Political scientist labels La. the ‘least-interested electorate I’ve ever seen’
5th December 2023 · 0 Comments
By Julie O’Donoghue
Contributing Writer
(lailluminator.com) – Forty years ago, Louisiana’s charismatic former Gov. Edwin Edwards wallopped incumbent David Treen in a gubernatorial primary election to return to the state’s highest office after a four-year absence.
A populist and Democrat, Edwards got 62 percent of the vote to the sitting Republican governor’s 36 percent. Treen’s image, as perhaps being too boring for Louisiana, never fully recovered.
He ran for public office later in life but never won another campaign.
By 2023 standards however, Treen didn’t fare so poorly at the polls.
In October 1983, Treen received 586,000 votes in his loss to Edwards. Last month, Republican Attorney General Jeff Landry won the governor’s race in a primary with just 548,000 ballots – 38,000 fewer than Treen but 52 percent of the votes cast.
Louisiana’s 2023 statewide election cycle generated almost record-settling low voter participation.
Turnout for the 15 previous gubernatorial primary and runoff elections held since 1979 hovered around 1.4 million people on average, but just 1.06 million people cast ballots in the race Landry won.
“This is the most apathy and least-interested electorate I’ve ever seen,” said Joshua Stockley, a political science professor at the University of Louisiana-Monroe. Turnout for the attorney general, state treasurer and secretary of state runoff elections on Nov. 18 was also down when compared with statewide contests over the past 40 years. The number of people who cast ballots in those races this month failed to top 700,000.
By comparison, a little over 717,000 people voted in the 2007 attorney general’s runoff James “Buddy” Caldwell won, even though it was the only statewide item on that year’s November ballot.
In 1987, the attorney general and secretary of state’s runoff races, without a governor’s race at the top of the ticket, garnered more than 957,000 votes.
The only governor’s race with less participation from voters over the past four decades took place in 2011, when experts considered lackluster participation. They considered incumbent Gov. Bobby Jindal a lock to win a second term in the primary that year, and Democrats didn’t even bother to field a major candidate. Just 1.02 million people voted.
The highest turnout of a recent gubernatorial election was the 1991 runoff between Edwin Edwards and white supremacist David Duke, who was running as a Republican and a member of the Klu Klux Klan. Nearly 1.73 million people voted in that election.
The 2023 election was supposed to generate a lot more enthusiasm. For the first time in over two decades, most statewide elected positions were open. No incumbents were running for governor, secretary of state, attorney general, state treasurer or insurance commissioner.
Voter interest was tempered, however, by the “complete collapse of the Democratic Party,” said Pearson Cross, a political scientist who runs the School of Behavioral and Social Sciences at the University of Louisiana-Monroe.
Despite coalescing around one candidate, former state transportation secretary Shawn Wilson, the Democrats were unable to turn out enough voters to push Wilson into a runoff with Landry as expected. While voter turnout across the political spectrum was low this year, it was more depressed among Black residents, who make up the majority of the Democrats’ voter base.
State Democratic Party chair Katie Bernhardt said getting Democrats to vote was a challenge for her party because many of the legislative races in majority-Black districts were uncontested, giving voters fewer incentives to go to the polls in the primary. Statewide candidates also struggled to raise money, she said.
“If you don’t have money in the bank, it’s not going to work,” she said.
Democrats also failed to field a full slate of candidates in the statewide races, leaving the agriculture commissioner or insurance commissioner elections to the Republicans entirely.
“Turnout is encouraged when you have intense two-party competition,” Stockley said. “When one party, across the board, is perceived not to be competitive, that can influence both parties not to turn out the vote.”
Landry’s early endorsement from the Louisiana Republican Party over other GOP candidates in 2022 may have also had an impact, Cross said. The party can help candidates raise and spend campaign funding more efficiently. Landry’s lock on the state party’s backing made it more difficult for the other Republican candidates to compete.
“Jeff Landry has been marching to the coronation ever since the state GOP endorsed him early,” Cross said. “People felt no reason to go to the polls this time around.”
Cross and Stockley also said national political rancor might have also caused voter fatigue to drip down to the state and local level. Donald Trump’s unfounded claims that he won the 2020 national election — all evidence points to Joe Biden’s victory — might be particularly damaging, Stockley said.
“You cannot incessantly declare the system is corrupt and broken, and then turn around and expect people to participate in it,” he said.
The top vote-getter in this election cycle was the candidate most closely tied to Trump. The former president endorsed Landry early.
Landry also hired a handful of Trump’s political advisers to help run his campaign.
The low voter turnout could affect Landry negatively as well, however. He heads into office with far fewer Louisiana residents having cast a ballot for him than every other recent governor.
Having never participated in a runoff, Landry did not have the chance to further consolidate the GOP base behind him and drive up his voting numbers.
Landry’s ballot tally (548,000) is far short of the totals Gov. John Bel Edwards (774,000) or Republican challenger Eddie Rispone (734,000) earned in the 2019 gubernatorial runoff election.
Jindal got more than 699,000 votes in 2007, when he won in an open primary like Landry.
The only governor in the past 40 years to head into office with fewer votes is Republican Buddy Roemer. He received 516,000 ballots, or 33 percent of the votes cast, to finish first in the 1987 primary.
Roemer was supposed to face Edwin Edwards in a runoff, but Edwards dropped out to make Roemer the automatic winner.
In Edwin Edwards’ last two wins for governor, he received more than one million votes, despite the population of the state being smaller. When Edwards and Treen ran against each other in 1983, Louisiana had 4.2 million residents.
Now, it has over 4.6 million, according to recent U.S. Census estimates.
Louisiana’s election turnout in the 1980s was also particularly high because of economic turmoil.
The oil and gas market crashed, leaving people without jobs and the state with limited revenue sources, causing would-be voters to pay more attention, said John Couvillon, a polling expert who worked for some candidates on this fall’s ballot.
“When Louisiana is doing relatively well like it is now, you have a less motivated electorate,” he said.
This article originally published in the December 4, 2023 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
