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.

Last month, the Wisconsin Supreme Court — which now has a liberal majority following the election of Justice Janet Protasiewicz last year — ruled that the state's legislative maps, which give Republicans a stark advantage, were unconstitutional and ordered them redrawn. But there wasn't a similar case pending against the state's congressional map, which also favors Republicans — until now.

On Tuesday, emboldened by that earlier ruling, a Democratic-aligned law firm filed a lawsuit against the congressional map, arguing that it was drawn according to a "least-change" mandate from the court that is no longer binding. (Back in 2021, the court ordered both the congressional and state-legislative maps to be drawn with as few changes as possible from the previous decade's maps.) The firm is hoping to have new districts in place in time for the 2024 election, though with Wisconsin's filing deadline coming up in early June, that seems like an ambitious timeline.

Wisconsin's congressional map currently consists of six Republican-leaning seats and two Democratic-leaning seats despite the state's competitive nature. Democrats are hoping that a more proportional map could give them a shot to pick up two more seats in the Badger State.

On Monday, Louisiana's Republican-controlled legislature convened a special session that will primarily focus on redrawing the state's congressional map. The legislature's gathering came in response to a federal ruling that the current lines violate the Voting Rights Act, which ordered the state to draw a second majority-Black seat among the state's six districts. At present, Louisiana has just one majority-Black seat, the 2nd District, which runs from New Orleans to Baton Rouge. Due to racially-polarized voting, any map with a second majority-Black district is guaranteed to provide Democrats with a good chance of capturing a second Louisiana seat, a result that would cut the GOP's advantage in the Pelican State from 5-1 to 4-2.

Legislators have proposed multiple maps, but each takes a different approach to drawing a second majority-Black seat. Two Republican-drawn maps exemplify this. In the state House of Representatives, one plan would keep both seats in central and southern Louisiana, with a New Orleans-based district that President Biden would've carried by 33 percentage points in 2020 and a Biden +14 seat around Baton Rouge. Alternatively, a state Senate proposal supported by Republican Gov. Jeff Landry would create a Biden +19 "slash" district that stretches from Baton Rouge to Shreveport in the northwestern part of the state, with a Biden +36 New Orleans-based seat in the southeast.

How the legislature draws a second seat will help determine the fates of Republican Reps. Garrett Graves and Julia Letlow. Some legislators have prioritized preserving Letlow's position as the state's lone woman in Congress, and both of the Republican proposals above largely keep her seat intact. For his part, Graves supported one of Landry's GOP opponents in the 2023 gubernatorial race, which may cost him politically as both GOP proposals would reshape Graves's 6th District into a majority-Black seat. Conversely, Democratic map proposals in the legislature would convert Letlow's 5th District into a majority-Black seat that largely runs north from Baton Rouge along the Mississippi River.

Some Republicans, including House Speaker Mike Johnson, who represents Louisiana's 4th District, have stated their preference to keep fighting the order to redraw the map because of the likelihood that a new map will cost the GOP a seat in the closely-divided U.S. House. But early indications out of the legislature suggest Louisiana will produce new lines with a second majority-Black seat.

On Thursday, the federal judge who had struck down Georgia’s old congressional map as a racial gerrymander gave his stamp of approval to the new congressional map passed earlier this month by the Georgia legislature. The map will now go into effect for the 2024 election, although Democrats who are unhappy with the decision may still try to challenge it in court.

In response to the judge’s finding that the old map discriminated against Black voters, the new map creates a new majority-Black district, the 6th, in the western Atlanta suburbs — but it achieved this by dismantling a different majority-minority district, the 7th, in the eastern suburbs. As a result, the partisan breakdown of Georgia’s districts remains nine Republican-leaning seats and five Democratic-leaning ones.

Democrats, who of course wouldn’t mind flipping one of those Republican seats, have insisted that the old 7th District, whose voting-age population was 33 percent white, 30 percent Black and 21 percent Hispanic, was protected by the Voting Rights Act, and may continue to press their case against this new map. In the meantime, though, all eyes are on Democratic Rep. Lucy McBath, who currently represents the 7th District and would almost certainly lose if she seeks reelection there. She could either retire or decide to run in the new 6th, despite the fact that she does not live there.

It’s unclear whether Louisiana will end up with a new congressional map ahead of the 2024 election. Like Alabama, Louisiana has faced litigation over claims that its district lines impermissibly diluted the influence of Black voters. In 2022, the GOP-controlled legislature implemented a map that maintained the state’s status quo of one majority-Black seat among six total districts. But Democrats and voting rights advocates argued that Louisiana, which has a population that’s about one-third Black, should have a second district in which Black voters could elect the member of their choice. A lower federal court agreed, ruling in June 2022 that the map violated the Voting Rights Act and ordering the state to draw a new map. The legislature appealed, but the Supreme Court put the Louisiana case on hold while deliberating over the similar redistricting case in Alabama. This allowed Louisiana’s map to be used in the 2022 election.

But a redraw of Louisiana’s map became a renewed possibility after the Supreme Court ruled in June 2023 that Alabama’s congressional lines violated the VRA. Following that decision, SCOTUS lifted its hold on the Louisiana case. Nonetheless, the case remains up in the air following a late September decision by a federal appeals court that canceled the lower court’s next hearing in early October, in which it was expected to approve a remedial map for Louisiana after the state failed to propose an alternate map in 2022. The plaintiffs have asked the Supreme Court for emergency relief to block the appeals court’s decision, arguing the appeals court ruled improperly and in a way that could delay the potential implementation of a new map beyond 2024. In the meantime, the appeals court’s decision gives Louisiana more time to defend the current map and consider new lines.