For months, the expected ending to the first half of this year’s gubernatorial race had been scripted as David Vitter versus John Bel Edwards. But how the race will play out in its second act is anybody’s guess at this point, according to an LSU researcher.
“Sometimes, the ball bounces the other way. Will this be one of those times? I just don’t think we know that yet,” Michael Henderson, the research director at LSU’s Public Policy Research Lab, told the Press Club of Baton Rouge today, two days after Edwards and Vitter squeezed their way into the governor’s race runoff, set for a Nov. 21 vote. Edwards led the primary with 40%, while Vitter managed only 23%.
Traditional wisdom would suggest that Vitter, the Republican U.S. senator, would waltz to victory in a typically conservative state against Edwards, the Democratic state representative from Amite. In any other situation, Republican voters who favored other party candidates would coalesce around the GOP candidate left in the runoff for the sake of the party, Henderson says.
But Vitter isn’t dealing with the usual set of circumstances in this dance.
The state Republican Party appears somewhat splintered at the moment after a brutal campaign in which not only Edwards, but fellow Republicans Public Service Commissioner Scott Angelle and Lt. Gov. Jay Dardenne lobbed repeated attacks against Vitter.
Louisiana’s senior senator also faces tough sledding in convincing the Angelle and Dardenne camps to switch to his side. Henderson said an LSU poll of voters during the primary season suggested that 70% of Dardenne supporters disliked Vitter, while supporters of Angelle—who finished four percentage points behind Vitter—weren’t much more favorable of him.
In other words, it’s a free-for-all of sorts between Vitter and Edwards to pick up the more than 381,000 voters that picked Angelle or Dardenne, Henderson said.
“At the end of the day, 85% of those partisans and independents lean towards party. So the fundamentals are telling us that those folks are going to come around rather than convert to Democrat,” Henderson said. “I really think it could go either way. … But it’s going to take us another couple of weeks to figure this out.
But while Edwards offered a strong showing in collecting 40% of the vote, by no means does he face an easy road to victory. Louisiana is still a Republican stronghold, so the “D” next to his name makes him an underdog virtually by default. Edwards might have to get as many as one out of every three voters who picked either Angelle or Dardenne to have a shot at taking down Vitter, Henderson said.
What will be an issue for both: voter apathy. Despite the fact that this year’s gubernatorial contest was as wide open since the 2003 race between Bobby Jindal and Kathleen Blanco, voter turnout was a paltry 38% for Saturday’s election, according to early estimates.
Among the factors deterring voters, Henderson said: the severe negativity of this year’s campaign, which Henderson depicted as among the most negative gubernatorial races in Louisiana history, and the rain.
In addition, the Democratic Party didn’t exactly exert itself in whipping up support for Edwards—who appeared to be a lock to survive the jungle primary—perhaps in an effort to save resources for the runoff, Henderson said. Should the Democrats better mobilize their base in the next month, Edwards may have a better shot at winning.
“Today, it’s just not clear,” Henderson said. “It really looks like it could turn out to be close, or it could be a typical pattern when a close election evaporates and the fundamentals hold.”
—Robert Stewart
