As of the latest U.S election in late 2024, there were 120 Congressional districts with a non-white majority out of a total of 435. While only 25 to 45 percent are considered to have been created in reference to the 1965 Voting Rights Act specifically, the existence of all could potentially be in danger now that the U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday changed an important provision concerning Section 2 of the law, which deals with, among other things, districting for elections. The court struck down a majority Black district in Louisiana as part of the case, opening the door for even more partisan districting that often but not always focuses on favoring Republican candidates.
The Voting Rights Act Section 2 specifies that district maps that give minorities “less opportunity than other members of the electorate to participate in the political process and to elect representatives of their choice” are illegal. This provision has been used in the past to create so called majority-minority districts, for example in Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and Virginia, and has helped to elect more non-white candidates to Congress. Previously, plaintiffs had to prove that white and non-white voters in a certain locations do overwhelmingly chose different candidates and that the district they were aiming to create or uphold was not overly gerrymandered. On Wednesday, the 6-3 Supreme Court decision penned by Justice Samuel Alito said that in the future, maps invoking Section 2 would have to prove present-day discrimination of the non-white group in question to justify such a district in addition to proving their racial voting patterns were distinct from regular partisan voting – something that opponents of the changes say is almost impossible to do.
Dissenting justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson called the changes a “demolition of the Voting Rights Act”.
Data published on Redistricting & Me, a website hosted by City University of New York, shows that of the 120 majority-minority districts, Texas and California have the most, while they also exist in the Southern and Southwestern United States as well as the Great Lakes region. Hispanic and Latino were most often the biggest group in these districts, followed by white plurality districts where whites are the biggest group, but not in the majority. While the South has the most Black majority or plurality districts, Hispanic ones are common in the Southwest, while Asian ones exist in California, Hawaii and New York. The districts with the biggest concentrations of a single racial group are Texas’ 15th, 16th and 34th districts, which are between 80 and 90 percent Hispanic. Mississippi’s 2nd District (Jackson, Mississippi Delta) and Tennessee’s 9th District (Memphis) have more than 60 percent Black inhabitants, while California’s 17th District encompassing San Jose is 56 percent Asian.
As of the latest Census, white non-Latino people made up almost 58 percent of Americans.
