Democrats’ Shrinking Coalition on Full Display in Louisiana Rout

On Saturday night, the Republican Party flipped the Louisiana governorship, held since 2015 by Democrat John Bell Edwards. With the popular Edwards retiring, Republican Attorney General Jeff Landry was widely expected to become the next governor, but few expected him to win outright in this weekend’s primary.

In Louisiana local and state elections, every candidate participates in a joint primary contest, with the top two vote-getters advancing to the general election in November – unless one candidate receives 50 percent of the vote in the primary, in which case he or she wins immediately. Accordingly, Landry faced not just Democrat opponents but several other Republicans.

The extent of Landry’s triumph – 52 percent of the overall vote and 66 percent of the GOP vote – came as a surprise. While he was widely expected to be the top vote-getter, few expected him to win outright.

D.C.-based political analysts will be quick to write off Landry’s success as the product of low turnout or an uncompetitive race, but that would be a mistake.

The extent and nature of Landry’s victory, as well as the record 41 percent of the vote the GOP candidate for Lt. Governor received in New Orleans itself, reflects a wider realignment in American politics, already on display in 2022, in which cultural class, not race or income, defines voting habits. Whether rural African American voters stayed home or voted Republican, the fact is that they did not vote for the Democrat candidates last weekend in Louisiana in the same numbers they did previously.

This result has alarming implications for Democrats in other states like North Carolina, where the party relies heavily on working-class minorities to remain competitive at all.

The numbers on Saturday cannot be explained merely by Louisiana’s “Republican Lean.” For starters, the margin by which Landry won far exceeds that which Donald Trump won by in 2020, when the state voted for Trump by 58.46 percent to 39.45 percent. This weekend, Landry defeated his closest competitor, Democrat Shawn Wilson, 52 percent to 26 percent. The Republican candidates overall led the Democrats by a combined margin of 66 percent to 29 percent.

That 29 percent is well below the African American percentage of Louisiana’s population, which stood at 32.6 percent in 2020. The 2020 exit polls showed white voters backing Trump 77 percent to 23 percent, and Black voters backing Biden 88 percent to 10 percent. Saturday’s numbers are not possible without either substantial crossover by African American voters, mass abstention, or more likely a combination of the two.

Democrats will be quick to seize on the relatively low turnout – Landry had the lowest total number of votes for a winning candidate since 1964 – to argue that voters staying home was the reason for his victory. It is easy to see why this is preferable to the other possibility, which is that racial polarization is finally breaking down in the deep south, not with white voters casting ballots for Democrats, but with African Americans casting ballots for Republicans.

However, even the notion that traditional Democrat voters simply stayed home should not be comforting for the party, as it implies that African American voters saw no reason to bother voting for Democrats – even as Democrats are apt to crow about how their post-2020/Dobbs coalition tends toward much higher turnout, giving them a supposed advantage in midterms and special elections.

Democrats should remember that in 2024 they do not need to win a midterm or special election, but rather a presidential election. If actions produce opposite reactions, it is unclear why that will necessarily bring these missing rural African American voters back to the polls, when Democrats will be running on the same platform designed to appeal to white liberal elites. Nor is it obvious they will vote for Democrats.

Why is this happening? Liberals would, after running through the usual litany of voter suppression claims, which appears to only occur in less populated areas without lines at the polls, argue that the election was merely uncontested. There is a chicken and an egg problem here. Why was it uncontested?

Bill Clinton won Louisiana in 1996, and as late as 2004 both U.S. Senators from the state were Democrats. Democrats controlled both houses of the legislature until 2013, while Al Gore and John Kerry received 45 percent and 42 percent of the vote in 2000 and 2004, respectively. Democrats won gubernatorial elections in 2003, 2015, and 2019. A Democrat is still governor.

Why, then, did the Democrat Party not bother even to contest seriously an office they already held? Especially when they are trying to argue in front of the Supreme Court that they are entitled proportionally to a second congressional seat under the Voting Rights Act. If they wanted to make the argument that anything less than two out of six seats designed to elect Democrats disenfranchised African American voters, would it have not helped to actually have an example of African American voters casting ballots for Democrats?

What happened since 2019?

The Dobbs decision, for one thing. Louisiana Democrats were always distinctly more pro-life than their brethren in other states. John Bell Edwards signed a law instituting prison terms for doctors who perform abortions after fetal viability in June 2022 – after the Dobbs draft had already leaked. It is hard to imagine anyone holding that position having a future in the Democrat Party, which may be one reason Edwards has been all-but-erased from national chatter.

It is far from clear that a candidate like John Bell Edwards could have won on Saturday, or even whether Edwards himself could have done so. Nonetheless, Democrats did not even try to find out the answer. Wilson’s positions on the issues were more in line with a Democrat running for office in New York or California, not Louisiana. Democrats made clear they’d rather run a candidate who had no chance of winning than run one who disagreed with the party’s stance on core social issues.

It is not even that the party has moved left. Rather, it is that the party has expelled everyone who disagrees. Instead of a party where 85 percent agree on social issues, it is one where 100 percent must do so, and the party would prefer to not to contest elections in which a majority of the electorate disagrees with the party elites rather than run candidates who might appeal to those voters.

For Louisiana, this meant effectively dissolving the state Democrat Party. John Bell Edwards, far from being out of touch with his party, seems to have represented a substantial segment of it. In 2020, nearly half of Democrats in the Louisiana state legislature voted to place a constitutional amendment stating there was no right to an abortion on the ballot. The amendment then passed by a margin of 63 percent 37 percent, more than Donald Trump’s 58 percent 40 percent. The result is that as social issues became more of a dividing line, voting has started becoming less, not more racially polarized.

Liberals may be apt to dismiss the importance of abandoning Louisiana, though their willingness to do so says a lot about the factors behind Saturday’s result. The problem for them is that Louisiana is not that unique.

A narrative has been built up that Democrats beat expectations in the 2022 midterms, which they did in the Midwest, New England, and Southwest. Largely ignored is the Deep South.

It is true that Democrats did not seriously contest gubernatorial or U.S. House races in Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, or Tennessee, but the same was true in 2018. In 2022, Democrat candidates turned in results which resembled those of the Republican Party at the height of one-party rule.

Democrat Senate candidates received 31 percent, 31 percent, and 35 percent of the vote in Alabama, Arkansas and Louisiana, respectively, while their candidates for governor managed 29 percent, 35 percent, and 33 percent in Alabama, Arkansas, and Tennessee, respectively. In every case, they ran substantially behind both past performance and Joe Biden’s in 2020.

Even in Georgia, where Raphael Warnock was reelected to the Senate, it was on the back of suburban ticket-splitters in the Atlanta area. Stacey Abrams received the worst results in rural Georgia of almost any Democrat candidate in history.

Warnock of course won, and that is evidence that the loss of these voters can be countered with gains elsewhere. But while not every state is Louisiana, the same type of voters exists elsewhere. Unlike in Georgia, where Democrats rely on an urban African American vote, in North Carolina it is largely rural, and many of those counties already showed swings to Donald Trump in 2020.

Elections are won on the margins. This is something Barack Obama’s campaign team understood in 2012, even if Democrat strategists took the opposite lessons from that success. If Democrats win African American voters in rural North Carolina by a margin of 73 percent to 24 percent on a 40 percent turnout rather than by 85 percent to 13 percent on a 70 percent turnout, they need to make up that additional margin elsewhere. If they lose rural white voters, or white conservatives 79 percent to 20 percent rather than 72 percent to 27 percent, it is going to be that much harder to do so.

Democrats have built a new coalition which is cohesive, but at the cost of only competing for specific demographics in specific parts of the country. They may be fine with ceding Louisiana or Tennessee, but the types of voters in these states exist everywhere. They should pay attention to Louisiana and consider whether these voters will magically appear elsewhere when they need them if nothing is offered.

Andrew Camman is the pseudonym of a regular writer on current affairs who has taught history at the University level for eight years. He has worked on Capitol Hill and is familiar with the historical development of the American and British political systems.