Republican Gov. Jeff Landry signed a new Louisiana congressional district map into law Friday, hours after the state's GOP-controlled Legislature approved the plan in a lopsided party-line vote. The map eliminates one of the state's two majority-Black House districts and positions Republicans to pick up a fifth seat in a six-district delegation.
The Louisiana state Senate passed the new map 28-10, and Landry wasted no time putting his signature on it. The move follows the U.S. Supreme Court's April 30 decision striking down the state's existing two-majority-Black-district map as an illegal racial gerrymander, a ruling that also weakened the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act.
For conservatives who have watched Democrats use court-ordered maps to carve out favorable districts for years, Louisiana's move is a straightforward exercise of legislative power. Republicans hold four of the state's six congressional seats. The new map aims to make that five, and to shore up the seat held by U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson.
Republican state Sen. Jay Morris, the bill's sponsor, was blunt about the map's purpose. He told colleagues on the Senate floor that he deliberately packed more Democrats into a single district to improve Republican performance elsewhere.
"I purposely put more Democrats into District 2 to make the remaining districts better performing for Republicans."
Morris insisted the map was drawn on partisan, not racial, lines. He said he told map demographers to avoid including any data on race and to exclude those statistics from information shared with lawmakers before the vote.
The practical effect: the heavily Democratic, majority-Black district based in New Orleans, currently represented by Democratic U.S. Rep. Troy Carter, absorbs part of Baton Rouge. Meanwhile, the district represented by Democratic U.S. Rep. Cleo Fields gets redrawn around predominantly white communities in the Baton Rouge area and southern Louisiana, turning it into far friendlier terrain for a Republican challenger.
Louisiana Republicans had initially weighed an even more aggressive approach: a map that could have given the party a shot at all six seats. They settled on a 5-1 configuration, arguing it was safer for the GOP overall and, critically, better insulated Speaker Johnson from a competitive reelection fight.
Democrats on the Senate floor objected sharply. Democratic state Sen. Sam Jenkins told Morris directly that the map amounted to racial gerrymandering dressed up as partisan strategy.
"I think it's a racially gerrymandered district that's going to get us into a lot of trouble here."
Morris replied with two words: "Agree to disagree."
Democratic state Sen. Royce Duplessis went further during floor debate, pointing out that other Southern states, South Carolina among them, had refused to redraw their congressional maps in the middle of an election year. Duplessis said Louisiana was participating in a "vicious, vicious race to the bottom."
The ACLU of Louisiana wasted no time signaling its intentions. The organization called the new map a "racial gerrymander hiding behind the thin veneer of partisanship" and warned that "this fight is just beginning." The group suggested Friday that it could file suit.
Whether that legal challenge gains traction is an open question. The Supreme Court's April 30 ruling already rejected the existing two-majority-Black-district map as itself constituting an illegal racial gerrymander. Any new lawsuit would have to navigate that precedent, and the high court's newly narrowed reading of the Voting Rights Act.
The redistricting fight forced Louisiana to overhaul its election schedule. Landry had already postponed the state's closed U.S. House primary, originally set for May 16. He then signed a separate law converting the primary to an open format and pushing it to November 3. Under the new rules, all candidates regardless of party affiliation will appear on the same ballot for voters in their district.
That shift matters. An open primary in Louisiana's political culture tends to benefit the dominant party, which, in most of the newly drawn districts, means Republicans.
Louisiana is not acting in a vacuum. The Associated Press reported that the national redistricting battle has been fueled by President Donald Trump's efforts to protect Republicans' slim U.S. House majority heading into the midterm elections. Republicans believe their redistricting efforts across the country could net them as many as 15 additional seats.
Democrats have their own redistricting plays. They think new district lines in California and Utah could yield six seats for their side. But the math still favors the GOP if red-state legislatures execute aggressively, and Louisiana just did exactly that.
Meanwhile, in Wisconsin, a separate front opened on Friday. The liberal-controlled Wisconsin Supreme Court agreed to hear an appeal in a redistricting case filed by a bipartisan coalition of business executives seeking to redraw the state's Republican-friendly congressional districts. A three-judge panel had dismissed the case in April.
Republicans currently hold six of Wisconsin's eight House seats, with only two considered competitive. The Wisconsin plaintiffs are not seeking a ruling in time for 2026. They want the state Supreme Court to send the case back to a lower court for trial, a proceeding unlikely to happen before 2027, with any new maps potentially taking effect for 2028.
That timeline means the Wisconsin case is a slow-burn threat, not an immediate one. Louisiana's new map, by contrast, will shape the 2025 election cycle directly.
Morris's insistence that the map was drawn without racial data is a deliberate legal strategy. The Supreme Court's April 30 ruling established that race-based line-drawing, even when intended to help minority voters, can violate the Constitution. By framing the new map as purely partisan, Louisiana Republicans are building a record designed to withstand the legal challenges the ACLU and others have already promised.
Democrats contend the distinction between racial and partisan gerrymandering is a fig leaf when the two overlap so heavily. Jenkins's warning about "a lot of trouble" reflects a genuine legal risk. But it also reflects a political reality: after the Supreme Court itself threw out the map Democrats preferred, the burden of proof has shifted.
Louisiana's current map, the one ordered by a lower court in 2024 to comply with the Voting Rights Act, is now legally dead. The Legislature filled the void. Whether the replacement survives will depend on whether courts accept Morris's race-blind, party-first rationale or side with critics who see the same old lines drawn with a newer justification.
The plaintiffs who originally challenged Louisiana's maps earlier criticized the Legislature's approach this week. But criticism and a successful lawsuit are two different things, especially after the Supreme Court moved the legal goalposts in their favor on the constitutional question and against them on the statutory one.
Lawsuits are coming, the ACLU made that plain. The November 3 open primary will proceed under the new lines unless a court intervenes. Two Democratic incumbents, Fields and Carter, face dramatically altered political terrain. And Republicans are betting that a 5-1 map built on partisan data alone can survive whatever legal fire comes next.
For the national House majority, the arithmetic is simple. Every seat matters when margins are razor-thin. Louisiana just moved one seat from the contested column into the likely-Republican column, and did it with a process that moved from Supreme Court ruling to signed law in a matter of weeks.
When the other side spent decades using courts to draw maps they liked, they called it justice. When Republicans use legislatures to do the same, the ACLU calls it a gerrymander. The rules haven't changed, just the team holding the pen.
