent, up from 45.5 percent in 2022 and 39 percent in 2010. In Texas, where a blue wave swept the entire slate of Democrats into statewide office for the first time in decades, the early and absentee Black vote rose 53 percent from 2022. And in Mississippi, where Scott Colom displaced the Republican incumbent to become the state’s first Black senator since Reconstruction, Black voters made up 33 percent of the electorate, up from 30 percent in 2024. Only about one in 10 Black men voted for the Republican on the ballot—except in Florida, where about a quarter of Black men and 10 percent of Black women backed the GOP candidate, Byron Donalds, making him the state’s first Black governor.
The question now is whether last Tuesday’s vote proves that 2024 was an anomaly and that Black voters have come back to the Democratic Party to stay, or whether they will be up for grabs in 2028 and beyond. Christopher Towler, a political scientist at California State University at Sacramento who studies Black voting behavior, argues that the shift toward Trump in 2024 was never as significant as it appeared, and that much of it could be explained by diminished overall turnout among Black voters that year. “Turnout influences how we interpret these partisan supports,” Towler told me. He said the share of Black voters who choose Republicans has stayed relatively stable for six decades (except for 1996 and 2008, when nearly all Black voters backed the Democrat for president), but it accounts for a larger percentage of the Black vote in low-turnout elections. Towler never bought the idea that the 2024 election marked the start of a racial realignment in politics. “All the evidence has suggested that is absolutely not the case,” he said. Instead, that spike in Black support for Trump more likely reflected who showed up and who stayed home.
But for Democratic operatives, the 2024 numbers should still ring some alarm bells. Charles Coleman Jr., a civil-rights lawyer and political analyst, told me fluctuations in turnout reflect a paradigm shift in how Black Americans participate in politics. Black voters have always been pragmatic: They vote for the party that they believe will “do us less harm,” he said. But this has been changing. “There are more and more members of the Black electorate who are tired of a ‘less harm’ orientation,” he said. They “want proactive policy that is going to benefit them.” If they don’t get it, they may just stay home.
[Madeleine Carlisle and Russell Berman: Republicans redistricted themselves out of Congress]
In practice, this means that Democrats can no longer assume that being the least-bad party will energize Black voters. The confluence of events that catalyzed a surge in Black turnout this year cannot be counted on to boost voter rolls in the next election or the one after that. Any party seeking to either keep Black voters in the fold or woo them to their camp will have to offer more than promises.
Black voters have grown accustomed to an insulting routine: When election season rolls around, candidates go to Black churches and barbershops to make their pitch and show voters that they care. This can make Black people feel like props, glad-handed just in time for their votes.
Garlin Gilchrist, a Democrat and Michigan’s first Black lieutenant governor, who was just elected Michigan’s secretary of state, told me that he traveled to every one of Michigan’s 83 counties at least three times. “I try to model consistency. I’m here with you, talking to you, listening to you, understanding what’s going on,” he said. But he noticed in his tours that many Black voters had grown jaded. “What I see are people who are just like, I’m sick of running in place, I’m sick of these people lying, I’m sick of these prices going up, and I’m sick of people acting like I only matter sometimes,” he said last week, not long after he cast his ballot.
Ever since President Lyndon B. Johnson, a Democrat, signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which banned racial segregation in public places and outlawed employment discrimination, Black voters have been the Democratic Party’s most reliable bloc. The “southern strategy” embraced by the Republican Party in the 1960s, which saw politicians play to the prejudices of white voters across the region, transformed the southern political landscape and alienated Black voters. For decades, the political calculus for Black voters had been clear: The Democrats are the “less harm” party. But a choice between empty promises and outright bigotry is hardly a choice at all.
Yet that calculus may be changing. While campaigning amid the coronavirus pandemic and the racial reckoning of 2020, Biden made a number of commitments to appeal to Black people. As he had promised, he tapped a Black woman for vice president and appointed the first Black woman to the Supreme Court. He also made Juneteenth a federal holiday and fought racial discrimination in the housing market. But Black voters began souring on him after his first year in office, disappointed by the failure of Democrats to pass key voting-rights legislation, and later by rising prices. By May 2024, pundits warned that Black voters were starting to splinter off from the Democratic coalition.
Over the past decade, the share of Black Americans who identify as Democrats has fallen, from 65 percent in 2013 to 49 percent in 2025, whereas the shares of those who identify as independent, Republican, or “other” have all risen. The share of “other” Black voters grew the most, from 7 percent in 2013 to 18 percent last year. Terrance Woodbury, a pollster, has done focus groups with Black voters who have gone back and forth with their vote—those who supported Barack Obama and then Trump, or Bernie Sanders and then Trump. “These voters feel like they have not been getting a fair deal. Their lives have simply not been getting better, despite giving Democrats 90 percent of their votes,” he told me. This, he said, made many of these voters “Trump-curious” in 2024: “They just wanted to give him a shot and see what he would do.”
These voters have now seen what Trump would do, and they didn’t like it, especially the war in Iran and rising fuel prices. The hardships that began under Biden have hardly let up under Trump: From 2022 to 2025, there was a 25 percent drop in median Black-household wealth, according to a recent report from the Federal Reserve. The Black unemployment rate climbed to 7 percent in September—almost double the rate of white workers.
But economic problems only partly explain why Black voters turned out in force last Tuesday. According to exit polls, voters were eager to not only repudiate Trump, but also push back against Republican-led efforts to redraw district maps to weaken Black congressional representation. In 1886, the Supreme Court called voting a fundamental right because it was a “preservative of all rights.” This year, that same Court gutted key parts of the Voting Rights Act, the 1965 legislation that protected Black suffrage by prohibiting voter suppression in southern states. Although the decision in Louisiana v. Callais purports to ban racial discrimination in voting, it allows lawmakers to carve up political districts for partisan reasons rather than racist ones when the two are so closely linked—especially in the South, where partisanship remains a solid proxy for race.
[Adam Serwer: Voters can be disenfranchised now]
Over the past two years, Black voters have watched as one Republican-run state after another tried to gerrymander them out of a voice. They responded by foiling those plans on Election Day. Representative Shomari Figures of Alabama, a Black Democrat representing the Second Congressional District, held on to his seat, despite the efforts of state lawmakers to redraw the map to favor his Republican rival. Especially high turnout in majority-Black counties helped explain why. In Georgia, the margins of victory for Democrats, including Bottoms, apparently squelched Republican plans to redraw the state’s congressional map. The outgoing Republican governor, Brian Kemp, announced last week that he would not call a special session for a gerrymander. “The voters of our state have spoken,” he said.
In a poll of 700 Black women ahead of last Tuesday’s election, 95 percent said that they were concerned about the impact of changes to voting rights. “We have to protect the right to vote jealously; we have to guard it,” Janai Nelson, the president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, told me. Without it, she said, the American idea of representative democracy falls apart. But, she added, the landscape for voting rights remains “quite bleak.” The new district maps may have failed to pay off this year, but the Supreme Court has ensured that lawmakers can still try to silence Black voters in the future—not that that will necessarily pay off for them. Republicans appear to have squandered the party’s nascent gains in the Black vote by trying to marginalize it. As LaTosha Brown, a co-founder of the advocacy group Black Voters Matter Fund, put it to my colleagues: “I call it the great Blacklash.”
Democrats shouldn’t necessarily count on Black voters to stay energized. The electoral stakes won’t always feel so high; the president won’t always be so unpopular; the Democrats could once again fall short of their promises. The voters who chose their couch over the voting booth in 2024 could do so again. If voters don’t feel like lawmakers are working with them to make their lives better—beyond a few church visits in the months before an election—they may question whether it’s worth heading to the polls at all.
“I get asked all the time from Democratic candidates and campaigns, What do we need to say to Black voters?” Woodbury told me. He explained that promising to make Black lives better can be a winning message. But it works for politicians only if they actually do it.
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