We're taking a tour of the most outrageous Republican gerrymanders in the nation. Read why in our introductory post, and click here for the full series.
Republicans gained control over redistricting in Louisiana in 2011 for the first time since Reconstruction, and swiftly gerrymandered the map to their advantage. The 6th District had previously been a compact Baton Rouge seat that Democrats held from 2008 to 2009, but Republicans excised the heavily black and Democratic core of the city into the already heavily Democratic 2nd District, making the redder 6th vote for Mitt Romney by a lopsided 66-32 margin. Republican Rep. Garret Graves easily won his second term in 2016 over token Democratic opposition by an enormous 78-24 spread.
This map was part of a larger Republican gerrymander that helped them maintain a 5-to-1 edge over Democrats since 2012. We proposed a set of nonpartisan maps for every state, and without gerrymandering, the 6th District might have shed its outlying fringes and gained the core of Baton Rouge plus the city of Lafayette. That would have turned it into Louisiana’s predominantly black Voting Rights Act-mandated district and made it strongly Democratic at 58-41 Obama. That means that Republicans took what could have been a safely Democratic majority-minority district and gerrymandered it into one that is safe for a white Republican.
Tell us what you think the district looks like in the comments!