Pollster: Appeals to progressives cost Carter-Peterson Congressional Race
3rd May 2021 · 0 Comments
By Christopher Tidmore
Contributing Writer
Some on the Progressive Democratic left in Louisiana have screamed that state Senator Troy Carter’s victory in the 2nd Congressional District race on April 24, 2021, came solely due to Republican voters opting for him, over the more perceived-liberal choice of state Senator Karen Carter Peterson.
However, pollster John Couvillon of JMC Analytics explained to The Louisiana Weekly that, in his view, Troy Carter would have won, even if no Republican had had the opportunity to vote for him.
“He might have won with 51 percent of the vote, but Troy Carter still would have pulled it off,” says Couvillon.
Exit polling reveals that he won almost a third of self-described liberals, the very constituency upon which Carter-Peterson banked to pull off a victory.
While the GOP vote most assuredly helped Troy Carter, Couvillon explained, “The thing that is not appreciated here is that not only did Troy Carter win by a 10-point margin, but the Republican vote is pretty small in the 2nd Congressional District. When you consider the fact that you had an all-Democratic runoff, you had less GOP turnout then you normally would have.
“I just see that the Republican vote was the icing on the cake, so to speak.”
Couvillon says, “Troy Carter got 48 percent of the Black vote, and if you’re purely looking at Jefferson and Orleans Parishes, it was 58-54 percent. He received 51 percent of the white vote in the City of New Orleans and 82 percent in Jefferson Parish. Taking Republicans out of the equation would give him a bit more like 51 percent or 52 percent, but I still think that he would probably have won.”
The major problem that Karen Carter-Peterson encountered he said, is that she did not establish complete dominance in any voting constituency in the electorate.
Even winning 90 percent of just self-described progressives might have swung the course of the election, but she failed in that effort, partially because she was so ideologically polarizing, Couvillon speculated.
Carter-Peterson barely won her home Senate district in Uptown New Orleans, despite the fact that it houses the very white “woke” voters to whom she had made such an appeal. (The electorate of Carter-Peterson’s Uptown New Orleans seat is 46 percent African American, 45 percent white, yet still one of the most Democratic-leaning seats in Louisiana, amongst voters from both racial constituencies.) Gary Chambers Jr. had won many of these voters — of both races – in the primary. Quite a few voted for Troy Carter, instead of Peterson, in the runoff.
John Couvillon noted that “an incorrect assumption” was made by her campaign. As he outlined, “This goes back to kind of my central premise about when you’re trying to assemble a majority coalition in a runoff — is that this ‘playing to the base’ stuff typically doesn’t work. And so Troy Carter had support across the spectrum, but I think by the fact that he didn’t exclude any groups — like what happened with the Peterson campaign where they basically took a hard left turn on every progressive issue —Troy Carter got a respectable number of the voters on the liberal side of the aisle as well. So he basically had much more freedom of movement, as it were.”
In contrast, Peterson pursued a narrow ideologically based campaign to motivate liberal voters from the primary behind her effort, and just barely cross the majority threshold in the runoff. That was risky, the pollster observed. “Peterson, who basically from what I can appreciate of her play, wanted to get the Gary Chambers vote. That might have been good from the standpoint of being viable, but not good from the standpoint of getting 51 percent of the vote.” It was too limiting in metro New Orleans, not to mention most everywhere else in a District that stretches to Baton Rouge.
Troy Carter also overwhelmingly won in the River Parishes, the West Bank precincts from St. John Parish into St. James, Ascension, and Assumption parishes, which are lined with Chemical Plants. That was not an accident. While a supporter of the “framework” of the Green New Deal, Carter took a far more nuanced view of its implementation, whereas Carter-Peterson desired a quick reduction of the fossil fuel-based economy. That might have scared voters of both races, the pollster reasoned.
“The fact is that you do have a lot of people employed by the petrochemical industry of both races up down the River Parishes, so that’s why I didn’t really see [embrace the Green New Deal] as an effective line. It was almost like a campaign being run in a California or Colorado race,” Couvillon said.
Reaching out across party lines, without undermining your ideological bona fides, ended up being the key in this congressional race, as well as the 82nd District State Representative race, according to Couvillon.
He believes Eddie Connick’s decision to attack Laurie Schlegel on the fact that she was a social worker ended up swinging much of the African-American votes to her candidacy, almost making up her margin of victory. It was an effort by Connick to pander to the GOP right. It backfired.
“Schlegel won Black voters in those precincts specifically because of those attacks,” Couvillon concluded.
It is his belief that every effort Connick made to broaden his coalition, including earning the endorsement of Democrat Raymond Delaney Jr. (the third candidate who missed a runoff slot) ultimately faltered thanks to his verbal appeal to the ideological extremes.
The full interview with John Couvillon can be heard by going http://www.thefoundershow.com, and listening to the 5/1/21 program.
This article originally published in the May 3, 2021 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
