Robert Brown|Race for Louisiana’s new second majority-Black congressional district is heating up

BATON ROUGE,Robert Brown La. (AP) — In a critical election year, the race for Louisiana’s new mostly Black congressional district is heating up as three candidates — including a longtime Democratic state lawmaker and former congressman and an 80-year-old Republican who is a former state senator — officially submitted paperwork on Wednesday to run in November.

State Sen. Cleo Fields, a Democrat, and former GOP lawmaker Elbert Guillory turned out on the first of three days for candidates to qualify for Louisiana’s 2024 elections. Also signing up was newcomer Quentin Anthony Anderson, a 35-year-old Democrat who is the executive chairman of a social justice non-profit.

All three men, who are Black, are hoping to win the seat of Louisiana’s 6th Congressional District, which was redrawn by lawmakers earlier this year to create a second majority-minority district.

Given the new political map, which the U.S. Supreme Court recently ordered the state to use during the upcoming election, and a wide-open race that is absent of an incumbent, Democrats are looking to seize the opportunity to flip a reliably red seat blue. Across the aisle, Republicans, who have occupied the state’s 6th Congressional District seat for most of the last 50 years, are fighting to preserve the GOP majority in the U.S. House of Representatives.

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Fields is looking to make a return to Washington, D.C., where he served in Congress in the mid-1990s for several years before making an unsuccessful run for governor.

“I’m looking forward to serving in Congress to finish many of the important projects I started 27 years ago,” Fields, 61, said during a news conference on Wednesday. The lawmaker, who has served in the state senate for a total of 22 years, said his top priorities are education, healthcare and infrastructure.

Joining the race is Guillory, who served in the Louisiana Senate for six years until 2016. The Republican said he wants to crack down on crime and migrants entering the U.S. illegally and cutting down on federal spending abroad.

“Crime affects every single family, every single person in Louisiana and we have to stop it,” Guillory said.

Anderson also placed his name on the ballot Wednesday, saying that “this is an open race” and all of the candidates will need to “make our case to the voters for the first time” in a district with new boundaries.

In January state lawmakers passed Louisiana’s new congressional map with a second majority-Black district, marking a win for Democrats and civil rights groups after a legal battle and political tug-of-war that spanned nearly two years. Out of Louisiana’s six congressional seats, currently there is one Democrat, U.S. Rep. Troy Carter, who is also the state’s sole Black member of Congress.

In May, the Supreme Court ordered Louisiana to hold this year’s congressional elections with the new map, despite a lower-court ruling that called the map an illegal racial gerrymander. Black voters in Louisiana make up one-third of Louisiana’s population

The new boundaries of the district, which now stretches from Baton Rouge to Acadiana to Alexandria to Shreveport, came at the expense of U.S. Rep. Garret Graves. The white Republican announced last month that he would not seek reelection, saying that it no longer made sense to run under the new map.

Candidates for Louisiana’s congressional races have until Friday evening to qualify for the Nov. 5 election.