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 U.S. representative 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 chair of a social justice nonprofit.
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.
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, says his top priorities are education, health care and infrastructure.
Joining the race is Guillory, who served in the Louisiana Senate for six years until 2016. The Republican says he wants to crack down on crime and migrants entering the U.S. illegally and cut down on federal spending abroad.
“Crime affects every single family, every single person in Louisiana and we have to stop it,” Guillory says.
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.
