A Supreme Court decision limiting the reach of the 1965 Voting Rights Act on redistricting may have huge ramifications for Black representation in Congress, and many of New Jersey’s Black political leaders are reacting with dismay – though they’re not calling for a wholesale rethinking of New Jersey’s own map-making processes.
For decades, majority-minority areas have been protected in congressional and legislative redistricting by Section 2 of the VRA, which requires map-makers to draw districts that allow them to elect candidates of their choice. Today’s ruling narrows those protections considerably, though it doesn’t fully do away with them as some Democrats had feared; writing for the 6-3 majority, Justice Samuel Alito struck down a Louisiana map with two majority-Black House districts as an “unconstitutional gerrymander.”
It’s still murky for now how far-reaching the ruling will be, and may remain murky for quite some time as litigation over other states’ maps starts to hit the courts. Those most at-risk, though, are a number of Black politicians, all of them Democrats, elected to majority-Black House districts in the South that had previously been protected by the VRA and that may now be dismantled by state legislatures dominated by white Republicans, either this year or in future election cycles.
Senator Cory Booker, New Jersey’s first Black senator and one of five current Black members of the Senate, called the ruling “very problematic” for Black representation: “The Voting Rights Act was written to ensure fair representation for African Americans and protect against discrimination,” he said. “This is a real setback.”
Reps. Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-Ewing) and LaMonica McIver (D-Newark), the first two women of color elected to Congress from New Jersey, similarly warned of deleterious consequences for Black lawmakers like themselves, though New Jersey’s Democratic leadership and its bipartisan redistricting procedures mean that the risk to their own seats is low.
Both congresswomen also took issue with a particular component of the decision stating that lawmakers cannot “intentionally” use race to guide their map-drawing; especially in many Southern states, where race and partisan affiliation are near-synonymous, how can intentionality be judged?
“The Supreme Court hid itself behind the word ‘intentional,’” Watson Coleman said. “I think the intentionality of diminishing the Black vote, and any Democratic vote, has been obvious from the very beginning. It comes out of the lips of the President of the United States. It comes out of the lips of leadership.”
And LeRoy Jones, the chairman of the New Jersey Democratic Committee, said in a statement that the ruling has “set our country back decades.”
“This decision removes critically important protections against racial discrimination in redistricting and is just the latest in a long line of catastrophes perpetrated upon America by Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans,” he said. “I can assure you that New Jersey Democrats will never back down and will never be deterred in this unprecedented fight to defend our democracy.”
Of course, Booker, Watson Coleman, McIver, and Jones are all Democrats, and have a vested interest in keeping Democratic-leaning districts intact – but New Jersey’s Black community leaders and voters, too, lean overwhelmingly towards Democrats. New Jersey has never sent a nonwhite Republican to Congress, and of the 38 Republican members of the state legislature, only two are people of color.
New Jersey, notably, has not been part of the broader gerrymandering war that’s engulfed other states like California, Texas, Virginia, and Florida (though Jones did laud Virginia Democrats last week for passing a gerrymander there).
When the Trump-ordered effort to redistrict Texas in Republicans’ favor first kicked off last summer, some national Democrats encouraged New Jersey to revisit its map, but were rebuffed by state Democrats who had little interest in embarking on what would be a complex and time-consuming process. Only a state constitutional amendment could overturn the state’s bipartisan commission, which produced a Democratic-leaning map during the 2021 redistricting process.
Asked whether the state’s map should be revisited in light of the Supreme Court’s VRA ruling, McIver and Watson Coleman both said no, while Booker declined to specifically answer.
“I think New Jersey, its districts are fairly representative of the state,” Watson Coleman said. “So no, I don’t want us to do anything about it.”
Even without mid-decade redistricting, changes to the VRA could have longer-term effects on how New Jersey’s congressional and legislative maps are drawn. Four of the state’s 12 congressional districts and 17 of the state’s 40 legislative districts were majority-minority as of the 2020 Census, though only some of them would be protected under the VRA.
McIver represents one of two congressional districts in the state that have been specifically drawn for decades to elect a candidate of color: her 10th district is 54% Black, while neighboring Rep. Rob Menendez (D-Jersey City)’s 8th district is 51% Hispanic. In theory, new limits on the VRA could mean that Democratic map-drawers would have freer rein to unpack their districts and make nearby seats bluer, but McIver said she wouldn’t support any such plan.
“We should be doing things fairly based off the Census that comes out and making those determinations, instead of just coming up with these grandiose ideas of doing mid-decade redistricting that doesn’t relate to any data,” she said.