Why the SCOTUS decision on Alabama voting rights is a 'game changer' for Dems in 2024, according to an expert

Black voters who challenged a Republican-drawn congressional district map in Alabama were handed a major victory Thursday when the U.S. Supreme Court found that the state violated a federal civil rights law that bars racial discrimination in voting.

In an unexpected 5-4 ruling by the conservative-majority court, the justices decided not to further dilute the protections of the Voting Rights Act, which the court had done twice in the past decade.

The opinion was written by Chief Justice John Roberts, a Republican appointee who has led the Supreme Court in previously restricting and overturning parts of the Voting Rights Act.

“We find Alabama’s new approach to Section 2 [of the Voting Rights Act] compelling neither in theory nor in practice,” he wrote.

Conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh joined Roberts and the court’s three liberal justices: Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.

Thursday’s decision upholds a lower court’s ruling that the congressional district map must be redrawn. Alabama lawmakers had passed a newly drawn map to reflect the 2020 census, with just one majority-Black district even though Black residents make up 27% of the state’s population. The remaining Black voters were dispersed among the other six congressional districts.

“In an era of highly polarized voting and highly polarized geography, [voting maps] are destiny,” Dave Wasserman, senior editor for the Cook Political Report, told Yahoo News. “The way maps are drawn determines who wins them in November in 80% to 90% of cases.”

Wasserman spoke with Yahoo News about what the political implications could be for the 2024 election as a result of the justices’ decision in the Alabama voting rights case. Some responses have been edited for length and clarity.

The Cook Political Report changed five House races from solid Republican to toss-up following the SCOTUS Alabama decision. How will this impact the 2024 election?

“It’s almost never that seats move from solid Republican to solid Democrat overnight. In this case, it’s still unclear which Republican seats are going to be axed or reconfigured in order to make way for additional Black-majority districts,” Wasserman explained.

“But we moved the members that are in the most geographic jeopardy into the toss-up column. That doesn’t mean that Democrats are going to gain four seats across [Alabama and Louisiana],” he said. “It just means that at the end of the day, one seat in each state is going to end up in a solid Democrat column. We just don’t know which ones yet.”

How else could the SCOTUS decision reverberate beyond Alabama in the 2024 election?

“A federal case [in Louisiana] essentially went on hold when the Supreme Court took up the Alabama case because they were so similar,” Wasserman told Yahoo News. “It’s pretty straightforward to draw a second Black-majority district in Louisiana, so I think that’s very likely.

“The other two states I’m watching, Georgia and South Carolina, are less clear-cut,” Wasserman said. Both states also have pending racial gerrymandering cases.

Why are the seats all in the South?

Southern states are typically made up of white Republican majorities, with large Black populations that lean heavily Democratic. Republican-dominated state legislatures across the South redrew congressional district maps after the 2020 census to maximize Republican seats.

“Political parties always seek to maximize their own power. Until this [SCOTUS] decision, the way that Republicans in Alabama and Louisiana did so was by packing as many Black voters, who are highly Democratic, into single districts as possible,” Wasserman said, referring to gerrymandering.

The Supreme Court held that the way Alabama’s map was drawn diluted the power of Black voters. The decision reaffirmed Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which bars racial discrimination in voting practices.

Are there any states where this SCOTUS decision could net Republicans more seats?

“No,” Wasserman said simply.

What other big implications could this SCOTUS decision have on the 2024 election?

During the 2022 midterms, North Carolina Republicans gained control of the state Supreme Court and overturned an earlier decision by the Democratic-controlled court that said the state’s 2022 congressional map was the result of partisan gerrymandering.

“Republicans have a very tenuous [House] majority and they’re very likely to draw a new gerrymander in North Carolina [with a GOP-led majority] to pad their margin and seek to maximize their seats to guard against losses elsewhere,” Wasserman said. “Now, this latest ruling probably at least partially offsets that. So it’s a game changer for Democrats.

“This [Alabama] ruling not only has the potential to offset the changes in North Carolina, but it could also impact Republicans’ thinking in North Carolina when they go to draw the map later this summer. Republicans could be more risk-averse and decide that they don’t want to target the Democrat from a substantially Black district, Don Davis,” Wasserman told Yahoo News.