The above is a question I’ve been getting a decent amount over the past several weeks since Louisiana’s legislature passed a new congressional map which would turn the 6th Congressional District into the state’s second majority-black congressional seat. We’re moving, assuming the map passed in January isn’t overturned in the courts, from a 5-1 congressional delegation (the five being white Republicans, the one being a black Democrat) to a 4-2 delegation.
Or at least that’s the assumption.
And the odd man out is Garret Graves, who has found himself in a peculiar situation.
Graves is generally regarded as a good congressman for the 6th District. He’s been pretty successful in getting funding for infrastructure projects for his Baton Rouge-based district, and he had moved up the ranks as a policy wonk within the House Republican caucus, particularly as former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy took Graves under his wing. McCarthy had Graves ensconced in a position which would make him responsible for a redesign of the federal government, essentially. It was a big deal.
But then McCarthy found himself voted out as Speaker.
And Graves was accused, apparently credibly, of playing games on McCarthy’s behalf to derail the potential speakership of Steve Scalise. And of attempting to do the same to Mike Johnson.
This came on the heels of his involvement in the 2023 governor’s race, where Graves raised a bunch of money for Stephen Waguespack’s unsuccessful bid against Jeff Landry and on a couple of occasions spoke in uncomplimentary terms about Landry.
So when federal judge Shelly Dick, an Obama appointee who’s doing her level best to go down in history as the most toxic Democrat partisan hack ever to occupy the federal bench in Louisiana, threw out the current 5-1 map and demanded that the state legislature draw a second majority-black district – essentially mandating that the state’s Republican political majority surrender a congressional seat to Democrats that Louisianans don’t want to vote for – and the Fifth Circuit wouldn’t stay her ruling, Landry called a special session to change the map.
Everybody knew when that happened that Graves’ seat would go on the chopping block. The rest of the delegation wanted to stick it to him and the governor certainly had it in for him. Graves’ stance on closed party primaries (he’s an opponent) largely meant the LAGOP favored him getting the shaft.
He’s a popular congressman who’s managed to make enemies all over the state. It’s a very strange situation. And now Graves finds himself at a crossroads.
He also finds himself with a decision to make.
You’re not bound by a residency requirement in Congress. You don’t have to physically reside in the district you represent.
And with the new map, Baton Rouge will have three congressmen. Clay Higgins now has a sliver of the capital city, as does Julia Letlow. And then the 6th District, which starts in Baton Rouge and makes its way northwest essentially up the Red River to Shreveport, is also still more or less based in Baton Rouge.
Graves could choose to run in any of the three.
But the 6th, the Red River district as it’s being called, is now 56 percent black. Cleo Fields, the black Democrat state senator who actually chaired the committee which drew the congressional map, is already running for the seat. Fields represented a similarly snaky congressional district back in the 1990’s when Louisiana had eight congressional districts; a lot of people think he’s a shoe-in to return to Capitol Hill for that reason.
But on the other hand, it’s been 30 years since that old 8th District was done away with in the courts. So Fields’ old congressional voters might be a little stale.
And while radical left politics do seem to be popular among black voters in North Baton Rouge, most of the black vote moving northwest as that district heads for Shreveport is a lot more conservative – culturally and economically.
Can that vote be brought around for a popular, relatively moderate Republican incumbent with a track record of success in bringing infrastructure projects home?
I don’t know. Frankly, I have my doubts.
But what I will say is that should Garret Graves take on the challenge of running in the 6th District against Fields, a challenge that would be admittedly pretty difficult, you’d have to think that all of the people who’ve turned against him would have little choice but to help him this fall.
That includes Landry, who broke a little bit of bread with Fields and got some help from him in the black community during the governor’s race. It would be bad optics, and it would look petty, if Landry took Fields’ side in a Graves-Fields race.
And Higgins and Julia Letlow would have no choice but to help Graves win, because if he’s running in the 6th District he isn’t running against either of them and that saves them a ton of money and effort at re-election.
It’s a question of fighting the good fight, or fighting what will be seen as a selfish fight. It’s not out of the question that Graves could beat Higgins or Letlow – but the entire Republican infrastructure in the state will line up against him. And running against Letlow would be especially weird, seeing as though Graves was a very, very good friend of Letlow’s deceased husband Luke, who died of COVID-19 just after winning the seat in 2020.
I’m not trying to suggest a course of action for Graves. If I was, I might actually tell him he ought to run against Craig Greene for the Public Service Commission, because it’s becoming ever more clear that Greene is aligning himself with the Green New Deal communists and giving them a majority on the PSC that will kill any chance of Louisiana’s economy catching up to our neighbors. Graves is enough of a policy nerd that he could master the in-the-weeds vagaries of utility regulation and end up as a titan at the PSC. That isn’t as juicy as Congress, of course, but the PSC is nonetheless a proven springboard to statewide office and it could be a place to marinate for a couple of terms while Landry serves his tenure as governor.
Or – and this is a truly off-the-wall idea – he could run for mayor of Baton Rouge. Republicans need a candidate for that race, Graves would have a great deal more money than anyone else running, he’s a harder worker than either Sharon Weston Broome or Ted James (James is one of the laziest politicians in Louisiana, and he’ll prove it this year), he’d be the biggest name in the race and the level of competence he would bring to that office is something the city hasn’t seen since, well…ever. A mayor like Graves would restart thoughts of Baton Rouge becoming America’s next great city, something that used to be on the table but has become a complete joke since Broome took office.
But if he wants to try to stay in Congress, there is at least an argument which says he should run against Fields rather than Higgins or Letlow. It’s a tough race, and maybe it’s unwinnable. But at least he’d be aligned with everybody else in the LAGOP and he’d have a moral claim to their assistance and alliance. And if he won that race, Garret Graves would then become not just a Louisiana Republican hero, but one on the national level as well.
Whereas running against Higgins or Letlow would have something of an opposite effect.
It’s a lousy situation Graves finds himself in, whether you believe it’s self-inflicted or not. He’s going to have to make lemonade out of lemons no matter what he does. He’s a talented guy that we could definitely use in a leadership position moving forward, but what choice he makes this year will color his perception statewide for possibly the rest of his political career.