Last week, I wrote a piece on the long-deferred arrival of a biracial New South. I left out one important piece of history and one related piece of unfinished business going forward.
In fact, thanks to the power of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which has now been gutted by the Supreme Court, there was an interlude of two-party, biracial politics in the Deep South beginning in the 1970s. Among the New South Democratic governors, racially liberal and economically moderate, elected by a coalition of whites and newly enfranchised Black voters in the 1970s, were Reubin Askew of Florida, Dale Bumpers and David Pryor of Arkansas, Jimmy Carter of Georgia, and Edwin Edwards of Louisiana.
A second wave of Democrats elected to statehouses and the U.S. Congress in the 1980s included Bob Graham of Florida, Dave Treen of Louisiana, William Winter of Mississippi, Richard Riley of South Carolina, Chuck Robb of Virginia, and Bill Clinton of Arkansas.
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When Clinton became head of the Democratic Leadership Council in 1990, he argued that Democrats needed to move to the center nationally, in part to elect more Democrats in the South. As president, Clinton indeed governed as a centrist; but the number of Democrats elected from the South, as either governor or senator, dwindled to exactly zero by 2014.
What happened?
The New South died prematurely in part due to the destruction of the Voting Rights Act. Even before the Supreme Court overturned its key provisions, Republican Presidents Nixon and Reagan, and later both Bushes, and their Justice Departments, ceased enforcing it and weighed in on the wrong side of court battles. Whenever they could get away with it, Southern counties resorted to ploys such as at-large seats, to dilute Black voting strength.
In 2013, Chief Justice John Roberts was the prime author of Shelby County v. Holder, making the bogus argument that the white South had so mended its racist ways that Justice Department preclearance was no longer necessary. No sooner was the ink dry than many Southern jurisdictions resorted to their old tricks. In dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg memorably wrote, “Throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.”
In the 2021 case Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, the Court made it next to impossible to use Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act to challenge discriminatory laws that restrict voting rights. To add further injury to insult, in April 2026 the Supreme Court, in Louisiana v. Callais, gave its blessing to deliberate racial gerrymandering.
But why did Southern support for Democrats collapse well before the judicial assault on the Voting Rights Act? According to an authoritative research paper by the eminent economic historian Gavin Wright, another major culprit was globalization, both NAFTA and a companion trade deal that sacrificed the Southern textile industry. The prime sponsor of both was Democrat Bill Clinton.
Wright wrote that in the 1990s, “the manufacturing industries that had formed the core of the regional economy began their historic descent in response to import competition. In southern politics, trade policy was front and center. One highly visible object was NAFTA, enacted in November 1993 with vigorous backing from President Clinton … The origins of the pact were bipartisan, but Clinton took most of the blame, and Democrats voting in favor suffered badly at the polls in 1994.”
Even more damaging, Wright added, was “the 1994 Agreement on Textile and Clothing, negotiated as part of the WTO’s Uruguay Round. The agreement phased out the import quotas of the Multi-Fibre Arrangement (MFA),” which killed the Southern textile industry.
A wave year like 2026 can offset some of the damage, both of the Democrats’ record as corporate globalists and of the gutting of the Voting Rights Act. Black voters turned out in record numbers despite the crippling of the VRA. The great gerrymander caper ended in a net loss for Republicans. But not all years will be like 2026.
Even with the Democratic wave, Republican success in breaking up historically majority-Black districts will leave the new Congress with fewer Black representatives (48) than the current one (51).
So one piece of unfinished business for Congress and the next Democratic president is to restore and strengthen the VRA. The proposed John Lewis Act, named for the great civil rights leader and former member of Congress, would create a new framework to determine which jurisdictions with a history of voting discrimination are subject to preclearance. And it would restore Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.
Presumably, the Supreme Court would strike down the John Lewis Act. But as the fictional character Mr. Dooley famously observed, “The Supreme Court follows the election results.” In 1938, the Supreme Court stopped overturning New Deal legislation not because FDR succeeded in packing the Court but because he made a half-hearted foray at it. Wags termed the Court’s shift “the switch in time that saved nine.”
Would the Roberts Court do likewise? We’ll soon find out, as other decisions come down, well before Congress and a Democratic president can get the John Lewis Act passed into law. Otherwise, there is nothing sacrosanct about nine justices.
