Ari Berman reports:

Before Georgia voted for Joe Biden, the biggest upset in recent state politics came when Democrat Lucy McBath became the first Black person to represent Newt Gingrich’s former congressional district.

Georgia’s Sixth District, home to the affluent northern suburbs of Atlanta, was long a bastion of deep-red Republicanism, represented by Gingrich for 20 years. But that changed in 2018, when college-educated white voters shifted their allegiance to the Democrats and joined with an influx of Black, Latino, and Asian Americans who’d moved to the suburbs. They teamed up to elect McBath, a political novice who had turned to activism after her 17-year-old son, Jordan Davis, was murdered by a white man in Florida in 2012, and decided to run for Congress after the Parkland high school shooting in early 2018. “The work was calling me,” she told Mother Jones that year.

McBath’s victory, which helped Democrats retake the House of Representatives, exemplified Democratic inroads in formerly red states like Georgia and the new power being exercised by communities of color in fast-diversifying Southern states. But those gains could quickly be wiped away—and districts like McBath’s eliminated—by GOP dominance of the next redistricting cycle, which will begin when the Census Bureau releases nationwide demographic data by August 16. [Continue reading…]