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.
The map, which is expected to elect five Republicans and one Democrat to Congress, passed the state Senate Friday afternoon after being amended in the House of Representatives earlier in the week. Republicans currently have a 4-2 advantage in Louisiana’s House delegation.
Lawmakers have drawn new lines in response to a major U.S. Supreme Court ruling, Louisiana v. Callaiswhich deemed Louisiana’s existing congressional map a racial gerrymander and further weakened the Voting Rights Act.
The map preserves a majority-black district that stretches from New Orleans to Baton Rouge and is expected to be challenged by voting rights advocates. A third of Louisiana’s population is black.
“Here we have a map that meets all the traditional redistricting criteria, it’s not racially redistricted,” said Republican Sen. Jay Morris, the bill’s author. “I feel like it’s going to be very defensible.”
Republicans emphasized during hours of debate and discussion that they were focused exclusively on partisanship, seeking to increase the Republican Party’s representation in Congress.
“We focused on the Democrats’ numbers, not the racial numbers in the drawing,” said state Rep. Beau Beaullieu, a Republican who is leading the drawing of the party map in the House. “Our focus in this case has been on partisanship, which Callais says, and I mentioned this in my introduction, is clearly permissible.”
Yet 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 Louisianans make up nearly a third of the population — and reduce that minority opportunity representation to just one seat in six, from 33 percent of the population to 16 percent of the membership representation,” the Democrat said. State Representative Kyle Green Jr.. said during Thursday’s debate. “It’s not a map, it’s a math problem with a moral answer, and the answer is no.”
Louisiana delayed House primaries that were originally scheduled for May 16 to give state lawmakers time to redraw the congressional map following the Supreme Court’s order, throwing out some 40,000 votes already cast in the primary.
This map is likely the last implemented by a state legislature before the 2026 elections, with primary season well underway across the country. However, it is likely that the litigation will continue for years.
President Donald Trump launched an unusual mid-decade redistricting spree last year, urging Republican-led states to redraw their maps to bolster his mandate. the party’s slim majority in the House.
Democrats responded similarly in several states, but a series of court decisions — the U.S. Supreme Court’s Callais decision and the Virginia Supreme Court’s decision to block a Democratic gerrymander in that state — gave Republicans a major boost.
