The Voting Rights Act Is Dead. Here’s a New Model for Black Politics.

The Biden presidency illustrated both the decline of the old Black politics and the struggles of the M4BL version. Biden overwhelmingly won the older Black vote during the Democratic primary, in part because the pastors and politicians of the Black Old Guard embraced him. He maintained close relationships with longtime Black officials like Representative James Clyburn. But his poll numbers with African Americans were among the weakest of any recent Democratic president, and eventually the 2024 Democratic ticket did worse among Black voters than recent ones. Being beloved by Sharpton, Clyburn, and that crew simply no longer translated to sky-high levels of Black support. They did not speak for the Black community—particularly its younger cohort.

At the same time, the M4BL struggled to gain footing. With little formal structure or organization, the activists never truly presented their agenda in a legislative form that Democrats in power could consider. And once Biden’s poll numbers dipped, he found it convenient to distance himself from the controversial but relatively powerless M4BL contingent within the party. (“Fund the police, fund them, fund them,” he declared in his 2022 State of the Union address.) Other Democrats followed his lead. By the 2024 election, not only had few of M4BL’s priorities advanced but the movement was being blamed for the party’s electoral troubles.

The Trump era has, of course, been catastrophic for both versions of Black politics. With Democrats out of power, M4BL doesn’t have anyone to pressure, and the Trump administration is cracking down on protest movements. At the same time, many of the small-bore initiatives pushed by the Black Old Guard, such as efforts to increase Black representation in corporate America, have been targeted by this administration’s executive orders. The Callais ruling now threatens to directly remove many of these Black representatives from office.