This past week, the Supreme Court said that the new map of districts (seven of them) in Alabama, based on the Census of 2020....can't be used. Go back and re-draw it....was the spoken word.
What caused this? Well....a challenge by the ACLU and the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.
If you look at the past 'old' map....one particular district (the 7th) was designed to have around 65-to-70 percent black votes, and the other six had black populations of roughly 25-percent or less.
The challenge? The folks want two districts to exist which have either "Black voting-age population majorities" or a 'device' where Blacks have a bigger voice.
The problem? After you sit and ponder over this.....the 7th is designed in a unique way....taking up middle-of-the-state and Birmingham (3/4th of the city), and most of Montgomery.
If you did carve off part of the 7th to make this reality of a 2nd district going Democrat? Well...you start weakening the 7th (last election, the Republican running got 34-percent).
The fact that the black population in Alabama lives in 'zones'? You can make the case that in various counties of the state, the black population makes up no more than 10-percent of local population. You can make the case that Birmingham itself...is now 68-percent black, but a lot of that population came from the past 30 years of people leaving the city (keeping their jobs) and living 30 to 40 miles outside of the region.
Same can be said for Mobile at 51-percent black.
Same for Montgomery, at 60-percent black.
What'll happen in the end? I suspect the 7th district will be weakened up enough....that it might not be pure Democrat anymore. I'd also start to wonder about the Hispanics in the state, and if their population in the 2030 Census....matters.
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