Stung by Voting Rights Decision, Many Black Southerners Plan for November

Across the South, from the Mississippi Delta to Georgia’s suburbs, Black Democratic candidates are imploring Black voters to rise up and secure the representation this November that they were expected to be denied with the gutting of the Voting Rights Act.

The hill is high, and Republicans remain supremely confident, but Democrats are trying to contest races typically seen as too far out of reach.

Keisha Lance Bottoms, the former Atlanta mayor, remains in a tossup contest to be the next Georgia governor, despite being outspent 9 to 1 by her deep-pocketed Republican opponent, the businessman Rick Jackson.

In Mississippi, Scott Colom, a state prosecutor running for the Senate, is seeing a rare infusion of national cash in his bid to defeat the incumbent Republican, Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith.

In Florida, Black voters helped State Representative Angie Nixon overcome a lack of establishment support and fund-raising to become the party’s nominee for the Senate.

In Alabama, Republicans tried to redistrict Representative Shomari Figures to defeat, but his seat, stripped of many but not all of its Black voters, may somehow still be within reach. And the impact could extend to states that pushed ahead with redistricting before the Supreme Court decision. In North Carolina, another Black Democrat, Representative Don Davis, remains in the running for the district the Republican legislators redrew against him.