Louisiana: Democrats in Registration Only

By NICK CORASANITI

Today, we continue our Presidential Geography series, a one-by-one examination of the peculiarities that drive the politics in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Today's stop: Louisiana, the Pelican State. FiveThirtyEight spoke with Wayne Parent, a professor of political science at Louisiana State University, and Robert Mann, a professor of mass communication at L.S.U.

When 26-year-old Walker Hines announced that he was switching his party affiliation to Republican from Democrat in 2010, he gave the Republican Party a majority in a Louisiana chamber for the first time since Reconstruction.

The young Mr. Hines's decision was emblematic of Louisiana's political transformation: it had become as red as its famous crawfish.

Much like its Gulf Coast brethren, Louisiana has flipped to a solid red state from a solid blue state over the past 20 years. The most recent FiveThirtyEight projections give Mitt Romne y a 99.7 percent chance of carrying the state, and Republican presidential candidates have carried Louisiana easily since George W. Bush. In 2008, Louisiana was one of four Republican states in the country to vote more in favor of John McCain (58.6 percent) than Mr. Bush in 2004 (56.8 percent).

But while Louisiana votes consistently with the Deep South, its conservative engine is made up of slightly different parts, some of which, when viewed in isolation, falsely appears to make Louisiana more pink, or purple, than red.

Of the roughly 2.9 million registered voters in the state, 1.4 million are registered as Democrats, while about 789,000 are registered Republicans and another 694,000 registered as “other.” Even if every “other” voter sided with the Republicans, it would appear that Louisiana is a hotly contested state. So how is every major state office held by a Republican?

The answer to the deceptive voter regis tration numbers lie, in part, with Louisiana's unique “jungle primary” system used in local, state and congressional elections, but not presidential elections. As in the presidential electoral system in France, all candidates for an office in Louisiana run at once without a separate party-specific primary. If any one candidate receives more than 50 percent of the vote, the election is over. If not, the top two face off in a runoff election a month later. Voters are not required to register with a party to participate in these elections, removing a main incentive for registering with either the Democrat or Republican parties.

“The minimal effort it takes to register with a party just isn't worth it in Louisiana,” Mr. Parent said. “And a lot of older voters who once registered as Democrats, and I'm talking those 50 and over, now vote nearly exclusively Republican.”

In 2008, older voters showed up strong for Mr. McCain, with 65 percent of those in the 50 -64 age range and 69 percent of those 65 and over casting a Republican ballot.

The “jungle primary” system also has the potential to depress voter turnout, which in turn can lead to misleading exit polls and even some occasional surprise upsets. When voters are forced to return to the polls in the case of a runoff, many won't come back if the issues that had initially drawn them to the polls were already decided.

“Say there was a hotly contested congressional primary that was decided in the first election, and then a lot of local bills and state races went to a runoff, I don't think many people would be coming back out to the polls,” Mr. Parent said.

Electoral system aside, Louisiana became a Republican stronghold because of one main demographic that has shifted through the years: the Catholic vote.

Louisiana has a large Catholic population, setting it apart from its Gulf Coast neighbors. In the 2012 Republican primary, Catholics made up 36 pe rcent of the voters in the primaries. While Catholics weren't tallied in Mississippi or Alabama exit polls in 2012, they accounted for only 8 percent in Mississippi and 5 percent in Alabama in 2008.

The Catholic vote is strongest in the predominantly Cajun southwestern part of the state known as Acadiana. Catholic voters once made up a large part of the “swing” vote in Louisiana, before social issues like abortion and same-sex marriage became part of the political conversation. In 1992, 41 percent of all voters in the state identified themselves as Catholics, and 47 percent of Catholics voted for Bill Clinton. By 2008, the vote had switched, with 70 percent of Catholics voting for Mr. McCain.

“Cajun Catholics are no longer moderately swing votes at all,” Mr. Parent said. “They are becoming as reliably Republican as Southern Baptists.”

However, this is not to say that the other regions of Louisiana hold no sway over elections. As FiveThirtyEight explained in its primary breakdown of Louisiana's political geography, the northern region of Louisiana is regarded as the most conservative region of the state, essentially behaving electorally as an extension of the states it borders: Arkansas to the north and Mississippi to the east. The southeastern part of the state tends to be evenly matched. While New Orleans and Baton Rouge are the state's Democratic strongholds, the surrounding suburbs are some of the most consistently Republican areas in the state.

The Bellwether: De Soto Parish

In the northwest corner of the state, south of Shreveport, De Soto Parish best reflects the current and continuing shift to the right of Louisiana. It has voted within three percentage points of the state margin in each of the last three presidential elections. It has a slightly larger black population (40 percent) than the state as a whole (32 percent), and with its proximity to Shreveport, has a blend of suburban Republican i deologies with Southern Baptist social conservatism.

The Bottom Line

Mr. Romney doesn't need to pick Gov. Bobby Jindal as a running mate to win Louisiana's eight electoral votes. The state will be called for the Republican candidate mere seconds after polls close on Nov. 6. Any Democratic hopes for winning the state disappeared in the 1990s.

And major disasters in the state have only kicked the Democrats further down. In response to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, President Obama placed a moratorium on drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, which created a sense of resentment toward the president in Louisiana, said Mr. Mann, a professor of mass communication at L.S.U.

“I don't hear anyone talk as bad about BP as they do about the moratorium,” he said. “People in Louisiana, Democrats and Republicans, saw it as an intrusion into their way of life.”

Where the oil spill brought resentment, Hurricane Katrina brought devastation. New Orleans lost 14 0,845 residents, a drop of 29 percent from 2000 to 2010. The majority of that loss can be attributed to the storm. The decrease in population was also a reason for Louisiana's losing a Congressional seat and an electoral vote in 2012.

“Katrina really did accelerate a lot of the changes that we have seen come about, like the Republican control of every statewide elected office,” Mr. Mann said. “The shift to the right was already occurring, but Katrina may have been the tipping point.”