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A gutted Voting Rights Act doesn’t erase Democrats’ unpaid debt to Black voters

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by Michael Starr Hopkins, opinion contributor - 05/01/26 8:30 AM ET

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by Michael Starr Hopkins, opinion contributor - 05/01/26 8:30 AM ET

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Treveyon Brock casts his ballot at polling place on November 4, 2014 near Ferguson, Missouri. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)

Democrats are asking Black voters to do again what we have done every cycle for 60 years: show up, carry the party, accept the thanks that arrives as a press release. I spent 20 years inside that arrangement. The accounting is overdue.

Black voters loaned the Democratic Party a country in 2020. The party spent it on everything except the lender. Here are the receipts.

My count of 2020 Federal Election Commission data shows Georgia flipped for Democrats by just under 12,000 votes, Pennsylvania by 81,000 and Wisconsin by 21,000. Joe Biden won 92 percent of Black voters nationally.

In short, without that coalition, Trump wins.

By 2024, Trump’s share of Black men younger than 45 had doubled to roughly 26 percent. Democrats went on cable and called it a messaging problem. It was not a messaging problem. The problem was that Black voters are not a base. We are creditors, and the debt was far past due.

On Aug. 6, 1965, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act. Five months earlier, John Lewis and 600 other marchers had been beaten on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma for walking toward a courthouse to register to vote.

Before the act, Southern states ran an open suppression system. They used literacy tests, poll taxes and grandfather clauses to stop Black people from voting. They inflicted violence so routine that it had a schedule.

In Mississippi, only 6.7 percent of eligible Black voters were registered to vote in 1964. As times changed, Alabama went from 11 percent Black voter registration to 51 percent. According to the ACLU, Georgia went from three Black elected officials to 495. The Voting Rights Act was not a courtesy. It was the enforcement of rights the Constitution had promised in 1870, but which the government had refused to deliver for a century.

In 2013, the Supreme Court in Shelby County v. Holder gutted preclearance — federal approval to change voting laws in states and municipalities with a history of discrimination. Within hours, Texas announced a voter ID law. Since 2013, 15 states have stripped early voting, same-day registration or Sunday voting. Congress was supposed to fix the coverage formula, but it didn’t.

This is why the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act mattered. Both reached the Senate floor in January 2022. Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) had the votes at that time, but he lost. Then-Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) joined all 50 Republicans to kill an essential change to the filibuster rule. The bills died.

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court handed down its verdict on what that failure cost. In a 6-3 ruling, Justice Samuel Alito gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, requiring plaintiffs to prove intentional discrimination to challenge a map. Democracy Docket said it plainly: The court smothered the Voting Rights Act and greenlit a generation of racial gerrymanders. The John Lewis Act would have been the only backstop. Now there is none.

The Senate killed the John Lewis Voting Rights Act in 2022. The Supreme Court finished the job Wednesday. That is not a coincidence, but a development on the same timeline.

States that had been waiting moved within hours. Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) unveiled a Florida congressional map engineered to give Republicans four additional House seats. Both houses of the legislature passed it the same afternoon, hours apart, coordinated in everything but name.

DeSantis also signed what has been called the “Florida version of the SAVE Act,” requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote. It will require of voters documents that students, the elderly and poor Black Floridians disproportionately lack. When voting rights groups objected, he declared unconstitutional Florida’s 2010 Fair Districts amendment, which 63 percent of Florida voters had approved.

The George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, named for a man whose murder had been filmed, died in September 2021. Memphis police beat Tyre Nichols to death in January 2023 as he called for his mother. The George Floyd Act was never revived. Also in 2023, the Supreme Court struck down student loan forgiveness, which would have primarily helped Black borrowers. Relief never arrived.

In short, the coalition had delivered, but Schumer and the party did not. I didn’t deliver either. I knew. I cashed the check and wrote the talking points. I told Black voters to be patient