Louisiana lawmakers on Friday approved a new congressional map that could allow Republicans to flip one of the state’s two Democratic-held House seats in the 2026 midterms. The map eliminates one of the state’s two majority-Black districts.
The Louisiana Senate gave final approval to the bill after hours of dissent from Democrats. The new map comes weeks after the US Supreme Court struck down the state’s current map as an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.
“This feels more like quicksand, because we’re in 2026 going into a map that we know is flawed, that we know is going to get struck down,” said state Sen. Royce Duplessis, a Democrat, on the Senate floor.
State Sen. Jay Morris, a Republican, defended the map ahead of the final vote. “I think we have a map here that meets all the traditional redistricting criteria,” Morris said. “It’s not racially gerrymandered. I think it broadly allows for representation for each region of the state, and it’s very fair, and we should approve it.”
The Supreme Court’s Shadow
The landmark Supreme Court decision dealt a blow to Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act and set off a newfound scramble of mid-decade redistricting in Louisiana and other states. Democrats say the ruling could drastically reduce the number of Black representatives in Congress.
On Thursday, during hours of floor debate, several Democratic state representatives condemned the redrawn map as discriminatory.
“I want to ask you to remember the argument that we should now be colorblind about a congressional map, in this state of all states, requires forgetting a quantity of history that I don’t believe any of us has the right to forget,” said state Rep. Kyle Green, a Democrat and member of the Louisiana Legislative Black Caucus. “Black people in this country were not citizens; not partial citizens, not second-class citizens. We weren’t citizens at all.”
The Republican Defense
State Rep. Beau Beaullieu, a Republican who sponsored an amended version of the map, argued that legislators had been forced to redraw the map because of the Supreme Court’s ruling.
“And now we find ourselves back with a similar map to the one this body passed in 2022, that had five Republican districts and one Democrat district,” Beaullieu said on Thursday. “The map complies with traditional redistricting principles and also maximizes partisan advantage. The map is contiguous; it is compact; it binds communities of interest; it protects incumbency. Race was not a factor when drawing these districts.”
The Bottom Line
Louisiana lawmakers have approved a new congressional map that eliminates one of the state’s two majority-Black districts and could allow Republicans to pick up a Democratic-held seat in the 2026 midterms. The map was passed after the US Supreme Court struck down the previous map as an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. Democrats condemned the new map as discriminatory. Republicans defended it as fair and compliant with traditional redistricting principles. The fight is almost certain to continue in court.
