2015 Election Analysis: How Edwards Won in Louisiana
November 23, 2015
By Jim Barnes
Conservative Democrat John Bel Edwards captured the Louisiana governorship when Republican-leaning voters failed to turn out for GOP Sen. David Vitter after a hard-fought runoff race. Based on unofficial election night results with 100 percent of precincts reporting, Edwards won 56 percent to Vitter’s 44 percent.
After the blanket primary on Oct. 24, in which Vitter narrowly advanced to the runoff against Edwards over two other Republican candidates, the second-term U.S. senator was unable to unite his party behind his campaign.
Lieutenant Gov. Jay Dardenne, who finished fourth in the Republican primary, crossed party lines to endorse the Democratic Edwards. And Scott Angelle, a Republican on the Louisiana Public Service Commission who finished third in the primary, remained neutral in the runoff.
Trey Ourso, the former executive director of the Louisiana Democratic Party and chairman of Gumbo PAC, said of his organization’s $1+ million anti-Vitter television ads, “If you look at all of our commercials, we were speaking to the Angelle-Dardenne supporters.”[1]
The personal rejection of Vitter, who was dogged by a 2007 prostitution scandal, was widespread: Edwards won 39 of the state’s 64 parishes. Republican Bill Cassidy won 24 of those 39 when he defeated incumbent Democrat Mary Landrieu in a 2014 U.S. Senate runoff. In his 2012 re-election campaign, President Barack Obama only carried 10 of the state’s parishes.
Most of the 24 parishes that voted for Edwards in 2015 but that were also carried by Cassidy in 2014 were in the state’s North Central region and Cajun country, the parishes in the Southwestern portion of the state, which is Angelle’s political base. In each of those regions, Vitter received more than 60,000 fewer votes than Cassidy. Vitter also saw his vote totals drop by more than a third from Cassidy’s 2014 tally in the Baton Rouge area, Lt. Gov. Dardenne’s base.
Edwards—a West Point graduate, former Army Ranger and state legislator—ran as a conservative on social issues, favoring restricted access to abortion and opposing gun control.
That kind of political profile made him acceptable to the state’s rural voters. Of the state’s 29 non-metropolitan parishes, Edwards carried 18 of them. Landrieu carried only six in her 2014 runoff contest.
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