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‘To the mattresses!” goes the old mafia battle cry.

Look for tensions between Baton Rouge and New Orleans to reach that point in three years, after the official U.S. Census count comes in and it’s time to redraw political districts.

Orleans Parish stands to lose as many as two seats in the Louisiana Senate, five in the House and a chunk of clout when the carefully crafted boundaries of Rep. William Jefferson’s congressional turf are revised to carve six districts where once there were seven.

“I don’t know what the political synonym is, but I can just hear various political interests trying to decide when it’s time to ‘go to the mattresses,’” Shreveport political analyst Elliott Stonecipher says. “The battle to be the recognized locus of power in the state is truly and officially engaged with this process.”

Both sides already have begun amassing their statistical arsenals. Mayor Kip Holden has lobbed verbal grenades at early Census population estimates indicating Baton Rouge grew by less than 5% after Hurricane Katrina, citing traffic counts as a more suitable indicator. Meanwhile, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin fires back with utility hookup and postal address change request counts, insisting the Crescent City is making a quick comeback.

As time goes on, however, the combat will intensify.

For one thing, mapping software is more advanced, affordable and available than ever, which means political interest groups from GNO Inc. to the NAACP will be able to politick their own visions of a new Louisiana in short order. Says Stonecipher: “If I’m a legislator from New Orleans who has a ghost district, like in the lower Ninth Ward, and I know when this puppy gets redrawn I’m going to have a prospective constituency that ain’t going to elect me, I’m going to have my own maps.”

And 2011 is also the year that the legislature and all statewide officials run for office, which could mean the ultimate politicization of the reapportionment process.

“New Orleans stands to lose not only a lot of political clout, but there’s also a sense in New Orleans that the rest of the state has moved on and is tired of hearing about New Orleans,” says Albert Samuels, a political science professor at Southern University. “There’s a definite fear that if New Orleans loses this fight, the state really is moving on and the city loses the ability to command the kind of attention and resources that it has in the past.

“On the other hand, there are other parts of the state that resented New Orleans in the first place and thought New Orleans got too much attention, and might welcome New Orleans being diminished in some significant way. It could potentially be a very messy battle.”

Louisiana Senate Secretary Glenn Koepp says the biggest challenge will be crafting majority African-American districts. U.S. Census population estimates indicate Louisiana lost 130,540 black residents in the year after the hurricanes—the bulk of them from Orleans Parish.

Samuels predicts that will be a major battlefront.

“There may not be a majority black congressional district in Orleans Parish anymore,” he says. “New Orleans traditionally has had the largest concentration of African-Americans, but that natural contiguous district appears to be gone now. The question is, can you cobble together enough people to create that kind of district, and avoid some of the issues raised in the 1990s, when Cleo Fields’ district stretched from Shreveport to Baton Rouge? The flip side of that is that we may have more African-Americans in the Baton Rouge area. How many more is the question.”

Even without the political warfare, Louisiana is under the gun to get through reapportionment. Census numbers won’t be available until February; the new districts must be finished and approved by the U.S. Department of Justice in time for qualifying in August or September.

Unless statesmanlike leadership steps in, Stonecipher looks for potential protracted court challenges by Orleans and St. Tammany, as well as third parties like the NAACP.

“When a state has failed at fundamental systemic reform, and we have, then what you’re left to do is fight amongst yourselves,” Stonecipher says. “As Tommy Lee Jones says in No Country For Old Men, ‘If this ain’t a mess, it’ll do until the mess gets here.’ What Louisiana doesn’t need to do is devour itself, and we could well do that in 2011.”