An astounding 86.5% of Louisiana’s registered voters didn’t participate in last weekend’s statewide elections, Jeremy Alford notes in his latest column.
“The math is a little depressing, but it’s worth a spin on the abacus,” he says. “It basically means that 400,000 voters collectively called the shots for Louisiana’s entire electorate, which numbers around 2.9 million voters.”
The story was a little different in Orleans Parish, which had a number of municipal races on the ballot including a contest for mayor, Alford writes. The parish had 31.8% of its voters cast ballots in the election—that’s higher than the statewide average yet lower than many local politicos had hoped.
Despite the low turnout across the state, Alford says there are lessons to be learned from this past weekend’s primary election. Among them:
- Voters will pass on voting all together if they are unable to engage with an election.
- A regional base is critical for statewide candidates, especially for Democrats. Attorney Derrick Edwards landed the other runoff spot in the treasurer’s race thanks in large part to the 46,122 votes he received in his home parish of Orleans. No other candidate came close to that kind of regional pull, except for former state Rep. John Schroder, who received 14,820 votes from Jefferson Parish and another 14,906 from St. Tammany. Both parishes are crown jewels in the the standard Republican playbook.
- It was a huge primary night for Dr. Craig Greene of Baton Rouge, who is about to become the newest member of the Public Service Commission. Greene managed to capture 54% of the vote in a massive district by besting two former legislators in the first round. His political brand will be one to watch.
“At least we walked away from the 2017 primary knowing that an election can be very low on turnout, but still high on lessons learned,” Alford writes. “It would be nice nonetheless to see more people participating in the process. Because 13.5% turnout for a statewide election is a lesson no one wants to learn twice.”
Jeremy Alford publishes LaPolitics Weekly, a newsletter on Louisiana politics, at LaPolitics.com. Follow him on Twitter, or on Facebook. He can be reached at JJA@LaPolitics.com.
