TUESDAY: Dare to struggle, dare to win?

TUESDAY, MAY 19. 2026

Could Democrats win in the South? Yesterday afternoon, Harold Ford sat in the (one) Democratic seat on the "cable news" confection, The Five.

The first topic under review was our struggling nation's redistricting wars. As happenstance happened to have it, we can tell you this:

From 1997 through 2007, Ford served as the congressman from the majority Black Memphis House district which is now being split apart. His father, Rep. Harold Ford Sr., had been the Memphis district's congressman for 22 years before that.

Before the district was marked for splitting, it was heavily majority Black—and it was strongly pro-Democratic. Before the district was split, the Cook Report scored it like this:

Tennessee 9th congressional district
Black: 60.2%
White: 25.2%
Hispanic: 9.2%
D+23

As constituted, it was hard to lose that district as a Democrat. For that reason, the district is now being sliced apart as part of our flailing nation's ongoing redistricting war.

Please note this:

From the Democratic Party perspective, there were also a lot of "wasted votes" in that district. (In 2024, the long-time incumbent, Rep. Steve Cohen, won re-election by a walloping 46 points.) 

All those Democrats crammed into that one district made it easier for Tennessee Republicans to win neighboring congressional seats. That widely understood political pattern seems to have played a significant role in the history of these majority Black House districts—a phenomenon which came into being in the wake of an addition to the Voting Rights Act in 1982.

We'll hope to return to that key point on some bright and beautiful day.

At any rate, Harold Ford Jr, knows Memphis! He also understands the workings of majority Black congressional districts. 

Indeed, Harold Ford Jr, knows rivers! In part for that reason, we were struck by what he said on yesterday's The Five when The Pro-MAGA Four let him speak.

The segment had started with very brief bits of tape from last weekend's voting rights rally in Selma. Some Democrats were shown railing against the Callais decision—against the Supreme Court's ruling that the deliberate creation of majority Black districts was constitutionally impermissible.

As is common on The Five, some of the statements had been edited down so far that you really couldn't tell what the Dem officeholders were saying. By way of contrast, Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) was shown saying this:

There are people in this hostile, anti-Black administration that would rather Black Americans pick cotton than pick the president, than pick their congressman... 

We suppose that could always be true. But when it came time for Ford to speak on The Five, he said that he has a different type of reaction to the redistricting turmoil:

FORD (5/18/26): I think about this differently than my friends and former colleagues in Congress... 

Now, interestingly, on the Democratic side, I've heard Senator Warnock and a few others talk about this. Senator Warnock is African American. He represents a state that is majority white and yet he was elected a United States Senator.

You have four Republican Black members of Congress who represent districts that are predominantly white—Byron Donald, Wesley Hunt, John James and Burgess Owens.

You also have a senator from Delaware, Black woman senator from Delaware, who represents a predominantly white state, and a [Black woman] senator from Maryland. And obviously Tim Scott, who represents South Carolina—Republican.

I understand what [my friends and former colleagues] are trying to say, but I think it's important we put all of this in context...

Intriguing! To our ear, Ford seemed to be making a radical suggestion. He seemed to be suggesting that, under current arrangements, Black candidates can win their way into the House, and into the Senate, in jurisdictions which aren't majority Black.

He specifically mentioned four Republican congressmen who were elected in districts which are heavily white. But there's a good number of Black Democrats in the House who have also won their seats in districts which weren't and aren't majority Black.

Uh-oh! When Ford went on to state his main point, his main point had nothing to do with the examples he had cited. (His work on this show can be like that.) But we were struck by his original drift, in which he almost seemed to be saying this:

Maybe it's time for Black candidates to shock the world in a new, post-Obama way. Maybe it's time for Black Democrats to go out and win House seats, including in states like Louisiana, in what a person might call the old-fashioned way.

He mentioned Senator Scott, someone we ourselves wouldn't vote for. But let the word go forth to the nations:

Scott was elected to the House from a South Carolina district which wasn't majority Black. And good God! In the Republican primary for that seat, he defeated a pair of famous (white) names:

One of those names was Paul Thurmond. Republican voters in South Carolina had decided they liked the black guy more than they liked Strom Thurmond's son!  

We're going to go ahead and admit it. It's one of our favorite political stories.

Did the Supreme Court rule correctly in Callais? We don't have the slightest idea, and we've seen none of our greatest Blue thought leaders stoop to the tedious task of trying to reason it out.

Instead, we Blues have been hurried off to the agitprop wars—to excited cries about Jim Crow 2.0, with the chaser of stirring remarks about the picking of cotton. We're going all the way back to 1892, one major voice hotly said.

Then too, there's what Rep. Jim Clayburn said, again in South Carolina. It's possible that he didn't mean what he said, but we'll show you his statement tomorrow.

Even more disclosure! Several years after he lost that race to Tim Scott, Paul Thurmond delivered one of our favorite political speeches. It's even better the way we remember it, as opposed to the way it was said.

We'll show you what Thurmond the younger said that day before our efforts are done. But in the wake of the Callais ruling, we Blues have been riding the agitprop train. The agitprop is easy to memorize, amazingly easy to say. 

They love such statements on The Five. They plainly feel that our agitprop kelps keeps MAGA hope alive!   

That's what they seem to believe on The Five. We can't swear that they're wrong.

Tomorrow: What Rep. Clyburn (and one state senator) said