A panel of three federal judges struck down Louisiana's new congressional lines on Tuesday, surprisingly throwing a last-minute twist into the 2024 congressional map.

Earlier this year, the Louisiana legislature redrew the state's congressional map to add a second Black-majority district after a court ruled that the old map violated the Voting Rights Act by not giving Black voters enough representation. This turned a solid-red seat, the 6th District, into a solid-blue seat, giving Democrats a near-guaranteed pickup this fall.

But the new 6th District was awkwardly shaped, stretching diagonally across the state from Shreveport to Baton Rouge, giving rise to complaints it was a racial gerrymander — essentially, that it was drawn based on race above all else. These three judges agreed, saying the district violated the 14th Amendment's equal protection clause.

That doesn't necessarily mean Louisiana won't get a second Black-majority, safely Democratic district, though. It's easy to draw such a district that's more compact, going from Baton Rouge up the Mississippi River. It remains to be seen what the state will do next; the judicial panel will meet again on May 6 to discuss next steps.

Time's up, Supreme Court! That's what a panel of three federal judges declared on Thursday, as they decided that South Carolina must use the congressional map it used in 2022 in the 2024 election as well.

The panel had previously struck down South Carolina's 1st District as a racial gerrymander because it did not have enough Black voters, which had turned the one-time swing district into a more safely Republican seat. However, Republicans appealed that ruling to the Supreme Court, which has been sitting on the case for months. The three-judge panel finally decided that it was too late to make any changes for 2024, given that Monday is the deadline for congressional candidates to file to run. As a result, Democrats will miss out on a chance to flip another district in their favor this year.

On Friday, the Wisconsin Supreme Court declined to hear a challenge to the state's congressional map. The order was a blow to Democrats, who had argued that the map unfairly advantaged Republicans. It was also unexpected after liberals took control of the court with the election of Janet Protasiewicz in April 2023; Protasiewicz did not participate in the order.

As a result, Wisconsin will use its current congressional map, which has six Republican-leaning seats and two Democratic-leaning seats, in the 2024 election.

This week, New York's Democratic-controlled legislature took up the congressional map proposed by the state's bipartisan redistricting commission … and largely left it unchanged.

On Monday, after the legislature voted down the commission's proposal, many people assumed they would replace it with an aggressive Democratic gerrymander that would help the party in its quest to flip the U.S. House. But that's not what happened. Instead, the legislature passed a map with only minor tweaks from the commission's, which in turn was pretty close to the old congressional map drawn by a court-appointed special master in 2022.

Based on the results of the 2020 presidential election, no district will shift by more than 4 percentage points of margin. The biggest change is in the 22nd District, which now would have voted for Biden by 11 points, making it harder for Republican Rep. Brandon Williams to win reelection. Democratic Reps. Tom Suozzi and Pat Ryan also got a little safer in their districts, while the legislature also did a favor for Republican Rep. Nick LaLota, turning his 1st District from a narrow Biden district to a narrow Trump district.

Gov. Kathy Hochul signed the new map into law on Wednesday night.

Last week, Louisiana's state legislature passed a new congressional map, which Republican Gov. Jeff Landry signed into law on Monday. A federal court had previously ruled that the state's map violated the Voting Rights Act by diluting Black representation. To avoid further litigation or even a court-drawn map, Louisiana's Republican-controlled government implemented a second majority-Black seat — the 6th District — that stretches diagonally southeast from Shreveport in the northwest to Baton Rouge in south-central Louisiana. Along with the New Orleans-based 2nd District, Louisiana now has two majority-Black, Democratic-leaning seats: President Joe Biden would have carried the new 6th by 20 percentage points in 2020, while the 2nd would have been Biden +36. As a result, Louisiana's six-member U.S. House delegation will likely go from 5-1 Republican to 4-2 Republican after the 2024 election.

The final map had Landry's endorsement, and the new lines mainly endanger the political future of Republican Rep. Garret Graves, who represents the current 6th District. Graves alienated some fellow Louisiana Republicans last fall — including Landry himself — by supporting one of Landry's GOP opponents in Louisiana's gubernatorial election and by not publicly backing U.S. House Majority Leader Steve Scalise's bid for the speakership. To create a second majority-Black seat, Louisiana Republicans chose to dismantle Graves's seat instead of the 5th District held by GOP Rep. Julia Letlow, whom many Republican legislators wanted to protect as the state's only woman in Congress.

Looking ahead, however, there are three outstanding questions: What will Graves do, will the new map survive legal scrutiny and which Democrat might represent the new 6th District?

Graves has said he will run again, but he's unlikely to run in a Democratic-leaning seat, so he may instead challenge Letlow in the new 5th District. Graves currently represents 43 percent of the redrawn district, while Letlow represents the rest, based on an analysis by Daily Kos Elections. But the Republican vote may be even more closely-divided: Letlow currently represents about 51 percent of 2020 Trump voters in the new seat versus Graves's 49 percent. Democrats will have a chance to weigh in, too, under the state's "jungle primary" format, in which all candidates regardless of party run on the November election day, and if a candidate wins a majority, that person wins; otherwise, there's a runoff between the top-two vote-getters. This won't be the setup beyond 2024, though: A new law will establish closed party primaries for congressional elections starting in 2026.

However, Graves also believes that the courts will rule against the new map — and he may have reason to hope. The federal court that ruled against the current map will review the new lines, and Graves has argued the new map ignored many communities of interest in its pursuit of a Black majority. This could be important: Back in the 1990s, federal courts twice deemed Louisiana's congressional map an unconstitutional racial gerrymander, forcing redraws before the 1994 election and again before the 1996 election. The second time was due to a similar "backslash" district that ran from Shreveport to Baton Rouge. This time around, it was possible to draw a more compact majority-Black seat running north from Baton Rouge up the Mississippi River to the state's northeast. However, that would've meant dismantling Letlow's 5th District, which Republicans didn't want to do.

But if the new map remains in place, the new 6th District is likely to elect a Democrat. And one leading possibility is a familiar name: Democratic state Sen. Cleo Fields, who announced his candidacy on Tuesday. Fields has a direct connection back to Louisiana's redistricting episodes in the 1990s. At the age of 29, Fields won a Z-shaped majority-Black seat in 1992 drawn to connect Baton Rouge and Shreveport, then won the redrawn "backslash" seat in 1994 before losing Louisiana's 1995 gubernatorial election (Fields didn't seek reelection in 1996 after the second redraw put him in a Republican-leaning, majority-white seat). Fields has become a cross-party Landry ally in the state legislature, which might help explain why Landry supported a congressional map that could be tailor-made for Fields. Still, the district will probably attract a few Democratic aspirants.