Gerrymanders finally deliver Caddo to Democrats

With the Shreveport City Council already gerrymandered to lock Democrats in the majority, last week’s elections did the same to the Caddo Parish School Board, four years late.

Having five incumbents running for reelection and data center tax revenue promises plus pay raises having been tossed out like Carnival throws over the past few months by the city, the four Democrats and one Republican cruised to Council victories, joining the GOP filler of one of the two open seats who didn’t draw an opponent. That left just one vacated seat tussled over by four Democrats, where the two Democrats, Billy Roy Anderson and Lester Smith advanced to a runoff.

Anderson hardly had any money as of mid-October, and Smith has a long record of activism. But Smith’s age and a recent bizarre police incident that got him cited, along with some key endorsements, might give community organizer Anderson an avenue to victory. Regardless of who wins, Democrats will have a veto proof majority on the Council.

By contrast, courtesy of timing and term limits, the School Board will see much greater turnover. Back in 2022, just as the Council had engineered a gerrymander to cement that supermajority of Democrats, the Board, taking advantage of a temporary accidental majority, attempted to cement a 7-5 majority. But they were crossed up when Republican Katie McLain won the majority-black District 10 over a black Democrat.

That fly in the ointment effectively became taken care of last year when another mid-term vacancy occurred and Jeri Bowen, who previously had declared herself a Democrat then no party, was picked (just as she had been in the similar situation years ago) as the interim member for District 8 which is probably the most conservative one in the parish. Upon advice from this space, she ran this fall as a Republican and drew only a hapless Democrat chronic candidate that she defeated easily.

Thus, with a Republican-in-name-only aboard, Democrats had their wish. It got better for them when no party Susannah Poljak defeated local and state party-endorsed Republican Matt Shields. Perhaps most satisfying to them, McLain lost to Michael LaFitte, former Shreveport NAACP president, in effect giving conservatives only three votes left on the Board even after runoffs among newcomers as all four of those contests feature a pair of Democrats. With McLain’s loss, two-thirds of the Board will be comprised of newcomers next year.

With that and the existing gerrymander of the Caddo Parish Commission that allows Democrats a majority there, they now control all major organs of power in Caddo Parish, as they once did four decades ago. Only the continued mayoralty of Republican Tom Arceneaux, in a runoff to save his job, stands in the way of Democrats having the run of the field in Caddo Parish as a result of 2026 elections.