Douglas Rooks has been a Maine editor, columnist and reporter for 41 years. He welcomes comment at [email protected].

Although votes are still being counted in some Maine primary races, the fall campaigns have already begun. Nationally, one of the biggest questions is whether Republicans can maintain their lengthy dominance of the Old South, in the states where slavery once existed.

In an epochal shift still insufficiently appreciated, segregationist Democrats who once ruled the “Solid South” for the national party have been replaced by Republicans with a slightly different platform, but which practically no Black voters find attractive. The twin pillars of Republican dominance run through Texas and Florida, which until the 1990s regularly had Democratic delegations.

In the South, the only Black legislators in most states represent “majority minority” districts, created under terms of the 1965 Voting Rights Act — the most consequential civil rights law ever enacted. It enfranchised millions of citizens previously denied the right to vote. Originally, implementation focused on registering new voters, who elected mayors, councilors and congressmen where they formed a de facto majority.

Efforts to re-segregate by gerrymandering were thwarted by Voting Rights provisions requiring “pre-clearance” by the U.S. Department of Justice, which denied any that diluted Black representation. In his 2013 Shelby v. Holder opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts removed that protection. Even earlier, Roberts opined that “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating based on race” — as if there’d been no reason for a Voting Rights Act in the first place.

Roberts has completed his repeal of the Voting Rights Act as it applies to representation through an Alabama case eliminating any barrier to diluting Black votes. In doing so, he revealed the six-member Republican supermajority he heads as a political arm of the Republican Party — something that once would have shocked us but apparently no longer does. Even more outrageously, other Republican justices suggested that extreme partisan gerrymandering could actually be a defense against charges of racial gerrymandering.

But the GOP is now slipping, and for last two decades has been furiously gerrymandering to maintain an edge out of proportion to its number of votes. The U.S. Supreme Court’s heavy thumb on the scales can rightly be viewed as a last-gasp effort to maintain a Republican House.

Roberts gave the game away by abandoning a position he took just three years ago when the court upheld a requirement for two “majority minority” districts in Alabama, where Black people make up more than one-third of the population. In the new ruling, Roberts and Brett Kavanaugh reversed themselves to approve only one “majority minority” district in Louisiana without bothering  to explain why.

Even more telling is that, with two dozen major decisions still pending, Roberts rushed this one out in May. Alabama’s governor suspended primary voting in the affected congressional districts so yet another map could be devised.

One little-recognized effect of this repeated redistricting is voter confusion. Citizens barely get to know their legislators before they’re suddenly voting for someone else. This means nothing to the court, or to legislators almost gleefully redrawing lines they think will benefit them.

The big question is whether it will work. Gerrymandering functions by packing as many of the other party’s voters into a small number of districts while maintaining thinner majorities in those it already holds. As voting shifts, margins diminish and the Achilles heel of gerrymandering takes hold.

A spectacular result came in Hungary’s elections in April, when proto-dictator Victor Orbán was removed from power. Orbán’s party held two-thirds of parliamentary seats before the election and just one-third afterward. The landslide reversal occurred despite a relatively small shift in voting, as one gerrymandered district after another was swept away. And Orbán seemingly had grabbed all the levers of power — parliament, the judiciary, the news media.

A similar result in the Southern U.S. is less likely but possible, if “voters of color” outraged by Trump administration immigration policies turn out in large numbers.

In any event, the Voting Rights Act still protects the right to vote, though not the right to proportional representation. The first time the South sent significant number of Black people to Congress — all Republicans — was during Reconstruction, when newly enfranchised freedmen allied with sympathetic whites (“scalawags”) and transplanted northerners (“carpetbaggers”) to create voting majorities.

The Roberts rules invite such coalitions again — something that might be healthy for our politics after so much conflict and division. People can unite around their common interests, even when they don’t regularly associate or even much like each other.

The New Deal coalition was one such moment. Given increased racial tolerance among younger Americans, another could be built — and the GOP billionaires are vulnerable. The Supreme Court’s new doctrine may not be reversed, but it can be overcome.