Blacklash

From the day after the 1997 General Election, the Daily Telegraph was avowedly in favour of the elected second chamber and the same-sex marriage to which the Blair and Brown Governments were expressly opposed throughout their existence. But if, as Alex Phillips would now have it, the Telegraph really had been taken over by the Communist Party, then it would be unbending both in its support of Brexit and in its opposition to NATO and its war in Ukraine, to all of the wars being waged by Israel, to assisted suicide, to gender self-identification, to prostitution including pornography, and to commercial surrogacy, as well as to any drug legalisation at least as envisaged by the Liberal Democrats and the Green Party, by the SNP and Plaid Cymru, by Nigel Farage and Lee Anderson, or by the Institute of Economic Affairs and the Adam Smith Institute. Phillips is a GB News insider, so I for one await the new roster of Telegraph columnists with breath so baited that I fear for my life. After all, Axel Springer SE also owns Politico, in which Jonathan Martin writes of a phenomenon that corresponds to the record Arab turnout to remove from power Benjamin Netanyahu, Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir:

The first hint appeared in the 2025 elections, when Democrats won larger-than-expected margins in Virginia and New Jersey. Then, beginning early this year, the turnout numbers in primaries were unmistakable. And now, the story is blaring in neon as early and absentee votes soar. Black voters are fired up, ready to go and poised to turn a good night on Tuesday for Democrats into a Blue Tsunami.

Their motivation can be traced to President Donald Trump’s return to power and then back-to-back events: the White House-led effort to dilute minority-heavy districts to elect more Republicans and the Supreme Court’s gutting of the Voting Rights Act. “Trump has tried to neuter them,” former President Bill Clinton told me about Black voters. “You know, he did all that reapportionment, which really infuriated them. And everybody knows that he’s turned the Justice Department into a political operation, not a justice operation.” As Clinton explained, there’s something else at play — an unmistakable and all-too-familiar whiff in the air. “Historically discriminated against groups have an uncanny feel detector to them,” as he put it.

I spoke to the former president — who has been working on or running in Southern campaigns for about 60 of his 80 years — Friday night. He had just addressed the capacity crowd of a Tupelo church-turned-event-center that still bears the stained glass of its old tenant but, unlike most churches, was nearly evenly split between Black and white supporters for Clinton’s appearance. He was there to stump for Scott Colom, a local prosecutor giving a lackluster GOP incumbent, Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, a stronger-than-expected challenge. In typical Clinton fashion, he used his speech to joyfully jump on Hyde-Smith’s comment that, instead of confronting high beef prices, voters should consider other proteins. “I don’t believe we need a senator to explain the existence of chicken,” Clinton deadpanned, calling her remark “a shopping tip, not a policy.” 

Since the start of October, I have visited Florida, Texas, Georgia, Mississippi and South Carolina, states that for the most part I never thought I’d set foot in during a midterm election. Battleground Texarkana was not on my bingo card. Yet the combination of poor or mediocre GOP candidates, better-than-average Democrats and, most of all, the sour national political environment for Republicans has surprisingly thrust these states into play. The biggest driver, for Black people and everybody else, is of course the cost of living. Gas and groceries are the same forbidding price for every voter. Yet the policies making life less affordable can feel targeted at Black Americans, especially in working-class communities.

“The current government has attacked almost every income stream that this community has to survive,” said Eddie Boykin, citing health care cuts and the sting of inflation caused by Trump’s tariffs and the Iran war. Boykin, an Air Force veteran who pastors a Black church in Lancaster, South Carolina, said he sees the strain among his flock: “It’s money — they’re hurting.” There is something deeper going on, though. I began to glimpse it when I visited a Black church with David Jolly, the Florida Democrat running for governor, at the start of the month. And I’ve seen it in every state since: angry but energized Black voters — many surprisingly young — showing up at events.

It’s a shift from 2024, when Trump roughly doubled his share of young Black men. But now, with Trump in office, many of the Black voters I met were voicing frustration with the Republicans in power. The mantra, across dozens of interviews in those states, was a desire for “change.” That word, as clear as it is broad, is also somewhat benign, expressive but safe enough to offer to a white journalist. To press a little more, though, is to find a determination. It’s one borne of history. And it shouldn’t be surprising. In fact, I warned Republicans in a column earlier this year about the unintended consequences, namely galvanizing Black voters, they were tempting with their redistricting push. It was bound to infuriate Black Americans and particularly those community leaders already uneasy with the shift in power in Washington.

“I think they really feel, the vulnerable people, doubly vulnerable because they don’t have the Congress, and because of all these decisions the Supreme Court made,” Clinton told me. In Mississippi, the short-lived effort to draw longtime Rep. Bennie Thompson, the state’s only Democratic lawmaker, out of his seat drew blowback. “It didn’t get much national attention, but it did in Mississippi,” Colom told me. “People were like, ‘Holy moly, why are y’all saying he can’t be our congressman? Why don’t you just beat him? Why you gotta draw the lines up to say that we don’t get to pick our person?’” Walking into a rally outside Atlanta featuring former President Barack Obama, Andre Dickens, the city’s mayor, said the combination of higher prices and seemingly punitive policies had “really made people distrust the Republicans in office — distrust is high.” As dozens of people, many of them Black, were turned away from an event that was at capacity over an hour before it began, Dickens said: “Black folks are fed up.”

Sitting backstage in Tyler, Texas — following a James Talarico event so large I thought people had mistaken it for an Earl Campbell homecoming — a local official put it even more bluntly earlier in October. “The campaign that we have really run is not one that has been in public view, and that’s just the way we want it,” Ralph Caraway Sr., a Smith County commissioner, told me. “We want them to think, ‘Well, [Black Americans] are not going to vote, they’re apathetic about voting.’ And so what we’ve done, we’ve camouflaged it intentionally because they tried to do all they could to keep us from voting.” The camo is gone now. By casting far more ballots than expected by strategists in either party, Black voters are fundamentally shifting the midterm landscape, nudging swing states left and making red states suddenly competitive. With white votes lagging so far, Republicans are confronting an increasingly dire scenario — mobilize their conservative base on election day or face once-in-a-generation losses. 

The GOP’s problem is especially acute across the South, where the electorate is most inelastic. Republican victories there are predicated on driving up turnout among whites and winning them overwhelmingly, to stave off a Black vote that’s almost wholly Democratic but typically ebbs in non-presidential years. But GOP candidates are at risk on all three fronts this year: Early balloting suggests they’re facing a turnout deficit; polls indicate they’re bleeding some white support; and Black participation is overwhelming. In the Carolinas, Georgia, Florida and even Louisiana, Black voters’ early balloting is far exceeding their showing in the last midterm election, which fundamentally changes what percent of each state’s total vote they comprise. “It changes everything because it changes the sea level,” explained James Carville, the Democratic strategist who’s been crowing in his Cajunese about Black turnout trends since the first primaries this spring.

There’s still time for GOP candidates to push their sleepy voters. And a good-enough election day showing by Republicans will likely prevent electoral catastrophe in the most racially polarized Southern states, such as Louisiana and Mississippi. However, it’s likely too late for Republicans in races across Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia and Texas, while South Carolina and Florida are now teetering and hang in the balance. “I’ve never seen anything like this before,” said GOP strategist Mark Harris. Harris, who’s working on campaigns to include state legislative races in North Carolina and Florida, called me unprompted Friday because the numbers were so stunning. “We’re looking at the potential of presidential-level Black turnout.”

Six days before the election, over a quarter of Black Southerners had already voted. That’s a rate that was higher than turnout from the overall electorate, according to Harris’ research. At the same point in 2022, Black turnout trailed the overall rate by just under three points; in 2024, it lagged by nearly six. The motivation may have first been on display in the primary season, but it wasn’t obvious in the polling. As Clinton told me about negative or fear-based enthusiasm, “it’s hard to poll that.” Terrance Woodbury, a Democratic pollster, knows that all too well. Woodbury had tried to measure Black engagement in polls and focus groups by asking about enthusiasm but determined that was “not a good proxy for turnout,” as he put it. 

So he asked a different question: “How much power do you think your vote has to make a difference?” Responses to that question began to rise during the initial GOP redistricting push last year and surged after the high court’s voting rights decision. As telling was one memorable focus group for Woodbury, who has coined the term “blacklash.” One Black voter likened casting a ballot to taking out the trash — a vital but not joy-inducing responsibility. “He said something like, ‘If you don’t do it, shit starts to stink around here.’ That doesn’t sound like enthusiasm, but it sounds like he knows the assignment,” Woodbury said.

Black votes could help propel Democrats to the unlikeliest of victories in the South Carolina Senate race and would land even more stunning upsets in Mississippi, Florida and Louisiana, where Democrats have Black Senate nominees. This year could also finally end the country’s longstanding reluctance to elect Black governors. With the certain reelection of Maryland’s Wes Moore, the only sitting African American chief executive, it’s possible there could be as many as six Black governors next year. One of them may be a Republican, should Byron Donalds prevail in Florida, and in South Carolina the Black Democrat running could at least drive turnout to propel Annie Andrews, who’s running for the Senate.

“I knew I’d be the person to excite people, to get them out to vote,” Jermaine Johnson, the South Carolina state lawmaker running for governor, told me — adding with a laugh that if he acts the role of blocking back for Andrews’s electoral touchdown, “they better call me and thank me.” One of them may be Georgia’s Keisha Lance Bottoms, who at a rally last week outside Atlanta recalled riding as a child in her parents’ car past the governor’s mansion and wondering if she could ever live there. “Yes You Can!” a group of Black women in the audience began chanting before the rest of the arena picked up the tune. Roy Cooper and Jon Ossoff are all but locks to win Senate races in North Carolina and Georgia, respectively, and James Talarico is increasingly likely to prevail in Texas, too.

Talarico drew crowds in Texarkana and Tyler that were extraordinary for their size in otherwise conservative East Texas communities and for the racial and generational breadth of the audiences. Yet for the older attendees, memories of Jim Crow weren’t far off. Helen Walker-Spiller said she was “shocked” at the Supreme Court’s voting rights decision and “disappointed” because the franchise had always been sacred in her family. Walker-Spiller lived in Texarkana, but she said her grandmother was a sharecropper in South Arkansas who had never voted even though she was alive to see her children and grandchildren go to the polls. “I can never forget her eyes when she saw we had gone to vote,” Walker-Spiller recalled.

Waiting in line before Talarico’s Tyler rally, Ruby Kendrick, a physical therapist who grew up nearby, said: “I grew up in the Civil Rights era, so I know what voter suppression looks like. And that’s what’s been going on. And I’m not happy with it. I know the drill.” A Talarico win paired with Jolly springing an upset in Florida would represent the most consequential storyline of this midterm, Democrats picking the GOP’s electoral lock on the two biggest prizes of the Sun Belt outside California. And if it happens, it will be because of lackluster Republican performance, pre-Trump Republicans drifting away and Hispanics shifting back to Democrats. But a historic night, or even a good one, would not have happened without the Blacklash. As Woodbury said, 2026 is about to show that “the South got something to say.”