Steve Scalise

In the first leg of his 10th run to represent suburban New Orleans in the U.S. House of Representatives, Majority Leader Steve Scalise faces a retired Naval aviator who also patrolled the border looking for immigrants trying to illegally enter the country.

Early voting for the May 16 closed party primary begins Saturday and runs through May 9.

Scalise, R-Jefferson, was first elected in May 2008 to fill out the remaining eight months of Bobby Jindal’s term after Jindal was elected governor. Since then, he has been easily reelected every two years.

Scalise has been a member of GOP leadership since 2013, first as chair of the conservative Republican Study Committee, then as the vote-counting GOP Whip from 2019 to 2023, when he was elected Majority Leader. As second-in-charge, Scalise sets the schedules for House legislative hearings and votes.

Scalise came a few votes shy of winning the House’s top job after Speaker Kevin McCarthy. R-California, was ousted in October 2023. When it became apparent he would not receive the 218 Republicans needed, Scalise withdrew and helped elect his Louisiana delegation colleague, Rep. Mike Johnson, a Benton Republican.

Scalise and Johnson were largely responsible last year for passing the tax-cutting One Big Beautiful Bill Act that included much of President Donald Trump’s domestic agenda.

His opponent, Randy Arrington of Ponchatoula, spent 21 years in the U.S. Navy, then 22 years as an interdiction pilot patrolling the U.S. border with Mexico for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. In retirement, he received a doctorate in political science from the University of New Orleans.

A California native, Arrington is running on the belief that the Founding Fathers made a mistake by not imposing term limits, which he would do if elected. Arrington also claims Scalise is not conservative enough and “consistently caves to the Democratic Party and their communist compatriots.”

Though it includes some uptown New Orleans precincts, the 10-parish district is predominantly suburban, with two-thirds of its 522,479 registered voters living in Jefferson and St. Bernard parishes. The 1st Louisiana Congressional District includes all of St. Tammany and Plaquemines parishes and stretches from Sorrento near Baton Rouge south through much of Lafourche and Terrebonne parishes on the coast.

Seventy-eight percent of the district’s voters are White. First District voters have delivered overwhelming majorities to Republican presidential candidates since at least 1988. The last Democratic congressman elected was Richard A. Tonry, of Arabi, who resigned in 1977 after being convicted of vote buying.

Arrington challenged Scalise in 2024 and polled 15,856 votes, coming in third out of five candidates. Scalise won that last election — in which all candidates competed in the primary regardless of party — with 238,842 votes or 67% of the 357,720 ballots cast.

In his tenth election for the seat, Scalise has never polled less than two-thirds — often more — winning outright in the primary each time.