Louisiana's 2nd congressional district contains nearly all of the city of New Orleans and stretches west and north to Baton Rouge. The district is currently represented by DemocratTroy Carter. With a Cook Partisan Voting Index rating of D+25, it is the only Democratic district in Louisiana.[3]
Louisiana gained a second district in 1823 as part of the 18th United States Congress. At first it comprised New Orleans and significant populations from surrounding areas. With the growth of population in the urban area, the current district is located mostly within the city of New Orleans.
Since the late 19th century, this has been historically among the most safely Democratic seats in the country, for sharply opposing reasons. During Reconstruction, most African Americans affiliated with the Republican Party and, as a majority, elected Republicans from this district.
White Democrats regained control of the district in 1891, when voter suppression of Republicans was rampant. In 1898 the Democratic-dominated state legislature had disenfranchised most blacks in the state through provisions of a new state constitution that raised barriers to voter registration, such as poll taxes and subjective literacy tests. The Democrats had maintained the political exclusion of blacks for decades. Like most congressional districts in the South, this district consistently voted Democratic from the late 19th century until the late 1960s, because the voters during that time were nearly all white Democrats. Such Democrats created what was known as the Solid South in Congress, exercising power beyond their proportion of the electorate.
From the 1960s onward, however, white conservatives began splitting their tickets and voting Republican, gradually switching outright to the GOP. At the same time, black voters regained the franchise and lent their support to Democrats. Since 1984, the district has been drawn as a black-majority district.
In 2008, after a federal grand jury indicted nine-term incumbent congressman William J. Jefferson on sixteen felony charges related to corruption the year prior, Joseph Cao was elected as the first Republican to represent the 2nd congressional district and most of New Orleans in more than a century. Cao was the first Vietnamese-AmericanU.S. Representative elected in the country. He was the only Republican in the 111th Congress to represent a district with a predominantly African-American population. Cao was heavily defeated in 2010 by state representative Cedric Richmond, and the district reverted to its Democratic ways. Richmond defeated nominal Republican challengers in 2012 and 2020, and no Republican even filed from 2014 to 2018.
For most of the period from 1983 to 2013, this district contained nearly all of the city of New Orleans (except for a small portion located in the neighboring 1st congressional district), and some of its suburbs. In 2003, it was pushed into the West Bank portion of Jefferson Parish and South Kenner, which have a higher proportion of white residents.[4] After the 2010 census, the legislature pushed the 2nd slightly to the west, picking up a portion of Baton Rouge–essentially, most of the capital's majority-black precincts.
The 2024 Allen v. Milligan decision dictated a new majority-black precinct, redrawing the 6th district. The 2nd district loses the Baton Rouge area and the northeast Orleans Parish but now represents the whole of the Iberville and Assumption Parishes, as well as Arabi and Chalmette in St. Bernard Parish.[5]
On November 3, 1868, John Willis Menard won a special election for the remainder of Mann's term in the 40th Congress, running alongside Lionel Allen Sheldon, who was running to represent the district for a full term in the 41st. Menard and Sheldon received the same number of votes and were both declared winners. But the losing candidate, Caleb S. Hunt, appealed to the U.S. House of Representatives to deny Menard the seat. The House could not reach a consensus on seating either man, so the seat was kept vacant until the 41st Congress. Menard was the first black person elected to Congress, as well as the first black person to address Congress.[6]
^He was elected along with Benjamin Franklin Flanders, assuming the seat left vacant after J. E. Bouligny's term expired in 1861. Flanders and Hahn were not seated in Congress until the last fifteen days of their terms in February 1863.
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