With all the confusion over how we’re going to vote, the only thing that could have made this year’s Georgia elections a bigger mess would have been to start tinkering with the state’s congressional and legislative maps.
Gov. Brian Kemp wisely chose last week to avoid that option in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s long-anticipated ruling limiting the reach of the Voting Rights Act. Unlike the governors of Alabama, Tennessee and Mississippi, he avoided calling for a special session to change the state’s maps immediately. Although he applauded the ruling, Kemp said it was too late for Georgia to take up a map change this year.
In so doing, Kemp did both parties a favor. The ruling poses a gigantic problem for Democrats nationally, but Republicans need to think long and hard about how they want to take advantage of it at the state level.
The Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965, but the first congressional election conducted under the expanded version of the act, which the high court threw out last week, was in 1992. Two new African-American Democrats, Cynthia McKinney and Sanford Bishop, joined John Lewis on the state’s congressional delegation, which had grown to 11 after that decade’s reapportionment.
In that same election, Newt Gingrich was joined by three new Republican members: Jack Kingston, Mac Collins and John Linder. Future Gov. Nathan Deal was elected to Congress that year as well, but he was still a Democrat.
In the testy redistricting session preceding the 1992 elections, some white Democrats openly suspected McKinney and other black Democrats of colluding with the Republicans to produce the new map. Whether that was true or not, Republican and African-American candidates benefited from the map, which a federal court shortly ruled to be an unlawful racial gerrymander.
There was a Republican wave coming anyway, but the point is that the GOP’s huge gains in the South in the 1990s coincided with new rules that said that wherever black-majority districts could be drawn, they had to be.
Those rules have now changed again, with the outcome less certain than either side might believe.
The African-American percentage of the population in Alabama and Louisiana hasn’t changed much since the VRA was passed in 1965. In Georgia, the percentage has risen from 29 to 33 percent, which would vastly complicate any effort to pack in or unwind black voting strength here. That’s not to say that when the issue is taken up before the 2028 election, the effort won’t be made.
The Civil Rights Movement and its aftermath took place over decades, which also saw a steady decline in union membership and political clout, and with that a national political debate that was more race than class-based. Last week’s dramatic weakening of the VRA comes at a time when a new class politics, with a modernized lexicon of terms like “oligarchs” and “Silicon Valley,” is taking shape.
Recently, Dario Amodei, CEO of the artificial intelligence company Anthropic, warned that rapid advances in AI may be creating a “permanent underclass” of workers no longer qualified for all but the most menial jobs. Possibly by the end of this year or the next, he expects AI development to achieve Artificial General Intelligence, a genius level which could put even Nobel Prize winners at risk of losing their jobs. When the oligarchs are talking this way, you hardly need union organizers to stir up class frictions.
What happens when members of the new permanent underclass find themselves in hurriedly drawn congressional districts with members of the old permanent underclass? Will they find common ground, or will racial divisions prevail? That’s a question which could loom large over the coming decade.
