(Louisiana Illuminator) — Federal law doesn’t require a member of Congress to live in the district they represent. Whether Louisiana voters will care whether their representative lives in their community remains to be seen.
Two of the four major Republicans running for Louisiana’s open 5th Congressional District seat don’t reside within its current boundaries. They are supposed to all be on the ballot in the May 16 GOP primary election.
The 5th District encompasses all or portions of 21 parishes that span the Baton Rouge region, the Florida Parishes in the southeastern portion of the state and the northeastern portion of the state around Monroe, including Louisiana’s portion of the Mississippi Delta.
One candidate, state Sen. Blake Miguez, lives approximately 70 miles west of the district boundary in New Iberia. Another, Louisiana Board of Regents Chairwoman Misti Cordell, who oversees higher education policy in the state, resides just outside the district line in Monroe, according to a review of parish property records in both locations.
The two remaining major GOP candidates, state Sen. Rick Edmonds and state Rep. Mike Echols, have homes within the district lines in Baton Rouge and Monroe, respectively.
Edmonds and Echols both said they have been surprised how often voters and civic leaders bring up the residency of other candidates, particularly Miguez.
“It may be the number one subject that anyone has mentioned to me,” Edmonds said earlier this month when asked about the residency issue in the race, adding, “Why would we have districts if it was not important?”
But national political analyst and elections prognosticator Charlie Cook had more of a mixed take about whether residency matters.
He said voters care less these days whether their congressional representative lives locally. A candidate who has a lot of campaign money could overcome any deficit they experience from being labeled a carpetbagger.
“Normal people do not know where district lines are,” said Cook, who grew up in Shreveport.
Yet Cook acknowledged that Louisiana has deep cultural divisions between the northern and southern parts of the state that might make a candidate’s outsider status more apparent.
“I wouldn’t want to have a strong Cajun accent running in northeastern Louisiana,” he said.
The question of where boundaries of any of Louisiana’s congressional districts actually fall is also up in the air this week. The U.S. Supreme Court handed down a decision Wednesday requiring the state to redraw its U.S. House of Representatives district map again.
The ruling means the lines of the 5th Congressional District, and likely every other U.S. House seat in Louisiana, will shift again for the third time in six years. But it’s unclear when those new boundaries will be drawn or go into effect.
As the district currently stands, one of the major Republican candidates running to represent northeast Louisiana does have a pronounced Cajun accent and a recognizable Cajun last name.
Miguez has represented Acadiana, the southern region of the state where Cajuns hail from, in the Louisiana Legislature since 2015.
Miguez joined the 5th District race in early February, the day before President Donald Trump blindsided Louisiana’s Republican establishment by endorsing Miguez in the same campaign.
The New Iberia legislator had spent the seven previous months running for U.S. Senate against incumbent Republican Bill Cassidy.
Miguez dropped out of that race shortly after Trump endorsed another Senate candidate, U.S. Rep. Julia Letlow, R-Baton Rouge. She is vacating the congressional seat Miguez is now seeking.
When he was still running for the U.S. Senate, Miguez played up his Cajun roots in political advertisements, emphasizing that his family has “lived on the Bayou” for seven generations. In the same video, he described himself as “Bayou Built.”
There are bayous in the Baton Rouge area and northeast Louisiana, but in Louisiana, the Bayou, with a capital “B,” typically refers to the waterways and swamps that funnel into the Gulf of Mexico. That region of the state is currently divided into three other congressional districts occupied by Steve Scalise, Troy Carter and Clay Higgins.
At a press conference in February, Miguez responded to carpetbagger criticism by saying that he has had a home in Baton Rouge for years and owns a business in East Baton Rouge parish.
“What many of you don’t know is about my deep ties in Baton Rouge and the 5th Congressional District,” Miguez said. “I’ve had a residence in Baton Rouge since the late 90s.”
The candidate declined to share where he owned a home in Baton Rouge at that time, citing security concerns for his family.
One of Miguez’s family businesses based in New Iberia, Miguez Fuel & Lubricants, also has had a Baton Rouge site since at least 2021, according to property records. But it is currently located in the 6th Congressional District represented by U.S. Rep. Cleo Fields, D-Baton Rouge.
Cordell also lives outside the current 5th Congressional District, though her home is still in Monroe and far closer to the boundary than Miguez’s.
“I could just about spit on the line, and I could definitely walk to it,” Cordell said in an interview earlier this month.
Gov. Jeff Landry and state lawmakers redrew the congressional boundaries two years ago and split Monroe between two different seats. Cordell ended up on the side of the line represented by U.S. Speaker Mike Johnson, R-Shreveport, but says she grew up in the “old” 5th District, which used to encompass all of northeast Louisiana.
“Just because they drew me out by a couple of streets doesn’t mean I’m going to sit this one out,” she said of the election. “I’m the only one of the four [major Republican candidates] who didn’t vote for this darn map that terribly gerrymanders us.”
For decades, Monroe and Baton Rouge have had two different members of Congress. That changed in 2024, when Landry pushed a reworked congressional map through the legislature that vanquished his political rival, Republican Garret Graves, who represented Baton Rouge in U.S. House at the time.
The current congressional districts were reconfigured to dump Graves’ Baton Rouge-area Republican strongholds into the 5th District represented by Letlow, who lived near Monroe at the time.
The lion’s share of the current congressional seat’s voters are now in the southern part of the district. Just three parishes — East Baton Rouge, Livingston and Ascension — hold 43% of the seat’s registered voters.
Assuming the district lines don’t change drastically, that should help Edmonds, the only major GOP candidate from the Baton Rouge area. He received several major Republican endorsements in the area, including those of Baton Rouge Mayor Sid Edwards and St. George Mayor Dustin Yates, both Republicans.
Monroe, where Cordell and Echols live, is also approximately 200 miles away from where most of Baton Rouge-area voters reside. While Echols’ Monroe home may be in the same congressional district, it’s almost three times as far away from the heart of the district as Miguez’s house in New Iberia.
“Livingston and Ascension are the fastest growing parishes in the state. So when do we get representation?” said Livingston Parish Assessor Jeff Taylor, who is backing Edmonds. “Why are we giving it up to a guy from New Iberia or a guy from Monroe?”
Yet Echols said many of the rural southern parts of the district near Baton Rouge resemble rural parts of northeast Louisiana. Both communities used to be home to large paper mills, for example.
“It is a very blue collar ‘get it done’ type of culture in that area,” Echols said of the rural parts of the 5th District in both the north and the south. “It’s very much different from the Gulf of America culture.”
And again, the recent Supreme Court makes it likely that the district lines will change once again in the near future, though it’s not clear whether they will be altered for this year’s election yet.
Outside of Miguez, Echols is perhaps the only Republican candidate who has enough money in his campaign account to mount a sophisticated political campaign.
His campaign has collected a total of $6.2 million and still had $4 million available at the end of March. But a lot of that money comes from a personal loan to his own campaign of $3 million, according to the most recent campaign finance report.
Echols collected $1.8 million and still had $1.4 million on hand at the end of March, thanks to a personal loan he made to his campaign of $1.4 million, according to his campaign finance report.
Cordell had $478,000 and Edmonds had $279,000 available to themselves at the end of March. They also both lent their campaigns $206,000 and $155,000, respectively.
“The more people there are in the field, the more important money is,” Cook said.
Greg LaRose contributed to this report.
