Louisiana dominated by reliably Republican supporters

Like other Gulf Coast states, Louisiana has flipped, politically speaking, from blue to red over the past 20 years. The most recent FiveThirtyEight projections of The New York Times give Mitt Romney a 99.7% chance of carrying the state. Republican presidential candidates have carried Louisiana easily since George W. Bush first won the presidency in 2000. In 2008, Louisiana was one of four Republican states in the country to vote more in favor of U.S. Sen. John McCain (58.6 percent) than 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 appear 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 Republicans, it would appear that Louisiana is a hotly contested state. So how is every major state office held by a Republican? Louisiana became a Republican stronghold because of one main demographic that has shifted through the years: the Catholic vote. “Cajun Catholics are no longer moderately swing votes at all,” says Wayne Parent, a professor of political science at LSU. “They are becoming as reliably Republican as Southern Baptists.” To read more, click here.