By Bill Barrow,
Kim Chandler
and Kate Brumback
Contributing Writers
MONTGOMERY, Ala. (AP) — Sheyann Webb-Christburg was 8 when she was part of the crowd of civil rights marchers attacked on Bloody Sunday in Selma, Alabama, months before President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act.
This week, she stood in Montgomery, Alabama, to celebrate a resounding political victory for Black voters and others who refused to accept the law’s recent diminishment by the U.S. Supreme Court and several state legislatures across the South.
“I think a new movement has started,” she said after U.S. Rep. Shomari Figures won another term in Congress despite Alabama Republican lawmakers reshaping his district with the intent of making his reelection more difficult.
Strong turnout among Black voters helped propel Figures, 41, over his Republican opponent in a new district that President Donald Trump won by double digits just two years ago. It was among several victories for Black Democrats across the South — including the governor’s race in Georgia — along with near-misses in places like Florida where Republicans have been dominant.
Victories in several states — many of them largely unexpected — helped propel Black candidates to unprecedented electoral victory, especially in the South.
* In one of the night’s most significant victories, former Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms defeated Republican businessman Rick Jackson to become Georgia’s first female governor and the first Black woman in U.S. history to be elected governor.
- In Wisconsin, Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley defeated U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany to become the state’s first Black governor.
- In Florida, U.S. Rep. Byron Donalds, a staunch Donald Trump supporter, defeated Democrat David Jolly to become the state’s first Black governor.
- In the U.S. Virgin Islands, Democratic Rep. Stacey Plaskett made history as the territory’s first Black female governor.
- In Illinois, Lt. Gov. Juliana Stratton won the state’s open U.S. Senate seat, defeating candidate Don Tracy to succeed retiring Sen. Dick Durbin.
- In Maryland, Gov. Wes Moore, who made history in 2022 as the state’s first Black governor and only the third Black person elected governor of a U.S. state, secured a second term.
- In Nevada, Attorney General Aaron Ford defeated Gov. Joe Lombardo to become that state’s first Black governor.
- In Mississippi, Black district attorney Scott Colom held a narrow lead in a “too close to call contest” Nov. 6 with incumbent Cindy Hyde-Smith. Should he retain that lead, he would become Mississippi’s first Black U.S. senator since Reconstruction.
- Perhaps the most consequential development in Washington was the Democratic surge in House races, which positioned House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries to become the first Black speaker of the House of Representatives.
Party leaders and activists framed the results as a repudiation of Trump and of the Supreme Court’s decision this year that gutted the Voting Rights Act and allowed Republican-led states to redistrict in a way that weakened Black congressional representation.
The Republican president’s crackdown on diversity initiatives in his second term and his efforts to limit how the U.S. government tells the nation’s history on race and civil rights also motivated Black voters, said LaTosha Brown, co-founder of Black Voters Matter.
“We can smell racism. We can see it … we can feel it, and we know how to respond to it,” Brown said. “Our survival has been based on our ability to resist it and respond and navigate around it.”
In Georgia, about nine in 10 Black men voted for Bottoms, according to the AP Voter Poll. By comparison, about three-quarters supported then-Vice President Kamala Harris in her 2024 presidential loss to Trump. In Clayton County in metro Atlanta, where about two-thirds of the population is Black, Bottoms received almost 86,000 votes — about 13,600 more than Democrat Stacey Abrams, who is also Black, received in her 2022 race for governor.
The changes among Black men this year were big enough to shift Black voters overall. About nine in 10 Black voters supported the Democratic candidate in their local U.S. House race this year, up from about eight in 10 who supported Harris in 2024.
Black women’s support stayed steadier because they were one of the few groups that didn’t shift meaningfully toward Trump in 2024.
After slavery was abolished, Black Americans entered Congress and other elective offices during Reconstruction, but disenfranchisement, violence and discriminatory laws helped severely erode that representation. Now, more than 160 years since Reconstruction and 61 years since the Voting Rights Act, they are serving in more statewide positions in which diverse voting blocs are their constituents.
This year, the Supreme Court’s weakening of the Voting Rights Act led Congressional Black Caucus leaders to warn they could lose up to 19 seats, roughly a third of their total roster. But with votes still being tallied, their potential losses nationally appeared well short of that.
Harris, the first Black woman to hold nationwide office, said the results should be “a huge wake-up call” for the Democratic Party.
“I’ve long believed that we have failed to put the resources into Southern states” because of a “misdirected perception of who the people in those states are and what they want,” Harris said this week.
Abrams, who twice lost races for Georgia governor, said the results — the wins and the losses — validate what she’s argued for nearly two decades about investing in organizations in Southern and Sun Belt states.
“You weren’t talking about massive margins,” she said of losses in Louisiana, Florida and Tennessee. “When we underinvest, especially states with significant populations of color, we throttle our own ability to expand the map.”
Bottoms also embraced the significance of the moment, recalling that she traced her family lineage to an antebellum plantation in Crawfordville, the Georgia town that produced the vice president of the Confederacy.
“Tonight should remind us all that no matter what community we come from, Georgia is not defined by one moment in time or by one person,” she said. “It’s been defined by all of us, and I will be a governor for everyone in this state.”
Bill Barrow, Kim Chandler and Kate Brumback write for the Associated Press. Wave staff and Associated Press writers Jack Brook, Gary Fields, Linley Sanders and Corey Williams contributed to this report.
