Can the ‘Senate Six’ Beat Voter Suppression and Democratic Disinvestment?

The results among Black Democratic candidates in the South may provide fresh clues about the direction of the party and the country.

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It’s an inflection point that has garnered little attention through the pandemic haze and Donald Trump’s verbal grenades: Six African American Democrats are vying for Senate seats, five of them in the South, the most Black candidates running for the U.S. Senate since Reconstruction. Their presence on the ballot is a triumph for a party that has willingly taken Black votes but not run many Black candidates.

Of the seats contested, only New Jersey seems a surefire win. Sen. Cory Booker is busy doing what proven vote-getting senators with safe seats and $24 million in the bank do, making appearances for Joe Biden and raising money for his fellow Senate contenders.

The Southern terrain for the Democrats is more uneven. Marquita Bradshaw in Tennessee, Jaime Harrison in South Carolina, Mike Espy in Mississippi, Adrian Perkins in Louisiana, and the Rev. Raphael Warnock in Georgia each face complex electoral circumstances. Only ten African Americans have ever served in the Senate, half of them in the past decade. Only three have been from the South and just one, Tim Scott of South Carolina, since Reconstruction.

The Republicans who control most of those Southern states have employed tactics echoing the devices their forebears built to separate African Americans from their constitutional rights. Changing demographics and motivated voters suffering Trump exhaustion may mitigate some, but not all, of the effects of voter suppression. However, no matter how these candidates fare, it’s clear that Democrats need to start focusing their energies on the South.

Can any of these candidates overcome voter suppression?

The Solid South, the red one that Lyndon Johnson created when he signed the Voting Rights Act in 1965, is crumbling fast, revealing a tapestry of voters with new ideas that unnerve white supremacist power brokers. The images of people wanting to vote beaten bloody in the 1950s and ’60s run together with the Charlottesville riots, the Mother Emanuel massacre, and Ahmaud Arbery’s murder. But in 2020, the South is not, nor has it ever been, the lone culprit in America’s racial horror show.

The ongoing reverse migration of the descendants of the African Americans who fled white terrorism has reshaped the Southern electorate. Black transplants from Chicago, Detroit, Milwaukee, New York, Philadelphia, and Boston have relocated to Southern cities, nudging them in a more progressive direction. Latino immigrants have settled in the region, and their children come of age expecting to have voting rights respected. Many Northern white newcomers bring their liberal expectations with them.

Raphael Warnock, a champion of a more diverse “New South,” is a beneficiary of those demographic shifts. Georgia is well on the way to being a majority-minority Southern state. If Warnock is not the outright victor in the special-election race to replace retired Sen. Johnny Isakson, he is likely to be one of the top two in the 20-candidate “nonpartisan blanket primary” (aka jungle primary) contest. If no one gets 50 percent of the vote, the top two advance to a runoff in early January.

Warnock is a son of Savannah, and successor to Martin Luther King Sr. and his martyred son in the pulpit of Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church. He is a longtime civil rights advocate who waged campaigns to press for climate change strategies and voting rights alongside Stacey Abrams, the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial candidate.

Warnock finds that COVID-19 weighs heavy on the minds of voters. Eight rural hospitals have closed in Georgia in the last decade, including one last week in Randolph County, a majority-Black county of 6,800 residents. “The virus has devastated the Black community in ways that are disproportionate,” says Warnock. “But as I move across disaffected, rural communities across Georgia, white sisters and brothers are suffering and wondering why the conversation in Washington is so disconnected from their actual lives.”

Jaime Harrison, a veteran South Carolina Democrat from rural Orangeburg, has shocked the political cognoscenti from Hilton Head to Hollywood. He’s banked $100 million, the most any candidate has raised for a Senate run in U.S. history. A former aide to Rep. Jim Clyburn, the third-ranking Democrat in the House, Harrison helmed the South Carolina Democratic Party for four years as its first African American chairman, cultivating a strong statewide and national fundraising base that’s reflected in his current campaign’s successes.

Harrison has avoided taking on President Trump, focusing instead on further eroding the waning enthusiasm for incumbent Sen. Lindsey Graham, who has morphed from a moderate bipartisan statesman on issues like immigration into a faithful Trump lapdog. Graham has pulled in nearly $70 million in contributions, but that may not be nearly enough.

“He’s kind of flailing around begging for money on TV,” says Chris Kromm, executive director of the Institute for Southern Studies, a North Carolina–based research and media center. “He’s just coming across as kind of a desperate candidate.” The national disgust for Graham among partisan Democrats, particularly after he shepherded Amy Coney Barrett through her Supreme Court confirmation, is likely driving a lot of the donations to Harrison.

Who wins could come down to this: Can white South Carolinians accept being represented by two Black senators? Journalist Issac Bailey, author of Why Didn’t We Riot?: A Black Man in Trumpland, explains, “An interesting thing about us here is Tim Scott, he actually won in spite of the Black vote, whereas Harrison would get that Black vote.” Harrison, Bailey says, needs a massive turnout of Black voters, especially in the Lowcountry in the south, to counteract the cities of Spartanburg and Greenville near the North Carolina border, which tend to be more conservative.

In Mississippi, former congressman and Clinton agriculture secretary Mike Espy has enjoyed a late-inning surge against Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith. On Wednesday, Espy embarked on a five-day bus tour of the state, kicking off in his hometown of Yazoo City in his old Mississippi Delta congressional district. He has jetted past Hyde-Smith’s fundraising haul with more than $9 million raised to her nearly $3 million; he pulled in $200,000 in a single day after the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Two polls show Espy behind by one point or eight points, respectively, down from 25 points behind earlier this year. As in much of the country, health care is a key issue in a high-poverty state that has not expanded Medicaid, and where COVID-19 cases among whites with lax mask-wearing and social-distancing habits have increased. Cases among Blacks declined once they adopted the recommended protection protocols. Proclaiming that “debates are a topic that losing candidates and reporters care about,” Hyde-Smith has also embarked on a bus tour and expects to ride Donald Trump’s coattails back to Washington.

To win, Espy needs a historic high turnout of Black voters and more than a 20 percent margin among whites.

Frustrated with Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy’s inaction on the COVID-19 recession, Shreveport Mayor Adrian Perkins jumped into the Senate contest this summer. The 35-year-old West Point and Harvard Law graduate is a latecomer playing catch-up in a 14-candidate race to oust Cassidy (who refused to debate unless his challengers could join him). Like Hyde-Smith, he’s kept a low profile.

Cassidy, a doctor, is the perfect pitchman for the administration’s atrocious COVID-19 posture. He has downplayed the virus’s severity, flouted mask protocols, and supported individual state-level response over a coordinated federal action. To no one’s surprise, Cassidy has contracted COVID-19. “We’ve got a senator with a complete disregard for this virus,” says Perkins. “Being a medical doctor like he should know better.”

Perkins also has been the beneficiary of a late boost in campaign contributions and attention from top Democrats. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer as well as Sens. Tim Kaine and Elizabeth Warren all hosted fundraisers. Perkins’s three-month window of visibility will likely not be long enough to give him the momentum he needs in this race, but it will raise his profile for future statewide bids.

Democratic voters shook up Tennessee’s open-seat race when they gave the nod to progressive Marquita Bradshaw of Memphis, the first African American woman to secure a major-party statewide nomination. The environmental advocate who grew up near a Superfund site vanquished a well-funded Democratic opponent on less than $25,000. Both Bradshaw and her Republican opponent, businessman Bill Hagerty, are new to politics.

Sending a Democrat to Washington wouldn’t be out of character for Tennessee, where Al Gore and Republican moderates like Howard Baker and Lamar Alexander can prevail. But running explicitly on Medicare for All and the Green New Deal is a gambit for Bradshaw that Joe Biden and her fellow Southerners have steered away from in this hyper-partisan 2020 election season.

Can any of these candidates overcome voter suppression? Democrats are on a path to win the demographic race in the long run, which is why state and local election officials are working overtime to shore up the last vestiges of their power. In Georgia, reforms like “motor voter” registration have made voting easier. But once registered, state and local officials switch gears. “Voter suppression is not unique to Georgia,” says Warnock. “But Georgia is very good at it.”

Take Macon-Bibb County’s latest move: The county board of elections implemented a new rule requiring that groups observing voters at polling locations remain 25 feet away at all times unless a voter initiates contact. County officials say that the measure protects voters. But according to Nse Ufot of the New Georgia Project, officials designed the rule to prevent election observers from offering water or pizza to people standing in line for hours. “The overwhelming participation that we see in large part is a response to the voter suppression,” says Ufot.

Harrison, South Carolina’s Hundred Million Dollar man, won’t be immune to voter suppression, either. Bailey, who stood in line for two hours in coastal Horry County to vote, notes that voter ID laws have deterred older people who can’t or don’t want to get identification. A lower court eliminated an absentee ballot witnessing requirement in an attempt to relax restrictions during the pandemic, but the Supreme Court reversed that ruling in early October. In Mississippi, Espy is up against very limited exceptions to prohibitions on absentee voting during the pandemic. Early voting does not exist.

The money sloshing around Harrison and Booker points out one of the major flaws in the Democratic Party’s national calculus. There has been a long-term failure to cultivate new voters and build a bench of next-generation Black candidates like Bradshaw and Perkins, or promote seasoned veterans like Espy and Warnock. The party has overly relied on white candidates (the more independently funded the better) in the South, since it has yet to abandon the fallacy that Black candidates cannot win in the region.

Early-voting enthusiasm does not necessarily translate into Democratic votes: The South is conservative, a fact that cannot be ignored and one that often transcends race.

With moribund state parties in places like Mississippi, nurturing a diverse generation of candidates has been left to pioneering young politicians and advocacy groups. “A lot of these [GOP] lawmakers have just been going through the motions in the Southern states,” says Kromm. “And, in some ways, progressive Democrats have kind of enabled that, by not taking a risk.”

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Moreover, Kromm cautions that early-voting enthusiasm does not necessarily translate into Democratic votes: The South is conservative, a fact that cannot be ignored and one that often transcends race. If Democrats want electoral success in the South, they must devote the resources and come up with coordinated plans to build those conduits. Georgia is a prime example of how advocates like Stacey Abrams built groups like the New Georgia Project and Fair Fight, not only to push candidates to Washington but to cycle lawmakers into the state legislature, where they can begin to dismantle the tactics that facilitate voter suppression.

“What would have happened if there had been a slightly longer-term vision and investment in organizations that are mobilizing young voters, voters of color, a progressive coalition and network within the states ten years ago?” says Kromm. “What if those people had been voting election after election, if they were a solid base that had been developed? We would be in a much different place.”

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