Louisiana’s newly designed 2nd Congressional District doesn’t look like it makes much sense: one end of it starts in a tip just north of Baton Rouge, and from there, it juts and jags more than 70 miles south and east past New Orleans, seemingly picking up random communities.
Most of the people who live in those communities are African-Americans, joined together partly by design and partly by law. By looping blacks into one district, lawmakers increased the number of Republicans in surrounding districts, virtually ensuring that the GOP will hold a major advantage in five of the state’s six congressional districts for the next decade.
As lawmakers across the nation begin the once-a-decade redrawing of their congressional boundaries, a significant migration of blacks from cities to suburbs is having a widespread political impact.
According to new census numbers, eight of the nation’s top majority-black districts lost an average of more than 10 percent of their African-American populations. That will provide an opportunity for GOP lawmakers, who control an increasing number of statehouses since last fall’s elections, to reshape districts in suburban swing areas of Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Georgia and elsewhere.
Dozens of seats could become easier for Republicans to hold on to, with a half-dozen or so becoming prime pickup opportunities for the party, according to political strategists.
“The practical effect is great for the GOP,” said Dave Wasserman of the Cook Political Report. “In state after state, it’s allowing Republicans to pack more heavily Democratic close-in suburbs into urban black districts to make surrounding districts more Republican.”
The 1982 amendment of the Voting Rights Act led to the creation of many legislative districts, particularly in the South, in which minorities became the majority populations. The idea was to give minority voters a chance to elect candidates of their choice.
Initially, these districts were a boon to Democrats, creating opportunities in places where the party struggled to win. But over the last few rounds of redistricting, Republicans have made a habit of “packing” as many reliably Democratic black voters into as few districts as possible, virtually guaranteeing black representation for those districts while also making nearby ones more winnable for the GOP.
So even as the African-American population has been shrinking in many longtime black districts, the number of majority-black districts has actually increased over the last decade — and could very well continue to do so, with Republicans leading the redistricting process this year.
