Over the past six months, Democrats have been more than happy to let President Trump be their best campaign ad. From his ill-advised war in Iran to his ill-advised tariffs, his obvious declining mental acuity to his increasing desire to spend taxpayer money on wasteful vanity projects, Dems know that Politics 101 dictates you never interrupt your enemy when he’s making a mistake.
With politicos predicting a midterm election bloodbath for Republicans, Dems were riding high. That is, until Trump unleashed his redistricting wars.
Aware of their inability to win with the current maps, the GOP has been redrawing the country in its image, and potentially marginalizing minority voters in the process. That’s bad — for the left, but more importantly for democracy. Voters should choose their candidates, not the other way around.
But the right’s assault on Black voters in particular may not be the coup they seem to think it is, especially if it unintentionally helps the left shore up one of its most problematic gaps.
In 2016, Donald Trump won his first presidential election largely thanks to white voters, who made up 88% of his coalition. Then, only 1% of his voters were Black.
By 2024, just eight years later, Trump had expanded that coalition considerably, winning 15% of the Black vote, per Pew.
But over on the Democrats’ side, the arrows were moving in the opposite direction. A once-reliable coalition — former President Barack Obama, for example, won 95% of the Black vote in 2008 — has been incrementally leaving the Democratic Party or staying home. In 2024, Kamala Harris won just 83% of the Black vote, down from Joe Biden’s 87% in 2000.
I assume that’s worrisome to the Democratic Party, though we don’t know how worrisome because it has refused to release its 2024 autopsy.
What I do know is Trump and Republicans may have just given them a lifeline they weren’t expecting.
The redistricting forever wars have Republicans carving up predominantly Black majority districts nationwide. On nearly every metaphorical battlefield, the GOP is winning — Trump successfully primaried Indiana state lawmakers who refused to redistrict; the Supreme Court sliced into the Voting Rights Act; Virginia’s supreme court ruled against the Dems’ efforts to redistrict. According to CNN’s redistricting tracker, Republicans could net nine seats in November.
That’s unequivocally bad news for the left, but the unintended consequence of the right’s zeal to rig the maps could send Black voters back to the Dems in numbers a single candidate not named Obama could not.
“Democrats are gonna be able to go into African-American communities and say, ‘Republicans are doing everything they can to take away your political power,’ ” Democratic strategist Ian Russell told Politico. “That’s a really salient message.”
And it could come at a really important time. Turnout among Black voters in the last midterms dropped by nearly 10 percentage points, from 51.7% in 2018 to 42% in 2022, whereas white turnout dropped just 1.5 points. The gap in 2022 was the largest in any election — presidential or midterm — since 2000.
Black voters’ disillusionment with Democrats has been growing, with just 66% self-affiliating with the party in 2023. The Republican war on Black districts could pull them back, at least in the short term.
Looking ahead, Democrats simply don’t have a transformative figure, like an Obama or a Bill Clinton, waiting in the wings to rebuild the Black coalition, but they do have an issue that could motivate it significantly.
If the Dems had a plan to win back this important voting bloc, or the parts of it that left, we don’t know what it was. But the redistricting wars might just be the catalyst they needed, and at the perfect time.
S.E. Cupp is the host of "S.E. Cupp Unfiltered" on CNN.
