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      Supreme Court Declines to Revisit Alabama Voting Map Dispute

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      For the second time in recent months, the Supreme Court ruled against Alabama lawmakers and their proposed congressional district map.The Supreme Court on Tuesday refused Alabama’s request to reinstate a congressional map drawn by Republican lawmakers that had only one majority-Black district, paving the way for a new map to be put in place before the 2024 election.Alabama’s request to keep its map was the second time in under a year that it had asked the Supreme Court to affirm a limited role of race in establishing voting districts for federal elections in what amounted to a defiant repudiation of lower-court rulings. In the latest twist in the case, the lower court had found that the state had brazenly flouted its directive to create a second majority-Black district or something “close to it.”The court’s order gave no reasons, which is often the case when the justices decide on emergency applications. The ruling clears the way for a special master and court-appointed cartographer to create a new map.The outcome of the dispute could ultimately tip the balance of the House, where Republicans hold a thin majority. The trajectory of the case is also being closely watched by lawmakers in Washington and other states where similar battles are playing out.In a surprise decision in June, the Supreme Court found that Alabama had hurt Black voters in drawing its voting map, reaffirming part of a landmark civil rights law.Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., who has long been skeptical of race-conscious decision making, wrote the majority opinion. Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh joined him, along with the courts three liberal justices — Ketanji Brown Jackson, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.At issue was Alabama’s congressional map. Its Republican-controlled legislature sliced up the state into seven districts, continuing to maintain only one majority Black district, although about a quarter of state’s population is Black.After the Supreme Court’s decision, state lawmakers scrambled to draw a new map. Over the objections of Democrats, the legislature pushed through a version that changed district boundaries but that did not include an additional majority-Black district. Instead, it increased the percentage of Black voters in one district to about 40 percent, from about 30 percent.The federal three-judge panel overseeing the case found lawmakers had, yet again, likely violated the Voting Rights Act of 1965.“The law requires the creation of an additional district that affords Black Alabamians, like everyone else, a fair and reasonable opportunity to elect candidates of their choice,” the panel wrote. The judges added that the Legislature’s proposal “plainly fails to do so.”In asking the Supreme Court to intervene, Alabama’s attorney general, Steve Marshall, acknowledged that the Legislature had not added a second majority-Black district to its map as dictated by the federal court, but said its new map still complied with the law.Unless the court acted, he wrote, “the state will have no meaningful opportunity to appeal before the 2023 plan is replaced by a court-drawn map that no state could constitutionally enact.”In their brief, the plaintiffs, including a group of Black voters and advocacy organizations, urged the justices to reject Alabama’s request for relief and said the state had “unabashedly” sought to defy the courts using “recycled arguments.”After the Supreme Court’s decision in June, the plaintiffs wrote, Alabama’s Legislature had drawn its plan in secret, with no opportunity for public comment, and had enacted it “over alternative plans that were supported by Black Alabamians.”“Disagreement with this court’s ruling is not a valid reason to defy it — and certainly not a basis for a grant of an emergency stay application,” they wrote. More

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      A Legal Battle Over Political Maps in Alabama, Georgia and Louisiana

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      G.O.P. legislatures in Alabama, Georgia and Louisiana are contesting federal orders to redraw congressional maps that disfavor Black voters. The stakes are enormous.WASHINGTON — The Republican-led legislatures of Georgia, Louisiana and Alabama find themselves backed against courtroom walls this month in strikingly similar circumstances, defending congressional maps that federal judges have said appear to discriminate against Black voters.It is a familiar position. Last year, the same judges said that, even before full trials were held, the same maps were so likely illegal that replacements should be used for the 2022 elections. That did not happen: Thanks to a once-obscure Supreme Court rule that outlaws election-law changes close to campaign season, the disputed maps were used anyway.With an electorate so deeply split along partisan lines that few House races are competitive, the significance last November was glaring. Republicans took control of the House of Representatives by a bare five seats, three of them from districts they were poised to lose had new maps been used in the three states.Now the revived litigation is again churning through the courts — at least six of them, at last count — with the same political stakes and a sharply divided view of the likely outcomes.Each of the cases asks the same question: whether the Republican-dominated legislatures drew maps that effectively boxed Black voters out of having a chance of electing a candidate in one additional congressional district. The 1965 Voting Rights Act bars maps that have that effect.A map of a Republican proposal to redraw Alabama’s congressional districts in July at the Alabama Statehouse in Montgomery.Kim Chandler/Associated PressMany redistricting experts say they believe the cases against the states are so strong that the states are left to pursue a hail-Mary legal strategy, hoping that delays and repeated appeals will maintain the status quo as they did in 2022.“Republicans in these three states are trying to run out the clock as long as they can to use invalidated maps” in 2024, said Jeffrey Wice, a senior fellow at the Census and Redistricting Institute at New York Law School.Some lawyers for the states, who did not want to speak publicly while litigation is pending, take issue with that interpretation. And one veteran litigator for Republicans in voting rights cases, Michael A. Carvin, said their arguments are stronger than their opponents think.Mr. Carvin, who successfully argued a major Voting Rights Act case before the Supreme Court in 2021, said he believed the states’ opponents were seeking “a dramatic change in the current redistricting plans” that higher courts were unlikely to support.“I think all the defendants have an excellent chance of prevailing,” he said.At first blush, there is ample reason to think that the legislatures have a losing hand. One reason the Supreme Court held up the drawing of new maps last year was to await the outcome of a major challenge to the Voting Rights Act’s rules for judging bias in political maps, brought by Alabama. Alabama lost in June, when the court reaffirmed those rules by a 5-to-4 vote.People line up to cast their ballots in New Orleans in 2020. Kathleen Flynn/ReutersSince then, Alabama has mounted what amounts to a scorched-earth defense of its maps, despite telling a three-judge panel that the state needed a new House map by October, before an early November filing deadline for candidates in congressional primary elections.After the Supreme Court decision in June, the federal panel resurrected its 2022 order that the state draw a new House map that gave Black voters a significant chance of winning two of the state’s seven congressional districts, instead of one, in a state that is 26 percent Black. The Legislature first asked for extra time, then produced a map last month that again limited Black voters’ clout to a single House district.And when the federal judges rejected that map this month and handed its redrafting to an outside expert, the state again asked the Supreme Court to intervene, arguing that the three judges’ map-drawing order had exceeded the bounds of the Voting Rights Act.The judges’ response, issued last Monday, was withering. They pronounced themselves “deeply troubled” by the state’s failure to draw a usable map, and “disturbed” by the resulting waste of time.“The law requires the creation of an additional district that affords Black Alabamians, like everyone else, a fair and reasonable opportunity to elect candidates of their choice,” they wrote. “Without further delay.”Some experts say they see similar tactics in Louisiana, where Black residents make up 31 percent of the state population but five of six of the state’s representatives in the House are white. A federal district judge ruled last year that the State Legislature’s map very likely violated the Voting Rights Act and ordered a new one drawn for the 2022 elections. The Supreme Court blocked that order, but lifted its stay after its June ruling in the Alabama case.Since then, the judge in Louisiana has rejected efforts by the state’s lawyers to put off drafting that replacement map, prompting the lawyers to ask a federal appeals court to allow a delay. The lawyers say there is “just enough time” to hold a trial first to determine whether the existing map is in fact illegal; the plaintiffs, including Black voters and the state chapter of the N.A.A.C.P., call it a delaying tactic.“Their strategy has consistently been to slow-walk this case, only to later announce that the time for entering relief has run out,” they wrote in a court filing last month.A lawyer for the plaintiffs in the Georgia, Louisiana and Alabama cases, Abha Khanna, said she thought the judges in those cases had made their impatience clear. She said that they had signaled that if there is relief to be had for Black voters in these states under the Voting Rights Act, “it should be in time for the 2024 elections.”Those defending the maps say that the current jockeying is a diversion from a bigger question: whether the states’ arguments for their maps are in fact persuasive. The arguments, like the cases themselves, are complex, but many of them boil down to a single assertion, that judges who have ordered new maps are using a too-broad interpretation of what makes maps illegal under the Voting Rights Act.In both Alabama and Louisiana, for example, the states’ lawyers argue that judges are ordering the states to create precisely the sorts of racial gerrymanders that the Voting Rights Act forbids — except that in these cases, the gerrymanders favor African Americans.In Louisiana, they argue, the judge is creating an additional district that could elect a Black representative by knitting together African American communities that are separated by a hundred miles or more. In Alabama, lawyers contend that federal judges are commanding above all else that the state create two congressional districts that give Black voters a voice — something they say defies the law’s decree that race cannot be the dominant factor in redrawing political maps.Both states also contend that the Supreme Court ruling in June that said affirmative action programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina discriminated on the basis of race should also apply to race-based redistricting cases.Many see that as a bid to win over Supreme Court Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh. He provided the fifth vote that same month to uphold the Voting Rights Act, but suggested that his mind remained open to other arguments against it.The question of how much race can figure in redistricting cases has been litigated for decades, and the states’ critics say the law is not just clear, but newly upheld by a conservative Supreme Court. In the past year, Alabama has challenged it four times — and lost every time.Mr. Carvin nevertheless said the law, and the Supreme Court’s ruling in June that upheld it, are not as settled as some think.“The courts have made crystal clear that there’s no obligation to create majority-minority districts” — districts with a majority of Black voters — “or districts that will elect minority candidates,” he said. “It’s equal opportunity, not equal results.”Sheelagh McNeill More

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      Why Are Democrats Losing Ground Among Nonwhite Voters? 5 Theories.

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      There’s no shortage of solid hypotheses, and the best explanation may be a combination of them.Why is President Biden losing ground among Black, Hispanic, Asian American and other nonwhite voters?There’s no easy answer for this relative weakness that shows up in polling, and there might never be one. After all, we still don’t have a definitive explanation for why Donald J. Trump made big gains among white working-class voters in 2016 or Hispanic voters in 2020, despite the benefit of years of poll questions, final election results and post-election studies.While the question may be hard, getting the best possible answer matters. Ro Khanna, a Democratic congressman and co-chair of Bernie Sanders’s 2020 presidential campaign, recently asked me on social media whether the Democratic challenge is the absence of a “compelling economic vision.”If Democrats believe that’s the answer, Mr. Khanna and his colleagues might approach the election differently than if they believe the answer is crime, the migrant crisis or perceptions of a “woke” left. The choice of approach might not only affect who wins, but also the policies and messages promoted on the campaign trail and perhaps ultimately enacted in government.A definitive answer to our question may be beyond reach, but there’s no shortage of solid hypotheses. The various theories are not mutually exclusive — the best explanation may synthesize all of them.Theory 1: It’s about the moment — Biden, his age, the economy and abortionWhy do surveys show President Biden struggling among all voters nowadays, regardless of race? The biggest reasons typically cited are inflation, the economy and his age.In each case, there’s an argument these issues ought to hurt Mr. Biden more among nonwhite voters, who tend to be younger and poorer than white voters.Of all the explanations, these would probably be the most promising for Democrats in the long term. In the short term, Mr. Biden could hope to gain ground if inflation continued to lose steam and the economy avoided recession.For now, he and the Democrats are counting on issues like abortion to compensate for their weaknesses. That might help Democrats among white voters, but it might not help much among nonwhite voters. In New York Times/Siena College polling over the last year, just 64 percent of nonwhite voters say they believe abortion should be mostly or always legal, a tally that falls beneath usual Democratic benchmarks.On the other hand, 63 percent of white voters say abortion should be at least mostly legal, a tally greatly exceeding the usual Democratic support among white voters.The economy and abortion are plainly important in making sense of recent shifts, but they’re not the whole story. Mr. Biden was relatively weak among nonwhite voters in 2020, as Hispanic voters swung to the right (by about seven points of major party vote share) and the rise in Black turnout didn’t match those of other groups. Democrats showed similar — if less acute — weaknesses with these voters in 2018 and during most Trump-era special elections.Mr. Biden’s weaknesses may exacerbate the problem, but this isn’t a new issue.Theory 2: Democrats are too far to the leftThis theory is brought to you by Democratic centrists, and it’s grounded in an important fact: There are many nonwhite Democrats who self-identify as moderate or even conservative. Many hold conservative views on issues, like opposition to same-sex marriage.These moderate or conservative nonwhite voters consider themselves Democrats because they see the party as representing them and their interests, not because they have party-line views on every issue. If so, Republican gains among nonwhite voters might naturally result from Democrats’ leftward shift over the last few years.This story is logical, especially when it comes to Mr. Trump’s gains in the last election. But is this really what has hurt President Biden since 2020? Democrats didn’t nominate Mr. Sanders, after all. Democratic socialism; calls to defund the police; and Black Lives Matter seem to be in the rearview mirror in 2023. The backlash against “woke” has faded so much that Republicans barely even brought it up in the first presidential debate.Even in 2020, the evidence that the progressive left was responsible for Democratic losses among Hispanic voters was more based on correlation than clear causal evidence. Today, the connection seems even less clear. Perhaps the best evidence is Democratic struggles among nonwhite voters in California and New York, where progressive excesses might weigh most heavily.Theory 3: Democrats aren’t delivering a progressive agendaThis theory is brought to you by the progressive left. You might be skeptical after walking through the centrist position, but there’s a credible story here.To understand it, it’s worth untangling two sentiments that we usually assume go together: a desire for big change and progressivism. They’ve gone hand-in-hand in recent Democratic primaries, with progressive candidates offering fundamental or revolutionary change, while liberal, establishment-backed candidates offer relative moderation, bipartisanship or a return to normalcy.But being a moderate on a left-right ideological scale is not the same thing as being content with the status quo. Many moderates are deeply dissatisfied and want politicians who promise big changes to American life. They may think politics, the economy and the “system” are all broken, even if they’re not animated by progressive slogans like Democratic socialism, a Green New Deal, Medicare for all, and so on.Many nonwhite voters fall into this category. In Times/Siena polling of the key battleground states in 2019, persuadable nonwhite voters said they wanted a relatively moderate Democrat over a liberal, 69 percent to 29 percent. But they also preferred a Democratic nominee who would bring systemic change to American society over one who would return politics back to normal in Washington, 52-32. This might seem contradictory, but it’s not.Mr. Biden is not exactly a great fit for these ideologically moderate “change” voters. He does not channel their dissatisfaction with the country, the establishment, politics or the economy. His accomplishments, like the Inflation Reduction Act or the CHIPS Act, do not register on the “fundamental change” spectrum. Perhaps it’s not surprising that voters — including nonwhite voters — don’t seem to think Mr. Biden has accomplished very much.It seems doubtful that a more ambitious, progressive legislative agenda would have left Mr. Biden in a very different place. He didn’t seem to earn too much support for student debt forgiveness, for instance. But it’s still possible that the mainstream Democratic Party’s relatively conservative, even Whig-like, form of moderation leaves disaffected, nonwhite working-class voters feeling cold.Theory 4: It’s TrumpIt’s easy for Democrats to blame themselves for weakness among nonwhite voters. But what if it’s not really Democratic weakness, but Republican strength?It’s Mr. Trump, not Mr. Biden, who defines American politics nowadays. Voters say they’re voting based on their feelings toward the former president, not the current one. With numbers like these, perhaps the default assumption ought to be that Mr. Trump, not Mr. Biden, is the driving force behind recent electoral trends.If it’s Mr. Trump, it’s not hard to see how or why. He has a distinct brand with demonstrated appeal to white working-class voters who previously backed Barack Obama and other Democrats. Many elements of his message might have appeal to nonwhite working-class voters as well. As we’ve established, many persuadable nonwhite voters care about the economy; aren’t liberal; are dissatisfied with the country and mainstream politics; and desire fundamental change. Mr. Trump’s combination of populist economics and anti-establishment outsider politics is potentially a very good match.What about Mr. Trump’s penchant to alienate Black and Hispanic voters with remarks like “very fine people on both sides” or “they’re rapists.” Today, some of these fights may be distant memories. And while Mr. Trump’s remarks may have hurt him at the time, it is striking that they didn’t do more to provoke a more obvious backlash among nonwhite voters, whether in terms of stronger turnout or greater Democratic support.Perhaps other elements of his message might have broken through. His views on crime and immigration have considerable appeal to some Black and Hispanic voters, even though these issues are often seen by liberals as nothing more than a racist dog whistle. And Democrats may bristle at the thought of Mr. Trump as a criminal justice reformer, but he spent millions on a Super Bowl ad promoting exactly that. Mr. Trump’s economic appeal may also be newly salient with continuing perceptions that the economy hasn’t recovered.Mr. Trump’s unique brand of populist conservatism isn’t the full explanation. In the midterms, Republicans overperformed in places like New York City, Florida and Southern California, even though Mr. Trump wasn’t on the ticket.But while Mr. Trump isn’t the whole explanation, he’s probably an underrated one. A recent CNN/SSRS poll found him faring much better among nonwhite voters compared with all the other Republican candidates. Mr. Biden led Mr. Trump, 58-34, among nonwhite voters in the poll, compared with a 64-28 result against Ron DeSantis.Theory 5: It’s about a new generationDemocratic strength among nonwhite voters was forged in an earlier era of politics, when the party vanquished Jim Crow and unequivocally represented the working class and the poor. Perhaps that’s still how many Black voters see it, given that they continue to back Mr. Biden and Democrats by wide margins in Times/Siena polling.Younger nonwhite voters might see it differently. At the very least, almost all of Mr. Biden’s losses come among nonwhite voters under 45 in Times/Siena polling.It’s not hard to see how younger nonwhite voters might have a different perspective. The basis for overwhelming Democratic support among nonwhite voters may have gotten weaker over the last 50 years.Second- and third-generation Asian American and Hispanic voters are more affluent and assimilated into American society than their parents.Young Black voters may not be second- or third-generation immigrants, but they are the second or third generation since Black Americans finally achieved equal citizenship. They can’t call up memories of the civil rights movement or Jim Crow. They’re less likely to attend church, which helped tie Black voters to the Democratic Party for decades. The bonds of community and sense of threat that connected voters to the Democrats might be weaker today.The Black Lives Matter movement mobilized a new generation of activists, but also put Democrats in a challenging position: There are few opportunities for Democrats to solve systemic racism. No bill will do it. The party’s claim to being the party of the working class is also quite a bit weaker than it was a half century ago, for good measure.Of all the theories, this one is hardest to tie to a short-term decline in Mr. Biden’s support. But more affluence and integration into mainstream American life might be a prerequisite for today’s Republican gains. And, if true, it would reflect largely positive changes in American society, much as Republican gains among Catholic voters in decades past required their acceptance in the mainstream.It would be hard for any party to hold 90-plus percent of a voting group forever. And if so, perhaps there’s not much Democrats can do about their decline today. It may be bad news for the Democrats in a certain sense, but if there’s any consolation it’s that perhaps Democrats don’t have to flagellate themselves over it. It’s not all their fault. More

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      How to Interpret Polling Showing Biden’s Loss of Nonwhite Support

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      Yes, there’s reason for skepticism, but also reason for concern for Democrats, particularly over turnout.Is President Biden really struggling as badly among nonwhite voters — especially Black voters — as the polls say?I’ve seen plenty of skepticism. Among nonwhite voters, a Democratic presidential candidate hasn’t fared as badly as those polls suggest in a presidential election result since the enactment of the Civil Rights Act in 1964. In the case of Black voters, the disparity between the usual support for Democrats — around 90 percent or more — and the recent polling showing it in the 70s or even the 60s just seems too much to accept. Some skeptics believe they’ve seen results like this before, only for Republican strength to vanish on Election Day.But if we compare the polls with those from previous election cycles, Mr. Biden’s early weakness looks serious. His support among Black, Hispanic and other nonwhite voters is well beneath previous lows for Democrats in pre-election polls over the last several decades — including the polls from the last presidential election. Yet at the same time, his weakness is put in better perspective when judged against prior polls, rather than the final election results.Here’s how you should interpret what the polling really means for Mr. Biden’s eventual support among nonwhite and especially Black voters.Election results are the wrong benchmarkA major source of skepticism of Mr. Biden’s weakness among nonwhite voters is the sheer magnitude of the drop-off, based on the difference between the early poll results among registered voters and the estimated final results in post-election studies, like the exit polls.It’s an understandable comparison, but it’s a bad one. Millions of people are undecided in polling today, while all voters have made up their minds in these post-election studies. The registered voter polling also includes millions of people who won’t ultimately vote; the post-election studies typically include only actual voters.These two factors — undecided voters and low-turnout voters — help explain many seemingly weird differences between pre-election polls and the post-election studies.For illustration, consider the following from our New York Times/Siena College polling:Mr. Biden leads, 72 percent to 11 percent, among Black registered voters over the last year.Mr. Biden’s lead among Black voters jumps to 79-11 if undecided voters are assigned based on how they say they voted in 2020.He leads by 76-10 among Black voters with a record of participating in the 2020 general election.His lead among 2020 voters jumps to 84-10 if we allocate undecided voters based on their self-reported 2020 vote preference.For comparison, this same group of Black voters who turned out in 2020 reported backing Mr. Biden over Donald J. Trump, 89-7, in the last election.The upshot: The gap between post-election studies and registered voter polls narrows considerably after accounting for the inherent differences between the two measures — undecided voters and turnout.This lesson isn’t limited to Black voters. To take a different example, Mr. Biden leads by just 46-34 among young registered voters in our polling over the last year, but he leads by 57-35 among young validated 2020 voters if we assign undecided voters based on their 2020 vote preference. His lead among Hispanic voters grows from 47-35 to 56-36 with the same approach. Among Asian American, Native American, multiracial and other nonwhite voters who aren’t Black and Hispanic, it goes up to 50-39, from 40-39.Of course, we can’t assume that Black, Hispanic, young or any voters will turn out as they did in 2020. We can’t assume that undecided voters will return to their 2020 preferences, either. The point is that the differences between pre-election registered voter polls and the final post-election studies explain many of the differences between survey results by subgroup and your expectations. If you must compare the crosstabs from registered voter polls with the final election studies, here’s a tip: Focus on major party vote share. In the case of Black voters, Mr. Biden has a 71-12 lead, so that means he has 86 percent of the major party vote in our Times/Siena polling, 71/(71+12) = 86. That roughly five- or six-point shift in major party vote share is a lot likelier to reflect reality than comparing his 59-point margin among decided voters (71-12 = 59) with his 80-point margin from 2020.Why major party vote share? The logic is simple. Imagine that today 17 percent of eventual Biden voters are undecided and 17 percent of eventual Trump voters are undecided. What would that mean for a poll of voters who will eventually vote 86 to 14? They would be 71 to 12 in the polls today.Mr. Biden’s polling weakness is unusualThere’s another aspect of the skeptics case that I’m less sympathetic toward: the idea that we always see this kind of weakness among nonwhite voters, and it just never materializes.If you look back at polling from prior cycles, it becomes clear that Mr. Biden today really is quite a bit weaker than previous Democrats in registered voter polling from prior cycles. More

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      Federal Court Again Strikes Down Alabama’s Congressional Map

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      Republicans failed to comply with a court order to create a second majority-Black district or something “close to it,” the judicial panel said.A panel of federal judges rejected Alabama’s latest congressional map on Tuesday, ruling that a new map needed to be drawn because Republican lawmakers had failed to comply with orders to create a second majority-Black district or something “close to it.”In a sharp rebuke, the judges ordered that the new map be independently drawn, taking the responsibility away from the Republican-controlled legislature while chastising state officials who “ultimately did not even nurture the ambition to provide the required remedy.”The legislature had hastily pushed through a revised map in July after a surprise Supreme Court ruling found that Alabama’s existing map violated a landmark civil rights law by undercutting the power of the state’s Black voters. The revised map, approved over the objections of Democrats, increased the percentage of Black voters in one of the state’s six majority-white congressional districts to about 40 percent, from about 30 percent.In its new ruling, the district court panel in Alabama found that the legislature had flouted its mandate.“We are not aware of any other case in which a state legislature — faced with a federal court order declaring that its electoral plan unlawfully dilutes minority votes and requiring a plan that provides an additional opportunity district — responded with a plan that the state concedes does not provide that district,” the judges wrote. Responsibility for a new map now falls to a special master, Richard Allen, a longtime Alabama lawyer who has worked under several Republican attorneys general, and a cartographer, David Ely, a demographer based in California. Both were appointed by the court. The decision — or the independent map to be produced — can be appealed. State officials have said that a new congressional map needs to be in place by early October, in order to prepare for the 2024 elections.The litigation has been closely watched in Washington and across the country, as several other states in the South face similar voting rights challenges, and control of the U.S. House of Representatives rests on a thin margin. Prominent lawmakers in Washington — including Speaker Kevin McCarthy of California and Democrats in the Congressional Black Caucus — have kept careful tabs on the redistricting effort.At least one nonpartisan political analysis has predicted that at least one Alabama district could become an election tossup with a new map, given that Black voters in Alabama tend to vote for Democratic candidates.The decision was joined by Judge Stanley Marcus, who was nominated by former President Bill Clinton; and by Judges Anna M. Manasco and Terry F. Moorer, both named to their posts by former President Donald J. Trump. (Judge Marcus typically sits on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, in Atlanta.)For Alabama, the ruling caps off nearly two years of litigation, marking yet another instance in the state’s tumultuous history where a court has forced officials to follow federal civil rights and voting laws.Two decades ago, a lawsuit forced the creation of the Seventh Congressional District, the state’s sole majority-Black district, in southwest Alabama. (Under the Republican-drawn map rejected on Tuesday, the share of Black voters in that district dropped to about 51 percent from about 55 percent.)“It’s really making sure that people who have consistently been kept at the margins or excluded as a matter of law from politics have a chance — not a guarantee — but a realistic chance of electing candidates of choice,” said Kareem Crayton, the senior director for voting and representation at the Brennan Center for Justice and a Montgomery, Ala., native. “The fact that we’re having to fight over that principle is really sad in 2023.”After the 2020 census, which began the process of setting district lines for the next decade across the country, the Alabama legislature maintained six congressional districts with a white Republican incumbent. A group of Black voters challenged the map under a landmark voting rights law, given that more than one in four residents of Alabama is Black.The Birmingham court said the map would need to be redrawn, but the Supreme Court intervened and said a new map could not be put in place so close to the primary races ahead of the 2022 election. In doing so, the Supreme Court unexpectedly affirmed the key remaining tenet of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which bars any voting law that “results in a denial or abridgment of the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race.” The court had gutted much of that landmark civil rights law a decade earlier, and many had expected a similar result with the Alabama case.But in a weeklong special session, Republicans refused to create a second majority-Black district, and shielded their six incumbents from a potentially brutal primary at a moment when the party has only a slim majority in the U.S. House of Representatives.Republicans defended their revised map, calling it a fair attempt to keep counties and communities with similar economic and geographic issues together, while adhering to the Constitution. Democrats and the Black voters who brought the challenge called it a squandered opportunity to provide equal representation to a historically disenfranchised bloc of voters.At a hearing in August, the panel of judges sharply pressed the state’s attorneys on whether the revised map had done enough to adhere to their guidance on how to address the voting rights violation, making their skepticism clear.“What I hear you saying is that the state of Alabama deliberately disregarded our instructions,” Judge Moorer said at one point. More

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      Consistent Signs of Erosion in Black and Hispanic Support for Biden

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      It’s a weakness that could manifest itself as low Democratic turnout even if Trump and Republicans don’t gain among those groups.President Biden is underperforming among nonwhite voters in New York Times/Siena College national polls over the last year, helping to keep the race close in a hypothetical rematch against Donald J. Trump.On average, Mr. Biden leads Mr. Trump by just 53 percent to 28 percent among registered nonwhite voters in a compilation of Times/Siena polls from 2022 and 2023, which includes over 1,500 nonwhite respondents.The results represent a marked deterioration in Mr. Biden’s support compared with 2020, when he won more than 70 percent of nonwhite voters. If he’s unable to revitalize this support by next November, it will continue a decade-long trend of declining Democratic strength among voters considered to be the foundation of the party.Democratic share of major party vote among nonwhite voters More

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      Biden Looks for New Ways to Energize Black Voters

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      With much of his racial equity agenda thwarted by Congress or the courts, President Biden is trying to close an enthusiasm gap among the voters who helped deliver him to the White House.During a recent town hall with the Congressional Black Caucus, Vice President Kamala Harris offered a gut check to the 200 people who had gathered to take stock of the state of civil rights in America.“We are looking at a full-on attack on our hard-fought, hard-won freedoms,” Ms. Harris told the crowd, which erupted in applause as she spoke. “So much is at stake,” she said of the 2024 presidential election, “including our very democracy.”In 2020, President Biden promised Black voters he would deliver a sweeping “racial equity” agenda that included a landmark federal voting rights bill, student loan relief, criminal justice reform and more. Three years later, with much of that agenda thwarted by Congress or the courts, the White House is looking for new ways to re-energize a crucial constituency that helped propel Mr. Biden to the presidency.That means describing the stakes of the election in stark terms, as Ms. Harris did over the summer in Boston, arguing that the Republican Party is trying to reverse generations of racial progress in America. But Mr. Biden is also asking voters to judge him on a series of achievements that benefit Black Americans — but that are hardly the marquee promises from the early days of his administration.In recent weeks, the Biden administration has gone out of its way to highlight its economic accomplishments, which include the lowest Black unemployment rate on record and the fastest creation rate of Black-owned small businesses in over 25 years. It has pointed to social policy efforts, such as increased enrollment in Obamacare and closing the digital divide, as examples of real impacts on the Black community.Vice President Kamala Harris has defended the administration’s racial equity policies.David Degner for The New York TimesIn an opinion essay published on Sunday in The Washington Post, marking the 60th anniversary of the March on Washington, Mr. Biden said his stewardship of the economy — a top concern among Black voters — was helping to fulfill the nation’s promise of equality.The president wrote that his administration was “advancing equity in everything we do making unprecedented investments in all of America, including for Black Americans.”Administration officials acknowledge that some of those advances may not immediately resonate with a population that sees its constitutional rights under assault. While polls show continued strong support for Mr. Biden among Black voters, there are growing concerns about an enthusiasm gap among the most loyal constituencies in the Democratic Party.Neera Tanden, Mr. Biden’s domestic policy adviser, said the president was focused on dismantling inequities that had been embedded for decades.“I think we’ll have a transformative change,” Ms. Tanden said, pointing to executive orders Mr. Biden signed in his first days in office, which directed federal agencies to consider racial equity when it comes to the distribution of money and benefits.But, she added, “it won’t be something millions of people feel in a minute.”For Black Americans like Maeia Corbett, the promises of future benefits ring hollow.“Looking at these promises that this administration has made, it’s like a whirlwind,” said Ms. Corbett, 27. “What can I grasp onto when all of these things are being taken from me?”Ms. Corbett, who graduated from college just months before the coronavirus pandemic brought student loan payments to a pause, had been banking on Mr. Biden’s promise to cancel up to $20,000 in student loan debt for millions of borrowers.When the Supreme Court ruled in June that Mr. Biden’s plan was unconstitutional, Ms. Corbett, like many Black Americans, felt a familiar sting of disappointment. The fact that the decision came just 24 hours after the court struck down affirmative action in college admissions, a longstanding mechanism for economic and social mobility for Black people, was almost disorienting.“It’s like you get to the steps of equity and the steps are torn down,” she said.Ms. Corbett’s sentiments are a warning sign for the president, who has tied the success of his presidency to racial progress. Mr. Biden has said he would use the power of his office to address inequity in housing, criminal justice, voting rights, health care, education and economic mobility.“I’m not promising we can end it tomorrow,” Mr. Biden said in January 2021. “But I promise you: We’re going to continue to make progress to eliminate systemic racism, and every branch of the White House and the federal government is going to be part of that effort.”Melanie L. Campbell, the president of the nonpartisan National Coalition on Black Civic Participation, said Black women — widely credited with securing Mr. Biden’s win — could see tangible progress in historic appointments of Black women to cabinet positions and the federal judiciary, including Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court. But the courts, conservative activists and a bitterly divided Congress have curtailed a lot of Mr. Biden’s agenda. Lawsuits have held up the administration’s efforts to forgive the debts of Black and other minority farmers after years of discrimination. Congress has blocked two signature pieces of legislation Mr. Biden championed, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act and the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. And conservative groups have vowed to pursue legislation challenging Mr. Biden’s plans to prioritize race-conscious policies throughout the federal government.Now, with aides describing him as frustrated over the setbacks, Mr. Biden is taking pains to cast the election as a choice between his agenda and the extremism of “MAGA Republicans,” or those loyal to former President Donald J. Trump.“My dad used to say: ‘Joey, don’t compare me to the Almighty. Compare me to the alternative,’” Mr. Biden says in a common refrain.Cedric Richmond, a co-chairman of the Biden campaign, said the campaign would emphasize that Mr. Biden should not be blamed for the Supreme Court decisions. “It’s the court that just rolled back equity, and we’re going to point to it,” he said.The Biden administration has pointed to social policy efforts as examples of real impacts on the Black community.Samuel Corum for The New York TimesA recent Axios survey of more than 780 college students and recent graduates found that 47 percent of voters blamed the Supreme Court for student loans not being forgiven, 38 percent blamed Republicans and 10 percent blamed Mr. Biden.Still, polls show that Black voters under 30 have far less enthusiasm for Mr. Biden than their elders do.Mary-Pat Hector, the chief executive of Rise, a student advocacy organization that has pushed for student debt relief and college affordability, said the disillusionment among young voters was real. On issues like student loan debt and climate, Ms. Hector said, all the voters see are “things we were told were going to happen that just haven’t happened.”“When it comes to Gen Z,” she said, “they don’t forget, and it’s hard for them to forgive.”In the meantime, the White House says it has not given up on its most ambitious goals.This month, the Education and Justice Departments released guidance for how colleges should navigate the affirmative action decision, urging them to continue to strive for diversity. And the Education Department is preparing to start new loan programs, while delivering billions in loan relief by fixing existing programs that have long disenfranchised Black borrowers. And dozens of federal agencies are working through “equity action plans” tackling everything from disparities in home appraisals to maternal mortality.Stephen K. Benjamin, Mr. Biden’s director of public engagement, said he believed the administration’s economic record would resonate, even as he acknowledged that the White House needed help from Congress to make good on its broader agenda.“I do believe when the rubber hits the road,” he said, “people will pay more attention to these dramatic investments in their quality of life.”Lennore Vinnie, 53, said she felt the administration was looking out for people like her.Having benefited from affirmative action when she entered the white, male-dominated information technology field in the 1990s, Ms. Vinnie, a single mother of two, incurred $280,000 in student loan debt after years of pursuing a doctoral degree to advance to a senior leadership position. Some of the debt was acquired at predatory for-profit colleges.Lennore Vinnie is applying for loan relief through forgiveness programs that were not affected by the Supreme Court ruling.Carlos Bernate for The New York Times“I know for me, as an African American woman, you can never have too many degrees or too many credentials,” she said, “because that way I take away all your reasons for not putting me in the position.”Ms. Vinnie, who ultimately obtained her doctorate and her promotion, is applying for relief through loan forgiveness programs that were not affected by the Supreme Court ruling.Ms. Harris’s appearance before the Congressional Black Caucus in Boston encapsulated the administration’s strategy moving forward: highlighting its progress while rallying a community to remember — and repeat — history.In Boston, the crowd was rapt, shouting “preach!” as she called out “extremist so-called leaders” who sought to distract from the nation’s legacy of slavery and systemic racism.Ms. Harris then reminded the room that Black voters drove Mr. Biden to win the presidency in 2020, and made her the first Black vice president. “The future of America,” she said, “has always relied on the folks who are in this room.” More

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      ‘No Place for Hate in America,’ Haley Says, Recalling 2015 Church Massacre

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      Nikki Haley, fresh off a strong debate performance last week, was back on the trail and took a moment to condemn the weekend shooting in Jacksonville, Fla.Breaking from her usual stump speech at a South Carolina town hall event on Monday, Nikki Haley paused to condemn a deadly weekend rampage in Jacksonville, Fla., that the authorities were investigating as a hate crime.“I am not going to lie to you, it takes me back to a dark place,” Ms. Haley told an audience of roughly 1,000 people gathered in a corporate campus auditorium in Indian Land. “There is no place for hate in America.”Ms. Haley was governor in 2015 when a white supremacist opened fire in an African American church in Charleston, S.C., and killed nine Black parishioners at a Bible study. Ms. Haley eventually called for the removal of the Confederate battle flag from the grounds of the South Carolina Capitol. She later described struggling with the beginning effects of post-traumatic stress disorder in response to the shooting, but she said that the victims’ families showed her what strength and grace looked like.Ms. Haley also toed the Republican Party line on guns and racism, suggesting that such violence and mass shootings could be prevented if Americans improved mental health services, abided by gun laws and rejected division and hate in their everyday lives.She renewed her calls for the need to reverse what she often describes as a “national self-loathing,” or the idea that “America is bad or that America is rotten or that it is racist.”“Don’t fall into the narrative that this is a racist country,” she told the mostly white and graying crowd, citing her own election in 2010 as the first woman and person of color to lead the state as progress. “It was only 60 years ago today that Martin Luther King gave that speech. Look at how far we have come.”The way Ms. Haley, a former United Nations ambassador, and other Republican presidential candidates tend to downplay structural racism and prejudice — and to focus on the nation’s racial progress — puts them at odds with most Black voters.On Monday, Ms. Haley’s home state rival in the presidential race, Senator Tim Scott, called the Florida rampage “heinous.” He said that the killings had prompted patrons at his church service to discuss “the absolute devastation” in 2015 at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston.Asked whether the Republican Party had done enough to denounce white supremacist violence, Mr. Scott argued that it was the duty of every American, regardless of party affiliation, to do their part. “The question is, Have humans done enough to talk about racism and discrimination that leads to violence and to death,” he said.Ms. Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy during the debate last week.Kenny Holston/The New York TimesOn Monday, Ms. Haley was back in her home state for a victory lap after a strong performance in the first Republican primary debate. In recent days, her polling numbers have climbed, and top donors have seen her as a standout. So many people packed into her town hall at the CrossRidge Center in Indian Land that attendees filled a balcony and an overflow room.As they return to the campaign trail, Ms. Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy, a biotech entrepreneur and political newcomer, have continued the clashes they started on the debate stage, where they tussled over policy on China, Israel and the war in Ukraine. Mr. Ramaswamy has unveiled his foreign policy platform, and on his website, he accuses Ms. Haley of lying about his stances on Israel, and calls her by her first and maiden last name, Nimarata Randhawa. For her part, Ms. Haley did not mention Mr. Ramaswamy by name, but she elicited loud laughter from the audience on Monday when she asked voters if they had watched the debate.“Bless his heart,” she said. “I know I wear a skirt. But y’all see me at work. If you say something that is totally off the wall, I am going to call you out on it.”Leaving the town hall, Ross Payne, 62, a former managing director for Wells Fargo, said that he supported Ms. Haley, whom he called the “Iron Lady,” a reference to Margaret Thatcher and a hero of Ms. Haley. But he said he had been somewhat disappointed with her answer to his question on whether she would be willing to pull from both sides of the political aisle to regulate guns and automatic weapons.Ms. Haley said that though she worried about her own children, people should have the ability to protect themselves, and that she would improve access to mental health services and ensure that people arrested for gun violations stay behind bars.“Like with abortion, can’t we all agree that if you want an AR semiautomatic weapon, you’ve got to go through two or three weeks of training and extensive vetting before you can get your hands on a weapon like that?” Mr. Payne said, echoing Ms. Haley’s calls at the debate for consensus on abortion. “A weapon that can kill, you know, 10 people in 10 seconds.”Maya King More