Louisiana redistricting: State Senate passes GOP gerrymander, erasing majority-Black district

The GOP’s effort to gerrymander across the South advanced Thursday, as the Louisiana Senate voted to eliminate one of the state’s two majority-Black congressional seats. 

By a 27-10 vote, the Senate passed a bill that would draw out the House district currently represented by Rep. Cleo Fields (D), replacing it with one far more likely to vote for a Republican. The new map would pack Black Louisianans into one district and pit Fields against fellow Democrat, Rep. Troy Carter.

The Louisiana House is expected to take up the measure next week. The bill must pass both chambers before the legislative session ends June 1. 

The U.S. Supreme Court’s recent ruling in Louisiana v. Callais incinerated the Voting Rights Act, igniting a rash of Republican gerrymandering ahead of the 2026 midterms. The following day, Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry (R) suspended the ongoing primary elections for the U.S. House, even though 45,000 absentee ballots had already been cast.

A Louisiana Senate committee advanced the map Wednesday in a middle-of-the-night, party-line vote. Ahead of Thursday’s vote, the bill’s sponsor, Sen. Jay Morris (R), defended the new districts as Democrats decried them during a lengthy floor debate. 

Sen. Katrina Jackson-Andrews (D) questioned the fairness of giving the GOP such an edge when roughly a third of Louisiana voters are registered Republican, a third are registered Democrats and a third are independents. Republicans “make up 35.6% of the state registered voters, [but] they will have 83% of the congressional representation of this state,” said Jackson-Andrews. “How do we justify that?”

“Respectfully, I ask you, how is that fair?” she added.

“Because the majority of the state tends to vote Republican, whether they’re Republicans or independents or Democrats,” Morris responded.  

“The Equal Protection Clause is still valid. It was never overruled. The one person, one vote principle is still valid,” Jackson-Andrews later implored. “This Senate should seek to support a map that gives everyone a voice.”

The debate also doubled as an attempt to generate evidence that the new map was drawn intentionally to target Black voters. In Callais, the Supreme Court kneecapped the VRA and essentially blessed partisan gerrymandering — even when it results in maps that are racially discriminatory in effect. But intentional racial gerrymandering remains unconstitutional, albeit far harder to prove in court. 

“I would argue that if 80% of the Republican Party is white, that [race] is a predominant factor — this amendment, and this bill in general, does use race as a predominant factor,” said Sen. Sidney Barthelemy II (D). “If the numbers bear out that the party is predominantly white, and you’re redistricting an area based on the party, then the two collide, and now you are redistricting based on race.” 

“I’m not redistricting on race,” Morris responded. “I’m redistricting on the basis of partisanship.”

Before the vote, the Senate initially adopted a Republican amendment tweaking the bill, which was first introduced in March before the Supreme Court’s decision.  

Sen. Price also tried to amend the bill, replacing it with a race-neutral map that had no majority-minority districts but still centered one district around New Orleans and another around Baton Rouge. Price’s map would have split fewer parishes and, he said, matched or exceeded the GOP’s map in all other factors Louisiana law imposes on drawing districts. The Senate rejected that amendment by a 10-27 party-line vote. 

Facing slumping approval ratings, President Donald Trump urged Republicans to gerrymander their congressional districts in the hopes of staving off a Democratic wave in the upcoming midterm elections. Texas, Missouri, Ohio and Florida all quickly complied. 

Following the Callais decision, Louisiana joined Alabama, South Carolina and Tennessee in moving to scrap majority-Black districts represented by Democrats ahead of November. 

The bill would also authorize $2,934,660 for notifying the state’s 2,964,303 voters at an estimated cost of $0.99 per mailer. It would not allocate any additional funds for reprinting ballots, remailing absentee and military voter ballots, broader voter education efforts, or other election administration costs caused by suspending an already ongoing primary election to redraw the congressional map. 

The Republican rush to redistrict ahead of November could still hit a judicial roadblock. A handful of lawsuits have been filed challenging the primary election’s suspension. 

The current U.S. House map was created ahead of 2024 after a district court held that the prior map violated the VRA and directed the creation of a second majority-Black district, to better align with Louisiana’s racial demographics. 

But the Supreme Court’s decision in Callais held that such racially-motivated mapmaking is unconstitutional. While the ruling did not require Louisiana to immediately replace its map, the Court did grant plaintiffs’ request to expedite sending an order down to the district court, which made a speedy redraw more likely.

If enacted, the new map would be nearly identical to the map Louisiana originally used in 2022.