In Louisiana, Jamie Davis, a third-generation Black farmer, ran for the Senate on what he called the “four pillars” of affordability, education, health care, and upholding the Constitution. He also supported a moratorium on building new data centers and pledged to introduce legislation barring elected officials from signing nondisclosure agreements. According to a local news investigationhis opponent, Representative Julia Letlow, signed an N.D.A. with Meta about a fifty-billion-dollar data-center project in her district; she went on to purchase stock in Meta and then failed to disclose those trades for more than a year, in violation of federal law. (In response to the reporting, a spokesperson for Letlow said that these purchases were made by a broker and that she did not direct any of her trades.)
Astonishingly, Davis was neck and neck with Letlow well into the fall, when, in an act of desperation, a Republican PAC released an ad showing an A.I.-generated Davis lumbering toward the camera in a T-shirt and jeans. A Louisiana Republican pollster, Bernie Pinsonat, explained to a local Fox News affiliate that the ad was intended “to turn any whites off that would think about voting for him. You know, we do have a lot of RINOs”—Republicans in Name Only—“in this state.” Davis came within two points of Letlow, losing by a mere twenty-five thousand votes. The Fox News Voter Poll for Louisiana estimates that he earned the support of ninety-two per cent of Black voters, thirty-four per cent of white voters, and eleven per cent of people who said they had voted for Trump in 2024. Every parish shifted toward Democrats by at least nine points.
The outcome may well have been different had Davis received meaningful assistance from the national Democratic Party. Days before the election, the longtime Democratic Party consultant and Louisiana native son James Carville noted“I beat my head against the wall trying to get some national money in here. It’s almost impossible.” Scott Colom, the Democratic Senate candidate in Mississippi, whose exceedingly close race was called in his favor on Wednesday, was also left out in the cold. In July, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee made a forty-million-dollar investment in ten Senate battlegrounds, part of which funded outreach to Black voters, that did not include Mississippi—even though a poll had shown that Colom was within three points of the Republican incumbent, Cindy Hyde-Smith. Finally, the D.S.C.C. joined Colom on a five-hundred-thousand-dollar ad buy with just six days left to vote.
Even near-misses, such as Jamie Davis’s and Angie Nixon’s Senate bids, convey a larger truth about the midterm elections. Two years after Trump’s return, his appeals to white supremacy and victimhood can’t compensate for voters’ struggles with the cost-of-living crisis, disgust with Trump’s corruption, or rage at the billionaires’ prerogative to put data centers anywhere they please. In races across the South, Democratic candidates attracted the support of a wide swath of voters. Their campaigns are evidence of the viability of class politics in every corner of the country. In Mississippi, a remarkable nine per cent of residents who voted for Trump in 2024 voted for Colom in 2026. In Louisiana, one field organizer for Davis said“I’ve never worked with Republicans this much. Ever.”
The G.O.P.’s racist attacks may not have worked to turn out white voters, but they undoubtedly helped to mobilize Black voters. These date back to the Administration’s war on D.E.I.—specifically, its attack on Black workers in the federal government, led by Elon Musk and the short-lived DOGE. By September, 2026, federal employment had fallen by roughly three hundred and twenty-eight thousand jobs since Trump took office. Multiple lawsuits have alleged that the firings targeted Black workers, who made up roughly eighteen per cent of the federal workforce in 2024. (The Trump Administration has responded that its firings were not racially biased.) The attacks on Black employment were amplified by the continued evisceration of the Voting Rights Act. After the Supreme Court’s Callais decision, in April—which allowed states to redraw, or “crack,” districts that concentrated Black voters to assure their representation—Louisiana dismantled its second majority-Black congressional district, Tennessee split Memphis’s Black communities among three districts, and Alabama reinstated a map that reduced Black voters’ share of the voting-age population in its Second Congressional District.
Source: www.newyorker.com
