Louisiana

Louisiana is a Gulf Coast state in the American South with a 33% Black population, one of the highest proportions in The Nation. It is a majority-Republican state with a Democratic enclave in New Orleans and the Baton Rouge corridor. The state holds six congressional seats and a history of redistricting litigation more prolonged than almost any other in the country. Courts have repeatedly found that successive Louisiana legislatures drew congressional maps diluting Black voting power, producing cycles of injunction, redraw, and appeal that stretched across decades.

Louisiana was the named plaintiff in Louisiana v. Callais (No. 24-109), the Supreme Court case that rewrote Voting Rights Act Section 2 on 29 April 2026. The 6-3 majority held that Section 2 does not require states to draw majority-minority congressional districts, overturning the Thornburg v. Gingles (1986) doctrine and freeing Republican-controlled legislatures to redraw maps without the minority-district floor . Two days later the Court issued a judgment forthwith ordering immediate effect, forcing Louisiana to redraw its own congressional map at once. Louisiana's new post-Callais map, reported by Roll Call on 4 June 2026, eliminates one of the state's two majority-Black districts and draws out Democratic Representative Cleo Fields, who had won his seat in 2024 only because the Supreme Court had ordered Louisiana to draw that second majority-Black district under the doctrine Callais subsequently overturned .

Louisiana's Senate seat turned over in the same window. Incumbent Bill Cassidy, who voted to convict Trump in the 2021 impeachment trial, finished third with 24.8% in the 17 May Republican primary, becoming the first elected incumbent senator to lose renomination since Richard Lugar in 2012. Trump-endorsed Julia Letlow (44.8%) and state treasurer John Fleming (28.3%) advanced to a 27 June runoff. A pro-Letlow super PAC, the Accountability Project, filed over $6 million in independent expenditures while Fleming ran on almost no outside money; a mid-June poll still showed the race collapsing to a near-tie. Letlow won decisively, 56.8% to 43.2%, a 13.6-point margin FAR wider than late polling suggested, with turnout down 21% from the May primary . Cassidy's and Cornyn's back-to-back ousters were read as two establishment Republican senators toppled within twelve days of each other.