Realistic Congressional and Supreme Court Maps for Louisiana, 2024

 As we political junkies already know, Louisiana is having a special session this week to redraw its congressional and supreme court districts. A new congressional map is mandated by the federal courts because it is possible to draw two decently compact black-majority seats out of the six districts in the state. It is the nearest proportion considering that African Americans are about a third of the state population. So anything less than that arguably disenfranchises the said racial group.

On the other hand, five of the seven state supreme court justices would also like that state’s judicial districts to also be made proportional to the share of the black population. However, the truth is that infighting and vengeance play major roles in this debacle. And the involved parties are using this redistricting session to extract retribution against their political enemies. However, I think the maps I saw being proposed so far can be bizarre and unnecessarily unwieldy, even if we consider the parochial interest of the involved politicians. So, as a thought exercise, I tried to draw what I think would be better maps while taking competing interests into account.

Congressional Districts

In the process of drawing the congressional maps, the following considerations are factored into:

• “Protect Julia [Letlow]”
  • Mrs. Letlow is the only female member of the Louisiana congressional delegation. There is outpouring sympathy for her for losing her husband to COVID-19, and she is universally well-liked. However, her seat is the one that most conventional redistricting maps turn into a second black-majority seat. State leaders don’t want that, so they want to set their sights instead to ….   
• “Screw Garret [Graves]”
  • Mr. Graves is generally seen to harbor gubernatorial aspirations. And Gov. Jeff Landry hates him for that. While he ultimately didn’t run in 2023, Graves persuaded Stephen Waguespack to run for governor instead. This put Mr. Landry in danger of going into run-off instead of winning the gubernatorial election outright. Fortunately for Mr. Landry, he got 51% of the vote, so ultimately no run-off is needed. Graves can also run in succeeding gubernatorial elections and even challenge Landry in 2027.
  • Mr. Graves also purportedly undermined House Majority Leader Steve Scalise’s bid to become House Speaker by supposedly speaking ill-health about him. This angered Scalise, and with Landry also holding a grudge against Graves, they now want to extract their pound of flesh against Graves.
• “Create one [seat] for [Cleo] Fields”
  • Mr. Fields is reportedly a political friend of Gov. Landry. While Fields endorsed his party’s gubernatorial nominee publicly last year, political insiders believe that he worked behind the scenes privately to elect Gov. Landry. As a reward, Landry wants to gift him a congressional seat. State Sen. Fields is even appointed chairman of the state senate redistricting committee. Thus, no map that hinders Fields’ congressional comeback will be passed, despite the grumblings of partisan Republicans. This comeback is 28 years in the making. He was first elected to congress at age 29, and he is now set to return to the said chamber at age 62. I believe only Rick Nolan’s congressional interlude is longer, at 32 years between 1981 and 2013. Please tell me if there are other similar cases.
  • While the map endorsed so far by Gov. Landry extends this new seat all the way to Shreveport, a similar iteration to that which existed from 1995 to 1997 has been struck down by the courts as an illegal racial gerrymander. This ultimately ended Cleo Field’s earlier congressional career, and he must know better than anyone else that such district arrangement must be avoided. Thus, I would not be creating a district like that.
• Consider parochial interests, while also making a decent looking map
  • It seems to me that parochial interests instead of maximizing partisan gains prevail at the end of the day in Louisiana, as evidenced by the actions of their political actors. However, the maps they have drawn so far are unnecessarily egregious, so I would like to improve on it.

With all of that in the way, I present the tentative map I’ve drawn with a link to DRA here.

As you can see, the new black district (LA-06) is centered around Baton Rouge while grabbing black precincts in Lafayette and Alexandria. It also includes the western half of the current LA-02. It is 50.9% black, and Biden won it by 14.4 points. Cleo Fields should be happy with that already especially since the original maps that he and his Democratic colleagues earlier proposed are weaker and only Biden +10.

Meanwhile, I also “protected Julia and screwed Garret” here. I tried to make LA-05 demographically dominated by Mrs. Letlow instead of by Mr. Graves. Earlier maps that I saw that are like the one I came up with in this version have their LA-05 with almost equal shares from Julia and Garret’s current districts. East Baton Rouge (EBR) and Livingston look small, but they are deceivingly big population-wise, so Graves has a fighting chance to win. Thus, Julia won’t be protected, and Garret won’t be screwed. In this map, I made the deliberate effort to make this a 56.4% Letlow-39.0% Graves district. The rest of the population comes from Speaker Mike Johnson’s district which is geographically Mrs. Letlow’s turf. So, while I originally intended to explicitly remove left-trending non-black EBR precincts from Mr. Fields’ new district, doing so would just strengthen Mr. Graves. So, I settled with this configuration. To add insult to the injury, I put Garret’s home into Cleo’s district so he can’t vote for himself anymore. Actually, my original plan is to double-bunk Graves and the Odious Clay Higgins into the same district. But the lines got ugly, so I scrapped it.

To make up for the lost western half of LA-02, I extended it northwards into St. Helena and Tangipahoa parishes. Doing so preserves LA-02’s black-majority status. Also, former Gov. John Bel Edwards would be happy that he’d be represented by a Democrat, finally. Needless to say, it is a safe Democratic seat and Troy Carter would cruise to reelection here. On the other hand, LA-01 receives Washington parish while still taking the non-black precincts of urban New Orleans metro. Steve Scalise can rest easy and focus on his cancer treatment. Not much has changed in Mike Johnson’s LA-03 and Clay Higgins’ LA-04.

State Supreme Court Districts

As a background, the following are Louisiana’s supreme court justices:

1. John Crain (R – Madisonville, St. Tammany Parish)
2. Scott Crichton (R – Shreveport, Caddo Parish)
3. James T. Genovese (R – Opelousas, St. Landry Parish)
4. Scott McCallum (R – Farmerville, Union Parish)
5. Jefferson D. Hughes III (R – Walker, Livingston Parish)
6. John Weimer (I – Thibodaux, Lafourche Parish)
7. Piper Griffin (D – New Orleans, Orleans Parish)

Here is the current supreme court map:

Here is the map as proposed by five of the seven justices:

In the process of drawing the judicial maps, the following considerations are factored into:

• Create a new black seat
  • While this is good and all, it is just an excuse to ….
• “target [Chief Justice John] Weimer”
  • To quote the reference of this diary: “Weimer is unpopular among the judiciary because he is a political independent and skinflint when it comes to spending government money. Last year, he was opposed by the six associate justices when he supported a legislative proposal to trim per diems and supplemental pay for judges and justices. That proposal didn’t advance, to Weimer’s dismay.”
• Limit county splits
  • I only permitted myself to split parishes to create black-majority seats. Otherwise, no county splits shall be allowed since zero population deviation is not required. The map proposed by the justices is so unnecessary gruesome.
• Consider parochial interests, while also making a decent looking map
  • Same explanation as with that one for the congressional maps

Considering all of that, I present the tentative map I’ve drawn with a link to DRA here.

Take note that I have no data on the exact residences of the justices, so I just approximated their houses in their hometowns. So, there’s a chance that Justices Piper Griffin, James Genovese, and John Weimer live outside their intended districts. The mapmakers can just adjust this right away instead. I reworked the map so that the districts have the same population, because the current and the proposed districts have very high population disparities, from just around 400k of Justice Griffin’s distric to over 800k of Justice William Crain’s district.

The subject of this map, Chief Justice Weimer (6^th District – I), is double-bunked with Justice Griffin (7^th District – D) into the 7^th District. While I originally placed Weimer into the open black-majority 6^th district, he could squeak into reelection in that district, instead of the district electing a black justice as intended. At least here, Griffin has her New Orleans base intact, while the Cajun country constituency of Weimer is decimated. The other supreme court districts are also made to be more geographically coherent, while taking into account the parochial interests of the justices.

Any feedback and suggestions would be welcome. While personally, I won’t be submitting this to the mapmakers, anyone seeing this can do so with my blessing.

References:

Bridges, T. (2024, January 14). Jeff Landry supports plan to create New Black Supreme Court district, but it draws flak. NOLA.com. https://www.nola.com/news/politics/jeff-landry-and-supreme-court-justices-support-court-remap/article_e91816ac-ac1c-11ee-8ebe-4fae9c36dcbc.html  

LaRose, G. (2023, December 30). Chief justice reveals rifts in Louisiana Supreme Court over redistricting – Louisiana Illuminator. Louisiana Illuminator. https://lailluminator.com/2023/12/30/louisiana-court-redistricting/