Louisiana Lawmakers Approve Map That Empowers More Black Voters

Louisiana lawmakers on Friday approved a new congressional map that would create a second district with a majority of Black voters, after a federal court found that the existing map appeared to illegally undermine the power of Black voters in the state.

Given that black voters often support Democratic candidates in the state, the new map also raises the possibility of Democrats taking control of a second congressional seat in Louisiana.

“It's a powerful moment for Black voters in this state and it's a powerful moment for history,” said Ashley K. Shelton, president of the Power Coalition for Equity and Justice and one of the plaintiffs who challenged the map .

Lawmakers in Baton Rouge also agreed to tighten the state's raw “jungle primary” system for federal elections and state Supreme Court races starting in 2026, though they fell far short of the statewide overhaul that Gov. Jeff Landry, the newly inaugurated Republican governor, aspired to.

The whirlwind, five-day special session offered the first glimpse of how Mr. Landry, just two weeks into office, will wield power combined with the Legislature's tough Republican supermajority after eight years of divided rule in Louisiana. As the session began on Martin Luther King's birthday, Mr. Landry made sure to emphasize how much easier lawmakers' jobs should be by comparison.

“His was a persecution for speaking his truth, while ours is just a comfortable dialogue,” Mr. Landry told lawmakers. “His was a huge push, while yours is just a push of a button.”

But during a series of public debates and private negotiations, it became clear that several lawmakers were unwilling to simply greenlight all of Mr. Landry's priorities, most notably a proposal to close all primaries for political office. Critics warned that completely abolishing the state's current system, in which primaries are open to all candidates and voters regardless of political affiliation, would increase partisanship and cause confusion.

The session was prompted by more than a year of lawsuits and rulings last year that found the congressional map drawn after the 2020 census violated the Voting Rights Act because it included only one majority-Black district voters in a state where about a third of the voter population is black.

Similar challenges in court paved the way for new maps elsewhere in the South. In Alabama, a federal court ordered an independently drawn map, and in Georgia, a judge last month signed off on a new map created by the Legislature.

Mr. Landry had fiercely defended the state's original map in his previous role as the state's attorney general and continued to warn this week against allowing a “heavy-handed” judge to take power. If the map fails to pass approval from Chief Justice Shelly D. Dick, a nominee under the Obama administration, it could be redrawn on its own.

But Mr. Landry, now governor and facing a court order, threw his support behind a new map that not only creates a second majority-black district but also protects the state's two most powerful conservatives in Washington — Speaker Mike Johnson and Rep. Steve Scalise, the majority leader. The new map undermines one Republican, Rep. Garret Graves, who endorsed it one of Mr. Landry's rivals in the governor's race.

For his part, Mr. Graves released a statement commenting sarcastically on “the imaginative creativity” of the new map, while Mr. Johnson defended the existing map as constitutional and objected in a social media post to the “unnecessary surrender of a Republican seat in Congress.”

On the new map, Graves' district would cross the state from Baton Rouge to Shreveport and increase the percentage of black voters to a slim majority of about 54 percent. The existing black-majority district, represented by Troy Carter, Louisiana's only black Democrat in the House of Representatives, would retain about 51 percent of black voters.

Despite a brief attempt to change how the map divides certain parishes after a round of private negotiations, the Legislature agreed Friday to back the map, backed by Mr. Landry. Dave Wasserman of the nonpartisan Cook Political Report predicted social media reported that if the map were to take effect, the new district would be “an almost certain” Democratic win.

Republicans focused on their desire to protect not only Mr. Johnson and Mr. Scalise and their power on the national stage, but also Representative Julia Letlow, the only woman in the delegation and a member of the House Appropriations Committee.

The map overwhelmingly cleared the House 86 to 16 votes and the Senate at a Vote 27 to 11 on Friday. Democrats, including Mr. Carter and other black lawmakers, celebrated the outcome even as they acknowledged it was not the map they would have drawn.

Senator Glen Womack, the lead sponsor of the map proposal and represented by Ms. Letlow in Washington, acknowledged at one point that “politics drove this map.”

Mr. Landry, who had set the parameters of the special session, also raised the prospect of closing the state's primaries, which currently allows the top two contenders, regardless of party affiliation, to advance to a runoff if a majority of votes are not secured. Only the state's presidential primaries are currently exempt from the system.

“If you choose to join a political party, it is certainly only fair and right that you have the opportunity to select your party's candidate without the interference of another party,” Mr. Landry told lawmakers , calling the current system “a relic. from the past.”

But some questioned why such a change was necessary, given that Landry's own bid for governor in October was so decisive that a runoff was unnecessary. Others warned it was a costly exercise that would consolidate the political power of the most hardline voters in both parties and exclude the hundreds of thousands of voters in Louisiana who are not affiliated with any party.

“Moving to a closed primary system could cost more and limit voter choice,” said the Public Affairs Research Council of Louisiana, a nonpartisan government watchdog organization. in a statement. It added that “it is difficult to understand why lawmakers would want to support abandoning the system that got them elected.”

State Rep. Julie Emerson, who led the bill this week, emphasized that the measure was not intended to expand government or be costly, saying at one point that “elections are a very important thing that we have to pay for in this state .”

Ultimately, a compromise was reached that would limit the change to elections for Congress and the state Supreme Court beginning in 2026, along with elections for the state education board and public service commission. It would also allow unaffiliated voters to vote for a primary party of their choice.

The final compromise was supported by a number of Republicans, including one of the state's senators, John Kennedy, who said: he spoke directly to Mr. Landry about how we can accommodate unaffiliated voters.

It is unclear when Mr Landry – who celebrated the introduction of both measures in a video released by his office – will sign the bills into law.