U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson made himself perfectly clear last week when he issued a list of endorsements for the fall election: Why of course he wants all his fellow Republicans in the Louisiana congressional delegation to be reelected.
But the announcement came with a subtle caveat. Johnson said he’s backing all his colleagues — as long as they run in their current districts.
It’s a message that seems meant for an audience of one: U.S. Rep. Garret Graves.
That Johnson endorsed Graves in the 6th District he now represents — and specifically that — amounts to the kind of deft strong-arming that smart politicians employ, the art of saying something without actually saying it.
What’s unsaid here is that, if the five-term Republican representative from Baton Rouge opts to run in another Louisiana district, he’s on his own.
That’s how the GOP political establishment has apparently decided to handle complications created by a series of court rulings culminating in the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent order that the fall elections be held according to a map created earlier this year by the Legislature and signed by Gov. Jeff Landry.
The new map created a second majority Black, heavily Democratic congressional district in the state — which now has just one of six, despite a population that’s about a third Black. In the zero-sum world of redistricting, that translated directly into the loss of a majority White Republican district.
Due to some factors outside his control and others well within it, Graves emerged as the man without a safe landing spot.
Baton Rouge is the logical place to root a second majority Black district due to its population and loose proximity to other pockets of Black voters. And Graves made things easier for legislative mapmakers when he was less than fully supportive of Majority Leader Steve Scalise’s failed bid to become speaker and when he endorsed against Landry last fall. Within the limits set by the law and courts, district-drawing is an inherently political exercise, and relationships — whether close or frayed — matter.
So the question now is, will Graves, who at this point has only said that he’ll run for reelection, take Johnson’s message to heart?
On one level it’s entirely his choice. He can run in any Louisiana district, and while his has gone from safely Republican to strongly leaning Democratic, there are others that better fit his politics. His problem is that those districts have incumbents already.
Two highly Republican districts, Johnson’s Shreveport-based 4th and Scalise’s New Orleans area 1st, are occupied by the House’s top two players. No way he’d take on either of them.
The 3rd District represented by Clay Higgins of Lafayette is a possibility — the most intriguing one, I’ve argued. Higgins is a reliable Republican vote but also a fringe figure known more for bizarre rants than actual legislating. Graves, a one-time congressional staffer and head of the state coastal authority, cares about the work of governing and has a particular expertise in the district’s existential challenges brought on by climate change — which, to his credit, he acknowledges is real. If 3rd District voters wanted to be represented by a Republican who would be taken seriously, Graves would be their guy.
Then there’s the redrawn 5th District represented by Julia Letlow. It stretches from the Monroe area down to Baton Rouge, where it takes in some of Graves’ current base. But Letlow is well-liked and deeply dug in on agriculture issues important to areas she now represents, which are as far from the coast as you can get and still be in Louisiana. She has a seat on the Appropriations Committee. Also, Graves was so close to her late husband Luke that he served as a pallbearer at his funeral. Challenging her after she won the seat that her husband was set to assume before his death would be awkward, to put it politely.
The last of Graves’ bad options is the one Johnson is pushing, the 6th, which under the new map has gone from 71% to 41% White and 40% to 22% registered Republican (remember that many people in Louisiana vote Republican but aren’t registered in the party).
This is not exactly fertile territory, and he’d likely be facing Democratic state Sen. Cleo Fields, who briefly represented much of the district in Congress back in the 1990s.
You couldn’t rule Graves out — turnout always counts — and it would at least be fascinating to see him pivot from positioning himself to the right in a highly conservative district to tilting much more moderate in a more liberal one. For one thing, he might end up talking about climate change more than he does now.
And, if he were to somehow pull it out, he could actually wind up doing Johnson a huge favor.
The one thing that surely keeps the speaker up at night, even more than the idea of an in-party fight in his own state, is losing the House’s tight majority to the Democrats.
In the far-fetched event that Graves could not only keep a Louisiana seat from flipping from R to D but save Republican control — well, that would be one sure route to redemption among a crowd for whom winning is pretty much everything.