Whenever Democrats get outraged over something, they tend to invoke "racism" or "Jim Crow," and then pretend to be the only party that cares about protecting minorities. They wrap themselves in the language of civil rights and portray Republicans as villains while claiming a monopoly on compassion for minority communities. But beneath the rhetoric lies an uncomfortable reality. Time and again, Democrats reveal that their interest in black voters begins and ends with political power.
As PJ Media previously reported, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries had a rather unhinged response to the Republicans’ redistricting efforts, calling them an "unprecedented assault on black political representation, the likes of which we have not seen since the Jim Crow era." He then cranked it up another notch. "The ghost of the Confederacy has afflicted the Supreme Court majority and is invading and haunting the nation right now," Jeffries said, alluding to last month’s Supreme Court ruling declaring racial gerrymandering unconstitutional.
It was such a shameless performance. A new Politico poll proves that Democrats’ interest in preserving black districts or black voting power is quite conditional. When asked about redistricting with no additional context, 54% of 2024 Kamala Harris voters said protecting the voting power of black and other minority voters by maintaining majority-minority districts was the priority.
That sounds principled enough, right? Well, guess what happens when the framing changes?
When the question was reframed to emphasize the Supreme Court ruling and Republican redistricting, suddenly a 45% plurality of Kamala voters decided that “protecting” majority-minority districts wasn’t important at all and that countering GOP efforts by drawing maps that maximize Democratic seats, even if that reduces the number of majority-minority districts, matters more. Only 32% held firm on preserving those districts.
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Elected Democrats aren’t much better. Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove, a black Democrat from California who represents a majority-Hispanic Los Angeles district, conceded that the Democrats’ strategy will "probably will have to" include breaking apart majority-minority seats because, as she put it, "It's existential at this point, and this is a larger battle that we're fighting for."
Translation: majority-minority districts are expendable the moment they stop serving the party’s interests. Democrats aren’t fighting for black communities; they’re fighting for the House majority, and those are very different things. All that fire-breathing about “Jim Crow” and “the ghost of the Confederacy” is designed to rile up the base, but even the base, as the polling shows, is willing to sacrifice black districts when the stakes feel high enough.
When push comes to shove, and the maps need redrawing, black voters aren't a community Democrats want to protect. They’re just variables to be optimized as the situation warrants. The Democrats don’t have principles; they have a lust for power, and the moment when they don’t need black voters for power, they will ditch them without giving it a second thought.
