We won’t know the early voting results in Saturday’s statewide primary elections until election night, but we can read quite a bit into the by the Secretary of State’s office. The news is great for Republicans, disastrous for Democrats.
The obvious takeaway — the one most pundits and politicos have talked about — is the overall decline in early voting numbers compared to the last statewide elections in 2019.
But early voting was down only a smidgen (a mere 821 votes statewide) among Republicans. Among Democrats, the early voting decline was a cascade — more than 23,000 fewer votes this year compared to the same period in 2019, the last round of statewide elections.
That drop in Democratic early voting mirrors, proportionately, the significant decline in Democratic voter registration in recent decades, a trend that appears to be accelerating.
Here’s the tell-tale milestone: For the first time since early voting became a significant event in Louisiana elections, Republicans this year cast more early votes than Democrats despite being outnumbered statewide by more than 146,000 voters.
Slightly more than 139,000 Democrats cast early ballots this election cycle. More than 154,000 Republicans voted early.
That’s a sea change from past election cycles and a major achievement for the Louisiana GOP.
It also belies the skepticism — hostility might be a better word — of national Republicans toward early voting.
“The higher turnout rates for Republicans in early voting is somewhat surprising,” says UNO pollster and political science Professor Ed Chervenak. “Former President (Donald) Trump and his Republican supporters have been highly critical of early voting, claiming it is fraught with manipulation and fraud and should not be trusted. However, Louisiana Republicans have embraced early voting, and it seems to be working out well for them.”
In 2019, Democrats cast just under 169,000 early votes; Republicans cast more than 159,000 votes, a difference of less than 10,000 votes. That year, Dems had a significant edge in registration, more than 42%, compared to just 31% for GOP registrants. Even then, Republicans turned out in significantly higher proportions than Democrats.
At the risk of numbing my readers with more numbers, let’s compare early voting stats from 2015 — because it shows how dramatically Louisiana voters have moved away from the Democratic Party and toward the GOP.
In 2015, registered Democrats outnumbered Republicans by more than 500,000 voters — 46% to 28% of the electorate. That’s a huge advantage on paper, but it masks the fact that a large percentage of registered Dems tend to vote Republican.
In early voting that year, even though Dems cast almost 119,000 ballots compared to just over 84,000 cast by Republicans, the difference was less than the registration imbalance in favor of Democrats.
In other words, Louisiana Republicans consistently have punched above their weight when it comes time to vote. Democrats, meanwhile, consistently have failed to turn out their voters in comparable proportions.
Despite that trend, 2015 is the year that Democrat John Bel Edwards pulled off a long-shot victory in the governor’s race, thanks largely to the vulnerability of the GOP’s runoff standard-bearer, then-U.S. Sen. David Vitter. Edwards garnered a huge swath of voters who otherwise vote Republican (as they did in all other Dem-vs-GOP runoffs on the same ballot), and a good many Republicans just didn’t vote.
Many said at the time that Edwards’ victory was a one-off, proof that every election is indeed a unique event.
As we look at this year’s contest, early voting suggests the early analysis of Edwards’ victory in 2015 was correct. He earned his second term in the election of 2019, but there again his runoff opponent — right-wing businessman Eddie Rispone — had no previous record of public service and no discernable plan or platform other than Trump, who stumped for Rispone but couldn’t put him over the top.
Even now, Democrat Edwards gets high marks from a majority of Louisiana voters.
But the numbers more and more suggest that our next governor — and every other statewide elected official — will be Republican.
