BATON ROUGE, Louisiana — Walking through the bright blue and yellow doors of Ryan Elementary School to cast his first-ever ballot, 18-year-old Altori Doherty had never heard the name Jamie Davis, a Black Democrat running to be Louisiana’s first Black U.S. senator since Reconstruction.
Neither had 37-year-old Thedric Haney. Nor had 25-year-old Vivian Hayes.
Down the river in New Orleans’ Ninth Ward, 39-year-old Arlet Wylie was in the dark, too.
Ultimately, Davis lost the Senate race by 1.7 points to Republican challenger Julia Letlow. Some of that loss rests on a lack of investment by the national Democratic Party across the state, advocates and residents said.
In the weeks leading up to the election, the party and its affiliates spent nothing on ads there, according to AdImpact via Wesleyan Media Project.
It wasn’t just Louisiana. Florida and Mississippi’s lack of investment also stand out.
Four of the seven closest Senate races — South Carolina, Florida, Mississippi, and Louisiana — were in the South. Yet groups affiliated with the national Democratic Party spent $11.8 million on ads across those states in the weeks before the election. By comparison, the other states — Ohio, Alaska, and Iowa — received $81.7 million, roughly nine times as much per race.
For Black voters and organizers, the narrow margins in Florida, Louisiana, and Mississippi exposed a contradiction at the heart of Democrats’ midterm success. National Democrats made the fight over Black voting rights a rallying cry without making several of the states at the center of that fight a spending priority.
But the decisions played out differently across the three states. In Louisiana, Davis struggled to become known in a state national Democrats had largely written off. In Florida, senatorial candidate Angie Nixon’s supporters saw resistance not just to the state’s electoral prospects, but to her politics as a Democratic Socialist. In Mississippi, party leaders ignored signs that the senatorial race was winnable. There, the national calculation eventually changed, but the largest advertising commitments came late.
In interviews, advocates described a cycle in which national Democrats have treated Southern states as unwinnable, withholding the resources needed to reach voters, then leaving local organizers to overcome both the barriers to Black political participation and the belief that nothing will change.
At the national level, Black Southerners have “been overlooked and made not a priority for as long as I can remember,” said Ashley Shelton, a Baton Rouge resident and founder of the Power Coalition for Equity and Justice.
Shelton has fought for years for greater Black political participation and was a defendant in the congressional redistricting case trying to maintain equal Black representation in the state.
In Louisiana, many voters that Capital B met were unaware that their home was at the center of the largest voting rights struggle in generations.
In April, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the state’s 2024 congressional map, finding that the state had engaged in unconstitutional racial gerrymandering when it created a second majority-Black district. The decision weakened the guarantees for fair voting representation among minority voters nationwide.
In the weeks leading up to Nov. 3, Shelton saw map after map that “left out Florida, Louisiana, Texas, and Mississippi as winnable Senate races.”
The Democrats would go on to win Texas and are currently leading in the Mississippi race, but “if [the national party] would send us like 10% of what they’re willing to spend in a battleground state like Ohio, it would make a huge difference in states like Louisiana and Florida,” Shelton said.
As funding fell short, Southern Democrats faced steeper climb
In Louisiana, the investment gap was visible in a basic fact: Voters did not know the Democratic U.S. Senate candidate’s name.
More than half of the nearly two dozen voters Capital B interviewed on Election Day in Baton Rouge and New Orleans had never heard of Davis or knew little about his campaign. Davis himself told WAFB-TV that his campaign found roughly 35% to 40% of Louisiana voters still did not know who he was.
U.S. Rep. Troy Carter, a Black Democrat from New Orleans, said he sought $2 million from national Democrats for Davis during the campaign’s final three weeks, as polling suggested a tightening race. Carter said some money arrived, but “not nearly as much as we would have liked.”
Davis, a farmer, said that additional funding could have paid for door-knocking and an immediate response to a late attack advertisement that he said used artificial intelligence and misrepresented his positions.
In Florida, there were doubts about whether the national party wanted to invest in Nixon.
Erica Hall, a Florida food access advocate who spoke with hundreds of voters this year, said, “Too many party leaders treated her as a risky choice because she is a Democratic Socialist.”
Darius Jones, founder of the National Black Empowerment Council, also said he believed Nixon’s politics contributed to the party’s hesitation.
Nixon campaigned on Medicare for All, a $25 federal minimum wage, universal child care, stronger union protections, and a wealth tax on billionaires.
To Hall, the primary had already settled the question of whom the party should support.
“It was a diverse group of voters that chose her as a nominee, and the party had a responsibility to invest in her campaign and give her a real chance to compete,” she said.
Nixon ultimately fell about 3 percentage points short. In the final weeks before the election, she said she lacked enough money to run a single television advertisement. The Washington Post reported that the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee did not spend on her race.
In Mississippi, Scott Colom, who defeated the Republican incumbent after a prolonged ballot count, had early champions. U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock of Georgia helped raise money for voter registration and mobilization.
But when Warnock first urged donors in April at a Washington, D.C., fundraiser to take Mississippi seriously, members of the audience laughed, CNN reported.
By Labor Day, Democratic political action committees were encouraging donors and allied groups to consider the race as polling and the wider Senate map improved Democrats’ prospects.
The group announced its first Mississippi advertising campaign on Oct. 20, two weeks before Election Day, committing $1.2 million.
The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee did not respond to Capital B’s requests for comment. A spokesperson for the Democratic National Committee said: “This midterm election’s historic results in the South proved our theory of the case: that when you invest and organize everywhere, you can win anywhere.”
The DNC sent between $17,500 and $22,500 a month to every Southern state chapter this year. (As of mid-2026, the DNC held roughly $18.5 million in debt against approximately $16.3 million in cash on hand, putting the committee more than $2 million in the red.)
“The DNC played an important role in expanding the map and flipping seats up and down the ballot,” the spokesperson added.
More money would not have guaranteed a victory. But the closeness of the races in Louisiana and Florida has sharpened a question Black organizers say the party can no longer avoid: How much of the South’s Republican dominance reflects voters’ preferences, and how much is sustained by decisions not to compete?
Why Democrats’ Southern spending frustrated Black voters
For many that Capital B spoke with, the lack of support exposed a party leadership too removed from the Black communities it counted on and from the economic pressures shaping their lives. Black candidates were left to compete without the resources they needed, while Black voters were asked to deliver victories without a meaningful say in where the party placed its bets.
Shelton said national leaders had neglected people “outside their own tax bracket,” even as those voters faced threats to health care and food assistance.
Hall saw a national party that expected Black women to deliver votes “without seeing them as real people.”
“Don’t just come to our neighborhood to get our votes and speak at a church,” she said. “That’s empty to me. This is the most engaged I’ve seen Black Florida in a long time, and it was without [national Democratic] support.”
Organizers say the missing investment means fewer opportunities to connect voters’ concerns about grocery prices, utility bills, healthcare, and schools to the candidates asking to represent them — and less support for the year-round work of building political power in communities whose votes the party depends on elsewhere.
Jones, of the National Black Empowerment Council, offered a more favorable assessment of the broader election results, arguing that victories by other Black candidates demonstrated a path to political power through coalition-building.
Across the historically Republican South this midterm election, Democrats won 63 congressional races compared to 92 Republican victories. There are still over 20 uncalled races.
About 9 in 10 Black voters supported the Democratic candidate in their local U.S. House race this year, up from about 8 in 10 who supported Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign in 2024. In Florida, 90% of Black voters supported Nixon.
The national Democratic Party’s “conversation about the Supreme Court’s efforts to roll back the Black vote … led to increased turnout,” Jones said, and even with losses in Louisiana and Florida, “that’s going to help make things better for Black people on the issues that are most important to our community.”
In the week since the election, Davis has said that he is weighing a run for governor next year and, if he does not enter that race, plans to run for Senate in 2028. Next time, he said, he would start campaigning earlier.
Nixon is unsure about running again. She questioned whether the party valued Black candidates’ leadership as much as the voters they mobilized. Two days after the election, she announced Never Scared PAC, an organization focused on civic engagement, developing local leaders, and building political power for working families. Its first announced task was training activists to press lawmakers about potential budget cuts and their effects on working families and seniors.
With the race in Mississippi still unresolved, the question was not only whether the late push would prove sufficient, but whether Democrats would approach the next campaign differently. Before the election, Colom had urged the party to invest in rebuilding its Southern strength.
Some Black organizers remain disappointed.
Gary Chambers, a former Senate candidate from Baton Rouge, said that in the week after the election, Black Louisianans “are doggishly proud of the work we have done here. We are ashamed of the party that has ignored us.”
“I see the consequences when communities are asked to organize, volunteer, and vote, but the resources and support don’t follow,” Hall added. “It’s disheartening, especially for people like me on the front lines that’s out here really doing the work. I’m not in an ivory tower talking. I’m out here on the ground every single day.”
Chambers took it a step forward: “So for every district that was won all over this country, you owe a debt to Baton Rouge,” he said. “You owe a debt to Louisiana because none of this would have been possible if it were not for the fighters here.”
