Shomari Figures

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Congressman Shomari Figures was surprisingly calm for the target of one of the most aggressive gerrymanders in the country. “Morning, team!” he greeted his staff as he entered his campaign headquarters in Montgomery, Alabama, on the Wednesday before the midterms.

The polls predicted a blue wave with Democrats poised to win the House and possibly capture a narrow Senate majority. But the Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais had allowed Southern Republicans to draw their states’ congressional maps to dilute Black votes. Alabama’s Second Congressional District, which Figures represents, went from being 47 percent Black to 40 — it now included parts of the Wiregrass region of the state, where President Donald Trump’s worst performance in 2024 was in a county he won with 73 percent of the vote.

“I always knew that, if given the opportunity, they would try to draw me out immediately,” Figures told me, settling into a swivel chair.

His composure turned out to be prescient. On Tuesday, Democrats exceeded even the most starry-eyed projections, winning a 255-seat majority in the House and flipping seven Senate seats (and counting) in an emphatic rebuke of Trump. The most stunning gains were in the South, where the party netted governorships in traditionally red Texas and Georgia, added a senator from South Carolina, and, shockingly, could win another Senate seat in Mississippi.

The results had pundits buzzing about a regional realignment. One of the crucial factors was the unexpected ability of Figures — and several of his fellow House Democrats from states like Florida and North Carolina — to outrun the Republican gerrymanders Callais ushered in. Their victories underscored the power of a coalition built on the party’s regional base: Black voters. And it led to discussion of retribution for redistricting. (“The ‘Blacklash’ is here,” declared a Politico headline that captured the buoyant national mood.)

But Figures was more cautious about the results this week. “People generally draw broader conclusions out of a single election than it warrants,” he told me the morning after the election. “We can’t pretend like this is some broader statement than it may actually be.”

He was referring, in part, to the depressing subplot of what has been an otherwise jubilant election season for Democrats. The party may have won back Congress, but 2026 will go down as the first election in more than six decades when the old Jim Crow states could legally draw electoral districts like they did under segregation. The results were nowhere near what Republicans wanted or expected. But they have raised questions about how replicable Figures’s success — and that of his Southern compatriots in this exceptionally favorable electoral environment — actually is. Figures told me he was able to compete largely because Alabama Republicans did not have enough time to make their new congressional map totally unwinnable for Democrats. “Do I think they’ll try again?” he said to me. “Yes. For sure.”

Democratic voters and pundits were rightly excited about the party’s underrated strength in the South. But another upshot is clear. Figures’s reelection was remarkable in light of the odds, and it is hard to imagine a repeat in a post-Callais landscape where Republicans are free to dilute Black votes to the point of irrelevancy or in a year when Democrats are not riding a blue tsunami.

Even this year, some of the Republican gerrymanders worked well. In May, Tennessee Republicans redrew the Memphis-based Ninth Congressional District — the only one in the state where Black voters could reliably hope to exert their influence — driving the district’s congressman of 19 years, Democrat Steve Cohen, to suspend his reelection bid. Justin Pearson, Cohen’s would-be successor, came tantalizingly close but lost to a Republican. In Louisiana, Representative Cleo Fields announced he would not seek reelection after the GOP redrew his Baton Rouge–based district. That leaves just one out of the state’s six congressional districts where Black voters can expect to elect the candidate they want.

The losses could also embolden Republicans to gerrymander further. “Any district where there is a perception that there is too much electoral opportunity for Black voters is going to get challenged,” said John Cusick, an associate counsel with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. “We unfortunately expect similar attempts in Georgia, South Carolina, and other states and the same pattern in state houses, county commissions, and school boards as we head into 2027 and 2028.” None of this is inevitable, to be sure. Georgia looks more promising now that Democrats have broken the Republican trifecta in the legislature and Governor Brian Kemp has said he will not redistrict before he leaves office.

Figures hopes other GOP lawmakers will interpret the results as a rebuke of their aggression on redistricting. “One of the hopes coming out of this election is that the gerrymandering environment gets restrained,” he told me. “I think a big takeaway is that redistricting has a significant risk of backfiring when you try to do it in the middle of a decade like this.” But his own experience in politics points to a system that has few guardrails. The district where Figures was elected in 2024 has been redrawn three times since the 2020 Census. The first time had produced a map, devised by the state’s Republican supermajority, that was found to be in violation of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 by a panel of federal judges. (Black people were 27 percent of Alabama’s voting-age population but were a meaningful bloc in just one of its seven congressional districts.) The second map was the GOP’s failed attempt at compliance, which led the panel to order an outside party to draw a third map containing the district that Figures ultimately won.

Alabama’s Second Congressional District had a reputation for keeping its members of Congress for long tenures, but Figures was modest about his prospects. “I just wanted to be around for as long as I could do good in this role,” he told me.

It quickly became clear why. The Supreme Court handed down its Callais decision — which gutted Section 2’s protections against racial gerrymandering — on Wednesday, April 29. That Friday, Alabama governor Kay Ivey called a special legislative session for Monday. By the following Wednesday, the GOP had reintroduced map No. 2 — the one the judicial panel had previously ruled noncompliant. Now, Mobile County, where Figures grew up, and Clarke and Washington Counties, where his ancestors were enslaved, were cleaved off from his district. And just like that, a congressional seat to which Figures had been elected by almost ten points two years earlier was “Lean R.”

Republicans voted that Friday to approve the new map, capping off a dizzying ten-day flurry that landed Figures among the handful of Black Southern Democrats whose districts turned red overnight and who are now at risk of being swept out of office. “I think the Court’s ruling was morally and procedurally wrong,” he told me. “It makes no sense at all.”

Yet Figures’s reelection campaign was notable for, if anything, how little it focused on gerrymandering. No fraternity of endangered Black Democrats has come together around the issue of GOP redistricting or Democratic efforts to rein it in, he told me. Nor was the crowd at a recent rally in Montgomery, attended mostly by Black women the week before the election, uniquely responsive on the rare occasion when he did bring it up. “Our campaign is not singularly around that issue at all — not even close,” Figures told me. “We run on the issues that are impacting everyday people. And that’s the way it should be, right? Because I think one thing that people have made the mistake of, e