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Louisiana Republicans approved a new congressional map Friday, eliminating one of the state’s two majority-Black districts and drawing an additional Republican-leaning district in its place.
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The map, which is expected to help elect five Republicans and one Democrat to Congress, was passed out of the state Senate Friday afternoon after being tweaked in the state House earlier in the week. Republicans currently have a 4-2 advantage in Louisiana’s House delegation.
Legislators drew the new lines in response to a major U.S. Supreme Court ruling, Louisiana v. Callais, which found the existing congressional map in Louisiana to be a racial gerrymander and further weakened the Voting Rights Act.
The map preserves one Black-majority district that snakes from New Orleans to Baton Rouge and is expected to be challenged by voting rights advocates. A third of Louisiana’s population is Black.
“We have a map here that is meets all the traditional redistricting criteria, it’s not racially gerrymandered,” said Republican state Sen. Jay Morris, who authored the bill. “I feel like it’s going to be very defensible.”
Republicans stressed during hours of debate and discussion that they focused exclusively on partisanship, seeking to increase GOP representation in Congress.
“We focused on the Democrat numbers, not the racial numbers when drawing,” said state Rep. Beau Beaullieu, a Republican leading the map drawing for the party in the House. “We focused in this case on partisanship, which is what Callais said, and I mentioned in my intro, is clearly permissible.”
Still, with partisanship and race closely linked in the South, Democrats protested the racial impact of a partisan map.
“We are being asked to take one of two minority opportunity districts in this state — where Black Louisianians are nearly one-third of the population — and to reduce that minority opportunity representation to a single seat out of six, from 33% of the population to 16% of the representation members,” Democratic state Rep. Kyle Green Jr. said during debate on Thursday. “That’s not a map, that’s a math problem with the moral answer, and the answer is no.”
Louisiana delayed its House primaries that were originally scheduled for May 16 to give state lawmakers time to redraw congressional maps there following the Supreme Court order, discarding some 40,000 votes that had been cast in primaries already.
The map is likely the last one implemented by a state legislature ahead of the 2026 election, as primary season is well underway across the country. Still, litigation is likely to continue for years.
President Donald Trump kicked off an unusual mid-decade redistricting frenzy last year, urging Republican-led states to redraw their maps to shore up his party’s slim House majority.
Democrats responded in kind in several states, but a series of court rulings — the Callais ruling at the U.S. Supreme Court and the Virginia Supreme Court’s decision to block a Democratic gerrymander there — gave Republicans a major boost.
