President Obama won a second term last week, but it wasn’t a great week for other African-American candidates.

Despite Obama’s big win, there remain no black senators, only one African-American was even nominated for major statewide office, and black candidates lost seven of eight competitive House races — six of them by very close margins.

The end result: the number of African-Americans in the House will likely remain the same in 2013 as it was this Congress.

As of this weekend, three of the eight House races that had yet to be called featured black Republicans. All of them appear to have lost.

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David Bositis, an expert on African-American politics at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, said despite the close losses, there is reason for hope.

“Most years, black candidates get either large votes — 75 percent-plus — or small votes –10-30 percent,” Bositis said. “This year, there were quite a few black candidates who lost but got between 45 and 50 percent of the vote, which is very respectable.”

Read more at The Washington Post.

Congressional map-drawers in states across the country are struggling to maintain majority-black congressional districts as African Americans move out of urban areas. And now, it appears plausible that one of those new districts could be won by a non-black candidate.

Former congresswoman Debbie Halvorson (D-Ill.) is trying to do what few before her have accomplished: win a majority-black district as a non-black candidate. She faces an ethically wounded Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. (D-Ill.) in a primary in a district that has been stretched from the South Side of Chicago far out into the Cook County suburbs and Will County, which Halvorson represented for one term before losing in 2010.

Only two majority-black districts have been won by a candidate who isn’t black in recent years. One is the Memphis-based district currently held by Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.); the other was a New Orleans-based district briefly held by Rep. Joseph Cao (R-La.).

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David Bositis, an expert on race and politics at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies and a friend of Jackson’s, said black voters are actually more apt to vote for white candidates than the inverse. It’s simply a matter, he said, of white candidates not running in majority-black districts.

“Contrary to what a lot of people think, black voters do tend to be very pragmatic,” Bositis said. “They look to elect somebody who is going to benefit them.”

Read more at The Washington Post.

The last decade hasn’t been kind to majority-black congressional districts across the country.

While the black population nationally ticked up 12 percent in the just-released Census numbers, eight of the top 10 majority-black districts across the country actually experienced population loss, losing an average of more than 10 percent of their black population, according to a review of Census data by The Fix.

Many of these districts lost voters of other races too, and are now in need of significant expansion during this year’s redistricting process.

The population loss is really more of a migration. The black population is moving from the major metropolitan areas – where most of these districts are – and into the suburbs. In fact, of the 15 districts with the greatest black population growth over the last decade, all of them are in the suburbs of these metro areas.

And that could play right into the hands of a Republican Party that controls redistricting in an unprecedented number of states and will be drawing many of these districts.

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“Without question, the last election came at a perfect time for Republicans in terms of taking control of a lot of state legislatures that they hadn’t before,” said David Bositis, an expert on race and politics at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies. “But the underlying fact is that, if you look at population growth of the U.S. over last 10 years, almost all of the growth came in minority communities.”

Read more at The Washington Post.