Louisiana gained the 2nd congressional district in 1823 as part of the 18th United States Congress. At first it comprised New Orleans and significant populations from surrounding areas. With the growth of population in the urban area, the current district is located mostly within the city of New Orleans. Since the late 19th century, this has been historically among the most safely Democratic seats in the country, for sharply opposing reasons. During Reconstruction, most African Americans affiliated with the Republican Party and, as a majority, elected Republicans from this district. White Democrats regained control of the district in 1891, when voter suppression of Republicans was rampant. They kept the seat through much of the 1960s, largely because of disenfranchising blacks. In 1898 the Democratic-dominated state legislature had disenfranchised most blacks in the state through provisions of a new state constitution that raised barriers to voter registration, such as poll taxes and subjective literacy tests. The Democrats had maintained the political exclusion of blacks for decades. Like most congressional districts in the South, this district consistently voted Democratic from the late 19th century until the late 1960s, because the voters during that time were nearly all white Democrats. Such Democrats created what was known as the Solid South in Congress, exercising power beyond their proportion of the electorate. Throughout this period, New Orleans had a significant proportion of African Americans as residents, but they were utterly excluded from the political system. In 2008, after a federal grand jury indicted incumbent congressman Jefferson on sixteen felony charges related to corruption the year prior, Joseph Cao was elected as the first Republican to represent the 2nd congressional district and most of New Orleans in more than a century.. Cao was the first Vietnamese-American U.S. Representative elected in the country. He was the only Republican in the 111th Congress to represent a district with a predominantly African-American population. For most of the period from 1983 to 2013, this district contained nearly all of the city of New Orleans, and some of its suburbs. From 2003 to 2013, the legislature defined it as including the West Bank portion of Jefferson Parish and South Kenner, which have a higher proportion of white residents. After the 2010 census, the state legislature redefined it to encompass territory slightly to the west, and pick up a portion of Baton Rouge.
