Amidst the racially charged arguments surrounding Louisian’s congressional districts, the reality is that the population distribution within Louisiana isn’t naturally conducive to either political side’s fondest wishes.
It’s virtually impossible to create a second Black-majority district without major gerrymandering that violates traditional districting standards. Then again, a neutral application of those same standards naturally would produce a second district in which a Democrat, including a moderately liberal Black candidate, would be slightly favored to win.
One can reach this conclusion using race-blind principles along with parish population numbers readily available online. The point of this exercise wasn’t arithmetical exactitude but instead to get within a few thousand people in each district of the average h congressional district size of 777,000 residents.
Admittedly, I saved hours of research time by using Chat GPT and Wikipedia for searches and arithmetic, while cross-checking their numbers against each other — and again, the principles, not exact numbers, are the point here.
With those caveats, here’s what I found, using the court-recognized districting principles of compactness, contiguity, and existing parish lines or obvious geographical features such as rivers or lakes. In ordinary language, this means the maps should keep parishes whole to the greatest extent possible, while each district should appear as reasonably concentric shapes.
Without racial gerrymandering, the lower part of Louisian’s toe — the parishes of Orleans, Plaquemines, St. Bernard, Lafourche and the West Bank of Jefferson, with slivers from Terrebonne and St. Charles — naturally creates not a Black majority district, but at least a Black plurality one that, when combined with Hispanic voters, forms a non-White majority. Also considering the voting patterns of tens of thousands of liberal White Democrats in New Orleans, an overwhelming likelihood is that a Black Democrat would win.
The top of the toe, surrounding most of Lake Pontchartrain, would be, as now, a strongly Republican district consisting of the parishes of St. Tammany, Washington, Tangipahoa, St. John the Baptist and most of St. Charles, plus East Jefferson.
Along and inland from the south-central coast, the “Cajun parishes” easily form another Republican-leaning district. The western portion of the state from the Gulf to the Arkansas line, roughly a slightly bulbous rectangle including both Lake Charles and Shreveport, forms another such district — but with a significant Black population in Caddo Parish. Alas, the numbers mean that one major parish can’t stay intact, so Rapides, in the middle of the state, does get bisected.
The fifth of my districts is largely rural, so naturally it encompasses by far the largest amount of territory. Apart from the cities of Monroe and Ruston, it essentially takes in every non-Cajun, non-major-urban parish in the state, plus half of the Florida Parishes — the Felicianas, St. Helena, and Livingston. (The tiny Florida Parishes jut is unfortunate, but necessary for the numbers to work.)
That would leave one more district that would be hotly contested. Not perfectly concentric, it nonetheless is far more compact and geographically sensible than the crazy-quilt District 2 the Legislature actually produced. In essence, it’s a Mississippi River district, plus some borderline Cajun parishes. It would include both East and West Baton Rouge parishes, along with Avoyelles, Point Coupee, Iberville, Ascension, Assumption and St. James.
For those from either side who obsess about race or partisan advantage, this district would cause nervous nights. By my wiki-aided count (again, the general trend, not the exact numbers, are what’s important), the district would have roughly 360,000 White voters, 303,000 Black voters and just over 100,000 of “other” or “mixed” races, with Hispanics clearly predominating among those. Plus, a significant percentage of the Whites would be Democrats.
Meanwhile, some of us insist, with significant evidence, that race is not entirely determinative of political victory. Witness Mobile, Alabama, which for six consecutive elections chose a member of the then-minority race as its mayor — twice electing a Black Democrat when the city was majority White, then four times picking a White Republican after the city had become majority Black.
The “river district” above would almost assuredly mimic Mobile’s experience, in which successful coalition-building is rewarded. That’s a situation that is fair, one that inspires confidence in the system.
The broader point: A neutral computer programmed for compactness, contiguity, parish lines and geographical features would produce something similar to the plan above, without any racial or partisan thumb on the scales. For a healthy representative democracy, one in which no group thinks the game is rigged against them, that’s the sort of approach legislators henceforth should take.