Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry suspended the state's May 16 congressional primaries after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that the Pelican State's House map amounted to an unconstitutional racial gerrymander, a decision that now leaves candidates, voters, and election officials in limbo just days before early voting was set to begin.
The move, announced Thursday in a joint statement from Landry and state Attorney General Liz Murrill, came one day after the high court found that Louisiana had unlawfully discriminated by race when it created a second majority-Black congressional district in response to a federal judge's 2022 order. Early voting had been scheduled to start Saturday. Absentee ballots had already gone out to overseas voters.
The suspension applies only to U.S. House races and their subsequent runoffs. Senate and state Supreme Court elections will still proceed on May 16, Just The News reported, with House primaries pushed to at least July 15, or whenever the Legislature sets a new date, to allow time for lawmakers to draw a lawful congressional map.
The 6-3 Supreme Court decision struck down a map that had reshaped Louisiana's congressional delegation. Under the map drawn after the 2020 census, the state sent five Republicans and one Democrat to Washington. After the federal judge's 2022 order forced the creation of a second majority-Black district, two Democrats won seats ahead of the 2024 elections, shifting the delegation to four Republicans and two Democrats.
The Court's order automatically terminated a prior stay that had allowed elections to proceed under the disputed map. That termination left Louisiana legally barred from conducting congressional elections under the existing lines, a point Landry and Murrill made explicit in their joint statement:
"By the Court's order, however, that stay automatically terminated with [Wednesday's] decision. Accordingly, the State is currently enjoined from carrying out congressional elections under the current map. We are working together with the Legislature and the Secretary of State's office to develop a path forward."
The practical effect is straightforward: no valid map means no valid election. Landry framed the delay as a matter of constitutional obligation, not political convenience.
In a separate statement reported by Fox News, the governor said allowing elections under an unconstitutional map "would undermine the integrity of our system and violate the rights of our voters," adding that the executive order "ensures we uphold the rule of law while giving the Legislature the time it needs to pass a fair and lawful congressional map."
Misti Cordell, a Republican running to fill the seat vacated by Rep. Julia Letlow, told the Associated Press that Landry personally called congressional candidates following Wednesday's ruling to inform them the primaries would most likely be rescheduled. Cordell acknowledged the disruption but accepted the reasoning.
"It's an inconvenience for a candidate for sure, but you know they want to do it right versus having to go through all this again."
Cordell noted that candidates had already been "spending their war chest" ahead of the November 3 general election. A delay of two months or more means campaigns must stretch budgets, recalibrate outreach, and maintain voter engagement through a period of uncertainty, all because a map drawn under judicial pressure failed to survive judicial review.
The episode recalls recent redistricting fights in Virginia, where courts have intervened to block or reshape election maps at politically sensitive moments, leaving candidates and voters scrambling.
Not everyone accepted the suspension quietly. State Sen. Royce Duplessis warned that the governor's action would sow disorder among the electorate, regardless of party or race.
"This is going to cause mass confusion among voters, Democrats, Republicans, white, black, everybody."
Duplessis went further, accusing state leaders of manipulating the process mid-stream.
"What they're effectively doing is changing the rules of the game in the middle of the game. It's rigging the system."
That charge deserves scrutiny. It was not Landry or Murrill who invalidated the map. The Supreme Court did, by a two-thirds supermajority. The governor's options, once the stay dissolved, were limited: hold elections under a map the nation's highest court had just declared unconstitutional, or pause and let the Legislature fix it. Landry chose the path that respects the ruling. Calling that "rigging" requires ignoring who actually changed the rules.
UCLA law professor Richard Hasen offered a different critique, telling The Washington Post that the situation amounted to "naked partisanship", but then conceded that "under the Supreme Court's approach to voting now, naked partisanship is more of a defense than an indictment," as Newsmax reported.
The Louisiana ruling does not exist in a vacuum. The Court's decision could force other Southern states to redraw their congressional maps ahead of November's midterm elections. Any map change in Louisiana alone could shift at least one U.S. House seat toward Republicans, restoring the five-to-one partisan split the state had under its post-2020-census lines.
That prospect explains why the political temperature around this case runs so high. The second majority-Black district was itself the product of judicial intervention, a federal judge's 2022 order that compelled Louisiana to redraw its map. Now the Supreme Court has ruled that the remedy went too far, finding that race was used unlawfully in the process. The result is a rare situation where a court-ordered map was later struck down by a higher court as an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.
The Court's recent handling of the Texas redistricting case, where it allowed the Lone Star State to keep its congressional map in another 6-3 decision, shows how redistricting battles now turn on the specific facts of each state's mapmaking rather than any blanket rule favoring one party.
For voters, the practical question is simpler: when do they get to vote, and under what lines? The answer, for Louisiana's House races, is not before July 15 at the earliest. Whether the Legislature can agree on a new map in time remains an open question. It was unclear as of Thursday whether the suspension would also affect primaries for statewide offices, including one of the state's two U.S. Senate seats.
Critics will frame this as a Republican governor exploiting a friendly Supreme Court to grab a House seat. That framing requires ignoring the sequence of events. A federal judge ordered a new map in 2022. Louisiana complied. The Supreme Court then found that compliance produced an unconstitutional result. The governor suspended elections he was legally barred from holding.
Every step followed from a court order, not from a backroom deal. The question is not whether Landry had the authority to pause the primaries; the injunction left him little choice. The question is whether the Legislature will use the time responsibly to produce a map that satisfies the Court and serves Louisiana's voters.
The growing role of the Supreme Court's emergency orders in shaping election outcomes is itself a pattern worth watching. When courts intervene this close to an election, with absentee ballots already mailed and early voting days away, the disruption is real, regardless of which party benefits.
Duplessis is right about one thing: this will confuse voters. Confusion is the inevitable cost when maps are drawn under court order, challenged, upheld, stayed, and then struck down, all within a single redistricting cycle. The fault lies not with the governor who paused an election he could not legally hold, but with a process that produced an unconstitutional map in the first place.
Maintaining clean election administration is hard enough without courts rewriting the rules weeks before voters head to the polls.
Louisiana's voters deserve a lawful map and a fair election. Right now, they have neither. The Legislature should act fast, and the critics who spent years demanding judicial intervention in redistricting should think twice before complaining when the judiciary's own handiwork gets thrown out.
