Black voters turned out in force for Democrats in Tuesday’s midterm elections, with their support approaching the levels former President Barack Obama captured in 2008, according to exit polling.
Exit polls showed the Supreme Court’s voting rights decision, Republican redistricting and the economy were major factors in driving Black voters to the polls.
The Trump administration’s attacks on diversity initiatives and Black history in his second term, combined with economic policies that have hit Black families particularly hard and Supreme Court decisions that effectively gutted part of the Voting Rights Act, were a shock to the system, political commentator Avis Jones-DeWeever told USA TODAY.
“It’s awakened something in us, a memory of what we’ve seen before,” Jones-DeWeever said.
The surge came in an election in which Democrats swept back into control of Congress, winning the House and the Senate in a midterm widely interpreted as a repudiation of Trump’s second term. Black voters have long been the Democratic Party’s most loyal voting bloc, and the 2026 results showed that loyalty holding — and deepening — in a midterm shaped by fights over voting rules and the cost of living.
