A Dem Survival Plan for the Southern Apocalypse

There are no easy paths forward after SCOTUS gutted the Voting Rights Act.

(Photo illustration by The Bulwark / Photos: Shutterstock)

WHEN STATE REP. JUSTIN JONES went to the House floor in Nashville last week to speak against Republican plans to redistrict the state, he compared his GOP colleagues to some of the nation’s most abhorrent segregationists.

“You will be in the history books with Bull Connor and George Wallace. And your children will be ashamed of where you stand by presenting these maps,” said Jones.

He wasn’t done. Outside the State Capitol, Jones carried around a sign that read “Fight Against White Supremacy!!” Later in the week, he stood in the halls of the building burning a paper image of the Confederate flag while chanting: “We will not go back.”

Jones’s anger was righteous and understandable and, for his supporters, utterly justifiable. What it was not, in the most immediate terms at least, was effective.

Republicans moved aggressively last week to carve up Memphis’s majority-black congressional district, which will almost certainly leave black Tennesseans without a voice in Congress for the first time in decades.

Tennessee is among a handful of Southern states that have rushed to carve up the electoral power of black voters following the Supreme Court’s April 29 ruling gutting Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. While the response has been shock, anger, and—increasingly—despair among Democrats, a harsh reality is sinking in: It’s going to take more than impassioned appeals to morality and history, like Jones’s, to claw back power in the South.

“It probably fundamentally forces a recalibration of what the Democratic coalition, Democratic electorate looks like in these states,” said Zac McCrary, an Alabama-based Democratic pollster. “It really requires Democrats to think about things and go back to the drawing board in a way that we haven’t had to do in quite some time.”

To get a sense of what that trip to the drawing board will look like, I spent the past few days talking to Democratic operatives and officials in several Southern states, some part of this year’s Republican redistricting wave, others already severely gerrymandered: Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, and Louisiana. The question I asked them was straightforward: How do Democrats compete for House seats in this region when the districts have been drawn by Republicans to overwhelmingly favor their own side?

Although there’s still uncertainty in some of these states about what the final congressional lines will look like, there was widespread agreement among the Democrats I spoke with that their party would have to do things drastically differently.

It starts with the candidates they recruit to run. Operatives repeatedly told me that the party needs to embrace people with political views on issues—whether it be guns, immigration, or various social and cultural topics—that fall substantially outside the boundaries of the national Democratic mainstream. They stressed that this will mean ditching purity tests and elevating people who aren’t hyperpartisan or highly ideological. And, they said, this shift can’t just happen at the state level: It will require buy-in from the national party at large.

“We have to build a broader coalition in all these places, and we have to create space for candidates like John Bel Edwards,” said Steve Schale, a Democratic operative who has worked on races across the Southeast, referring to Louisiana’s former governor. “That’s going to be a huge test for the national party—whether we are willing to not only create the space for those candidates within the coalition, but also create the space in our rhetoric, in our branding as a larger party, to give those people a chance to win.”

Edwards kept coming up in my conversations as the archetypal candidate who could succeed in some of these new districts. A conservative Democrat, Edwards, whose military and rural background had strong regional appeal, won back-to-back terms in 2015 and 2019 in part by taking pro-gun and anti-abortion positions. Some combination of these factors let him make inroads with white voters.

But “inroads,” here, is a relative term. Edwards won roughly 30 percent of the white vote. While that might be good enough to win statewide in a state with a 33 percent black population, it won’t be nearly enough to carry—let alone compete—in these newly gerrymandered congressional districts.

More than any other question, the racial composition of the electorate in these new Southern congressional districts was pinpointed as the party’s greatest hurdle going forward. “In many Southern states, party affiliation is simply a proxy for race, and everyone knows that,” Derrick Johnson, the president of the NAACP, told me.

For years, Democrats in many Southern states have prioritized motivating voters in majority-minority districts, essentially writing off races beyond the likes of Rep. Bennie Thompson’s seat in the Mississippi Delta or Rep. Jim Clyburn’s in South Carolina’s Black Belt. Now that cities like Memphis have been spread across three different congressional districts, Democrats have little choice but to figure out how to appeal to white Southerners.

“The way we deal with this massive shift in the paradigm is to begin organizing outside of our base,” said Rickey Cole, the former chair of the Mississippi Democratic Party. “We haven’t had boots on the ground among white voters in Mississippi for probably close to two generations.”

Any new approach, Cole said, would require being more strategic about what the party emphasizes in white communities. He argued that Democrats should focus on cost-of-living issues and eschew other topics long at the core of the party brand in the region.

“I live in lily-white Mississippi. You can believe in civil rights and you should believe in civil rights. I believe in civil rights. But it ain’t gonna be my topic of conversation at the gas pump with Bubba,” said Cole. “I’m gonna talk to him about something else.”

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I’VE BEEN CLOSELY FOLLOWING—and occasionally covering—Tennessee politics since I moved back to the state last year. And I’ve been struck by how often Democrats here concede that they have to do things differently to compete, only to then explain how difficult it’s been to actually break with party orthodoxies.

There’s a variety of reasons for that. One of them, which came up regularly among the Tennessee Democrats I spoke with, was the dominance of social media in our politics. Since Jones was expelled from the Tennessee legislature in 2023 for protesting the state’s gun laws, he has amassed a huge social media following—and with it, the ability to raise significant amounts of money. He often goes viral for his fiery speeches on the House floor protesting the Tennessee Republican Party, and he’s become a hero among Nashville’s activist community and educated liberal voters.

But recognition and social media clout don’t always add up to expanding political power.

“For some activists, they measure their success . . . not so much by the laws that they pass or the change that they create, but more on the number of views, the number of likes, the number of clicks, the number of reshares, how many followers they have on Instagram. And that’s great for them individually,” said Darden Copeland, a Nashville-area businessman who is considering running for Congress in Tennessee’s newly drawn 7th district. “But they’re not going to win.”

The math in these new districts across the South is what it is: Democrats simply cannot get elected to the U.S. House by relying on their typical coalition of liberal whites and black people. They must win more voters in rural and suburban areas—and that means elevating candidates who are of and from these areas. Notably, Chaz Molder, a small-town Tennessee mayor who, as of now, is challenging Rep. Andy Ogles in the 5th district, did not attend last week’s State Capitol protests against redistricting.

“You’re going to need candidates that can appeal to both your urban voters and also to rural voters,” said Lisa Quigley, former chief of staff to Jim Cooper, who held a Nashville-based House seat for decades before the GOP chopped it into three separate districts in 2020.

“It’s going to be much harder, I think, for the activists to accept that you might not have somebody that simply says yes to everything on the Democratic agenda. They may have a slightly different take. They may want to emphasize different things,” she added.

What those “different things” might be wasn’t often outlined—at least with any specificity—by the Southern Democratic officials and operatives I spoke with. And when I pushed them on specifics, there wasn’t exactly consensus. To wit, while some of the people I spoke with are convinced that the party has to run more anti-abortion candidates in the mold of Edwards, not everyone is buying it. Others stressed that the politics of abortion had changed dramatically since the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022. They argued that Democrats don’t need to shift toward becoming pro-life to win, but that the party could benefit by embracing the Clinton-era talking point that abortion should be “safe, legal, and rare,” itself a step away from the position Democrats have staked out nationally over the past decade.

“Pro-life is a line that Democrats aren’t going to cross back over. I think that polling on that and national sentiment—even among Republicans, Christians, and conservatives—there are still a number of folks that agree we’ve got to keep hands-off and politicians out of a woman’s right to choose,” said Copeland, the Nashville businessman.

If there was any real agreement over what to emphasize to reach Southern voters after this current wave of redistricting, it was that the MAGA agenda had failed the very people it had promised to help. In particular, Democrats I spoke with this week said they were hopeful that Donald Trump’s tariff agenda and health care policies—which have crushed farmers and slashed funding for rural healthcare facilities—could give them an opening this cycle.

But it’s getting painfully late. It took until the end of last year for House Democrats to announce their first-ever rural-outreach program. And if Republicans get their way over the next few days and weeks, Democrats in Southern cities will be facing a host of newly drawn seats—with major GOP tilts—in which they will have to compete. It has already happened in Memphis and Nashville, and will likely soon happen to voters in New Orleans and Birmingham and other cities.

“We should never have gotten into the condition of being a party that’s only viable in cities,” said Jeff Yarbro, a Tennessee state senator. “The coalition that brought the Democratic party to its high-water mark was one built on an alliance between rural folks and African Americans and liberals who saw their common interest and organized around it.”

The current version of the Democratic party, he lamented, feels far away from that.

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