REDS SWAMP BLUES: When Newt's troops overran D.C. ...

THURSDAY, JUNE 11, 2026

...Dems like Jim Clyburn hung on: In November 1992, Bill Clinton regained the White House for the Democratic Party. For the record, he was a white Southerner. So was his running mate, Senator Al Gore (D-Tenn.).

After twelve years of Presidents Reagan and Bush, the Democrats were actually back in the White House! And in that year's congressional elections, the ancien regime prevailed:   

Congressional elections, November 1992   
Democrats: 258 seats
Republicans: 176 seats 

It had been that way since the dawn of time. Two years later, the deluge:

Congressional elections, November 1994
Democrats: 204 seats
Republicans: 230 seats

Say what? What the Capitol Hill? Yes, that actually happened! For all the data, click here!

The numbers can get a little confusing, but 34 incumbent Democratic House members were defeated in the general election that year. (That included Rep. Tom Foley, D-Wash., the speaker of the House.) 

In 22 other races, Republicans won open seats previously held by Democrats.    

Rep. Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) became the new speaker of the House. The GOP had seized control of the House, by a fairly comfortable margin, for the first time in forty years!

Republicans also seized control of the Senate with a pick-up of eight seats. The very next day, Senator Shelby (D-Alabama) party-switched, transitioning to an R. President Clinton would win re-election two years later, but the co-called "Republican Revolution" was very much underway.

Overall, Republicans had gained 54 seats in the House. Some of those gains, though by no means all, had occurred in Southern states as part of the process whereby "the solid South" (principally meaning the white South) was completing a slow, chaotic change from solidly Democratic to solidly GOP.  

It would be hard to overstate the shock at the size of the realignment, which brought a whole new generation of major Republican players to D.C. Indeed, six (6) future Republican senators won election as freshmen congressmen that year. We refer to future senators Brownback, Burr, Chambliss, Coburn, Lindsey Graham and Wicker.

Joe Scarborough even arrived in D.C. as a Republican congressman from the Florida panhandle! Today, Scarborough conducts the most intelligent conversations found on any of our struggling nation's daily cable news programs. 

Yesterday, he was denounced as a "douchebag" on the most-watched "cable news" show in our profoundly challenged nation. More on that this afternoon. For now, let's return to the Republican wave of 1994:

The solid South had always been politically and culturally conservative. But as the region fitfully moved from solidly D to solidly R, it moved away from the non-ideological alignment which had characterized our party politics for a great many years. 

That said, please remember this:

Even as the GOP was seizing final control of the South, an important change in the way certain House districts were formed meant that a new group of Black Democrats were entering the House from that region. 

To cite one prominent example, Rep. James Clyburn had won a House seat in November 1992. He was a straight-ahead Democratic congressman from the state of South Carolina!  

He would go on to be a major figure in American politics. He had won election in that state's new majority Black 6th congressional district, a district which had been created in the manner described by the leading authority:  

Jim Clyburn    

James Enos Clyburn (born July 21, 1940) is an American politician serving as the U.S. representative for South Carolina's 6th congressional district. First elected in 1992, Clyburn is serving his 17th term, representing a congressional district that includes most of the majority-black precincts in and around Columbia and Charleston, as well as most of the majority-black areas outside Beaufort and nearly all of South Carolina's share of the Black Belt.

[...]  

After the 1990 census South Carolina's district lines were redrawn. Due to prior racial discrimination before the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Supreme Court required the 6th district, which had previously included the northeastern portion of the state, to be redrawn as a black-majority district. The 6th was reconfigured to take in most of the majority-black areas near Columbia and Charleston, as well as most of the Black Belt. Five-term incumbent Robin Tallon's home in Florence stayed in the district, but he chose to retire.  

Rep. Clyburn has had an extremely significant congressional career. As other people have frequently noted, he's an extremely capable person. 

Could he have won a House seat from his home state absent the creation of that majority Black district?  We can't necessarily answer that question, but the answer might be no.   

Those majority Black Southern districts have been in the news of late, due to several Supreme Court decisions involving redistricting in Louisiana and Alabama. As a result of one of those decisions, Alabama will have one majority Black district this November—one such district out of seven districts total, instead of the current two.   

These districts were formed in various Southern states in the wake of an addition to the Voting Rights Act in 1982. The Republican Party strongly supported that addition to the VRA.

After the 1990 census, the Republican Party also supported the creation of those majority Black districts—districts which were virtually guaranteed to send Democrats to the House, even as the region was party-switching its way to Republican control.   

Today, we're involved in a great civil war about the likely dismantling of many or all of those majority Black districts. Blue America, including the nation's many Black Democrats, is faced with the challenge of deciding what to think and say, and what to do, in the face of this likely dismantling.

First, though, why did the GOP support the creation of those surefire Democratic districts in the first place? As their revolution was emerging, why did the GOP support the creation of those Democratic districts? 

Carl Hulse recently outlined the standard history in this Congressional Memo for the New York Times.

Tomorrow, at long last, we believe we'll finally get to Hulse's account. Rep. Sewell's recent assessments still lie ahead.  

Tomorrow: At long last, Hulse explains