The Fight for the Black Vote Is Already Underway

With seven weeks remaining before the midterm elections, some of the nation’s most influential Black political and civil rights organizations are pouring money, organizers and old-fashioned shoe leather into an unusually aggressive effort to turn out Black voters — particularly young people, rural residents and people who typically skip elections when the presidency isn’t on the ballot.

The latest effort came Tuesday, when the Congressional Black Caucus Institute launched “SO VOTE,” a multimillion-dollar campaign aimed at turning out voters in some of the country’s most competitive congressional races.

LEARN MORE: Why Voting is About the Power of ‘We’

But the mobilization comes amid a broader fight over who gets to vote, and how.

Supreme Court Ruling

On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to allow the Trump administration to impose sweeping new restrictions on voting by mail just weeks before the Nov. 3 elections. The high court left in place a lower-court injunction blocking a new U.S. Postal Service rule that forces states to provide information on voters requesting mail ballots — and to use federally approved ballot envelopes with unique barcodes. 

The Postal Service could have refused to deliver ballots from states that didn’t comply.

Election officials argued that imposing the new system while voting was already underway could prevent legitimate ballots from reaching voters. The Supreme Court said the administration was unlikely to succeed in overturning the injunction. 

Justice Brett Kavanaugh, concurring separately, said the Postal Service ultimately might have legal authority to regulate election mail, but imposing the rule now would violate federal administrative law because state and local election officials did not have enough time to comply.

The legal fight also directly involved two organizations now working to turn out Black voters. The NAACP and Black Voters Matter joined Common Cause in challenging the Postal Service rule. For those groups, mobilizing Black voters and protecting their ability to cast a ballot increasingly look like two parts of the same job.

The NAACP announced in July that it will spend $20 million on its largest-ever midterm get-out-the-vote campaign. The goal: recruit 20,000 volunteers to mobilize 6.5 million Black voters in 13 states and dozens of congressional districts. The organization explicitly tied the investment to what it described as attacks on voting rights and racial gerrymandering.

Now, SO VOTE is entering the field with a similar argument, focusing on voters traditional political campaigns often overlook.

‘Our Community’s Inherent Power’

Former U.S. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Marcia Fudge leads the effort with Reps. James E. Clyburn of South Carolina and Bennie G. Thompson of Mississippi, along with former Rep. Cedric Richmond from Louisiana. The initiative will target young and low-propensity Black voters, along with rural communities across the South. Organizers have raised roughly $1 million and plan to spend at least $4.5 million during the midterm cycle.

“For over six decades, the fight for the Southern Black vote has been a fight for survival,” Clyburn said in a statement. “Our youth and rural communities are too often forgotten. SO VOTE invests long-term in organizing our community’s inherent power.”

The campaign will target Georgia and Mississippi statewide, along with congressional districts in North Carolina, Alabama, Tennessee, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, Nevada, Missouri, Indiana, South Carolina and Arizona.

But instead of relying primarily on television advertising, organizers intend to invest in local groups and reach voters through churches, historically Black colleges and universities, Black fraternities and sororities and organizations like When We All Vote and Black Voters Matter.

They also plan to use geotargeted advertising and local digital creators to reach people who increasingly get their news online. The message is deliberately kitchen-table simple: “Your grocery bill is too high. So vote.”

Fudge said the campaign wanted to avoid “lecturing communities about civic duty” and instead give prospective voters “the tools and the support to make their voice count.”

‘We Got Us’

SO VOTE is not alone.

The National Urban League launched a nationwide surge this week through its “Reclaim Your Vote” campaign, using its network of more than 90 affiliates to register and mobilize voters. Its strategy includes door-to-door canvassing, text and phone outreach, and events on college campuses, in neighborhoods and inside Black churches.

Urban League organizers in Georgia have worked at Clark Atlanta University and with churches in Columbus. Nationally, the organization is partnering with the National Baptist Convention USA as part of a faith-based strategy designed to connect Black congregations with local Urban League affiliates.

Black Voters Matter, meanwhile, is organizing through its “We Got Us” campaign, which combines voter mobilization with opposition to restrictive voting laws and gerrymandering.

The National Coalition on Black Civic Participation has launched Unity ’26 and a campaign whose name leaves little ambiguity about its mission: “Power of the Ballot — United We Win!”

Its network includes more than 80 organizations and affiliates, with an emphasis on increasing Black turnout, providing voter-protection resources and building political participation beyond November.

BlackPAC, which has spent a decade developing its own Black voter infrastructure, says it has engaged millions of voters in battleground states including Georgia, North Carolina, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Nevada and Wisconsin.

Higher Heights is concentrating on another crucial part of the electorate: Black women, and mobilizing voters through its #BlackWomenVote campaign.

The tactics differ. The objective doesn’t.

Find Black voters. Register them. Talk to them repeatedly. Make voting easier. And persuade people who might otherwise stay home that the election affects their everyday lives. 

Black Votes Matter

But the more consequential question in a midterm election may be whether they vote at all. That is particularly true for younger and low-propensity voters — exactly the population SO VOTE intends to reach.

And the campaign reflects a frustration among some Black political leaders that traditional campaigns arrive too late and invest too little in communities they nevertheless expect to turn out on Election Day.

“For decades, as far as I can remember, there are those of us who have always complained about the fact that neither party spends the significant and requisite time with Black and brown and poor and rural communities,” Fudge told the Associated Press. “So we finally decided to take it upon ourselves to do something that we didn’t think anybody else in the industry was doing.”

That means building something intended to survive beyond Nov. 3.

SO VOTE says it plans to use what organizers learn this year to develop a playbook for reaching Black voters in the 2028 presidential election. But first comes November.

And for Black voting-rights organizations, the stakes extend beyond which party controls Congress.

The NAACP says its $20 million investment was prompted partly by Supreme Court decisions weakening protections against racial gerrymandering. Republican-controlled states have pursued new congressional maps that civil rights groups say dilute Black political influence. The Trump administration’s attempt to change mail voting added another front to that fight.

RELATED: What Keeps Young Black People From Voting?

This week’s Supreme Court decision removed that obstacle, at least for this election. But it didn’t end the larger struggle over voting rules, congressional maps and access to the ballot.

Which helps explain why Thompson, one of SO VOTE’s leaders, describes turnout itself as a response.

“I have watched this country try to legislate our communities out of power through redistricting, red tape and neglect,” he said. “These Southern states are trying to minimize Black political participation and, ultimately, Black political strength.”