In what almost seemed like a 12-step confessional, Baton Rouge lawyer Taryn C. Branson stood at a recent town hall and told the crowd that she had run for the Louisiana House. She didn’t face an incumbent in the 2019 race to replace Steve Carter, who was running for East Baton Rouge Parish mayor-president.
As a Black woman, she knew from the beginning she was tilting at windmills in southeast Baton Rouge’s House District 68, 73.4% of whose 41,230 constituents are White and 12 of whose 18 precincts backed Donald Trump’s presidency in 2016.
In a previous redistricting session, Baton Rouge’s historic Garden District, a racially diverse neighborhood of professionals who favored Hillary Clinton for president in 2016, was split, with half the neighborhood added to the predominantly Black House District 61 and half the precincts added as the far western corner of District 68, which otherwise is overwhelmingly White.
“No matter how much you engage voters, no matter how great the voter turnout can be — nothing, absolutely nothing, can compete against a map that is deliberately drawn to silence a group of people,” Branson told a town hall called in November to gather public comments from Baton Rouge-area residents about the composition of districts from which officials will be elected for the next 10 years.
Branson has advanced degrees, a teaching certificate and a Juris Doctor degree. She worked in Gov. John Bel Edwards’ administration, then opened a law practice. She was thoroughly trounced by Scott McKnight, a member of the state Republican Party’s central committee and whose family runs a century-old insurance company. McKnight received 9,165 votes, or 58% of the 15,885 total in the November 2019 runoff election.
After months of public testimony from cities across the state, legislators will convene Tuesday evening in Baton Rouge to adjust district lines to fit the latest census and ensure that there are roughly the same number of constituents in each of the districts that choose 105 state representatives, 39 state senators, 11 state school board members, five state utility regulators and, perhaps, seven state Supreme Court justices.
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They have until Feb. 20 to complete their work but hope to finish by Saturday.
The census figures show an anemic growth rate in Louisiana and underline a generalized trend over the past 40 years of people moving from north Louisiana to the south.
Minority populations over the past 10 years have grown by 432,916 people, or 23%, while the White population has decreased by 6.3% and now accounts for about 57% of the state’s 4.6 million people. The number of Black people increased and they now account for 33% of the population.
The NAACP Legal Defense Fund Inc. and more than a dozen civil and human rights organizations point out that federal law requires the new election districts to account for this shift in demographics. They’re looking for a second minority-majority congressperson, a third minority member of the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education, eight or so state representatives and more state senators.
The headlines are about the possibility of a second congressional district with a Black majority based in Baton Rouge.
With Louisiana’s White population on the decline, and its Black population growing, the state Legislature must include additional majority-min…
Nine state House districts will need to pick up population in the Baton Rouge area, mostly in the city and in Black-majority districts. Thirteen House districts will have to shed constituents. They are mostly in the majority-White southeastern portion of East Baton Rouge Parish and in the suburbs of Livingston and Ascension parishes.
Three of the 13 state Senate districts in the Baton Rouge area will need to find more constituents.
Reapportionment is a numbers game dictated by law, influenced by history and performed by politicians with a definite stake in its outcome. It’s a giant puzzle involving the movement of 3,934 precincts each representing a different demographic, and different philosophies on politics, culture and life. The law is at once clear — can’t pick your pencil up when encircling the different precincts for districts that have an equal number of constituents in each — and muddy — can’t dilute minority participation as historically has been done but need to keep “communities of interest.”
The census showed Vacherie state Rep. Ken Brass’ District 58 has 37,296 people — 7,063, or 15.9%, short of the 44,359-person ideal. Brass said he’s not sure why the district, which is 69% minority, has seen so many people move. But he surmises that younger voters are leaving their River Parishes home to move to areas with better schools and closer grocery stores. Brass said he already has talked with House Speaker Clay Schexnayder, R-Gonzales, about peeling off enough precincts from House District 81.
House District 29 was drawn to include 18% White voters, starting with the West Baton Rouge Parish subdivision of Brusly, running north along the river through Port Allen, then crossing the Mississippi River at the State Capitol to include the industrial sections north of Capitol Lake and predominantly minority neighborhoods around where the former Earl K. Long Medical Center was located.
State Rep. Sam Jenkins says his House district within the city of Shreveport is compact enough that he would have noticed stores closing and h…
At a population of 38,770 people, the district needs to pick up 5,639 people to reach the 44,359 needed for the map that will be in place for the next 10 years. One problem is that the other districts bordering District 29 also are majority-Black House districts, and they are also in need of more people. That is except for the far eastern end, which abuts Central, a majority-White enclave in East Baton Rouge Parish.
Democratic state Rep. Edmond Jordan, a lawyer who lives in Brusly, said while the west bank portion of his district has been growing in leaps and bounds, the East Baton Rouge Parish portion of his district is still struggling after chest-high water flooded homes and businesses in 2016.
To keep District 29 relatively the same as was drawn in 2011, “only tinkering around the edges,” would mean Jordan would pick up new precincts from nearly all-White Central precincts. Over on the west bank, where most of the population lives, some District 29 precincts voted 97% for Clinton in 2016. In the Central precincts most likely to end up redistricted into the 29th, voters backed Trump with 83% of their vote.
“We should be able to work it out,” Jordan said. “I’ve had a few informal conversations. But I’m not totally sure, at this point, where the population comes from, but at the end of the day, they don’t have a choice but to divvy it up.”
