Democratic state Sen. Cleo Fields said Thursday that he would decide “after the holidays” if he’d try and return to Congress after a 24-year absence by competing in next year’s all-party special election to succeed Rep. Cedric Richmond, who is resigning from Louisiana’s safely blue 2nd District to take a job in the Biden administration.
Fields was elected to the House in 1992 from what was then numbered Louisiana’s 4th District, a sprawling z-shaped seat that stretched from the Shreveport area in the northwest corner of the state down into Baton Rouge. Democratic Rep. Bill Jefferson had made history in the New Orleans area two years before by becoming the state’s first African American member since Reconstruction, and the 4th District was drawn up so that Louisiana could elect a second Black congressman. Fields, who was 29, was also the youngest member of the House when he took office.
Months after Fields unsuccessfully waged his 1995 bid for governor, though, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that his congressional district was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. He retired in 1996 but his political career was far from over: Fields was elected to the state Senate the next year, and after being termed-out in 2008, he returned to the chamber by winning a competitive intra-party race in 2019.
Two fellow Democratic state senators, state Sens. Karen Carter Peterson and Troy Carter, are already running to succeed Richmond, and plenty of other politicians are considering jumping in as well. If Fields ran, though, his past experience in Congress wouldn’t be the only thing that would set him apart in what could be a very crowded race. Peterson, Carter, and most of the prospective candidates we’ve heard from so far have bases in the city of New Orleans, while Fields represents a district in East Baton Rouge.
If the race comes down to geography, a candidate from the New Orleans area would have a big edge over someone from elsewhere in the district. Orleans Parish, which is coterminous with the city of New Orleans, makes up 40% of the district, while another 26% lives in neighboring Jefferson Parish. Fields’ East Baton Rouge Parish base, by contrast, makes up only 14% of the seat, with the balance coming from seven smaller parishes.
However, there are plenty of other potential factors at play in this all-party primary. Perhaps most importantly, it’s quite possible that a Republican could take one of the two spots in a likely runoff, an outcome that would make any Democrat the heavy favorite to win round two.
P.S. If Fields sought and won this seat, he wouldn’t be the only sitting member of Congress to return after a 24-year absence. Maryland Democrat Kweisi Mfume, a former Fields colleague who resigned in 1996 to lead the NAACP, returned to Congress earlier this year through a special election. Neither Fields nor Mfume would hold the record for longest gap in congressional service, though: That title belongs to another Maryland Democrat, Philip Francis Thomas, who was elected to his only terms in the House in 1838 and 1874.