The early voting period for Louisiana's runoff election ended on Saturday, and 257,021 people have voted early, a 9.5 percent increase compared to October's jungle primary. Notably, the state's
official early voting statistics, released Sunday, showed that early voting rose disproportionately in parishes in which Democrat John Bel Edwards is expected to do well. Turnout also went up among registered Democrats and among African-Americans.
First, a big caveat: Early voting statistics should not be used to predict results. For one thing, we don’t know how many early voters would have just voted on Election Day, and we also don’t know how many are showing up now when they stayed home last time. More importantly, they shed absolutely no light on whether Edwards is getting enough crossover support from Republicans, or whether he's improving on Democrat Mary Landrieu's performance among white voters last year—two things, among many, he will need to do to win the runoff. That said, early voting statistics can at least warn a party that it is facing a turnout problem, and based on these numbers, there is good reason for Democrats to believe that their voters are not staying home.
By contrast, the numbers contain one big red flag for Republican David Vitter's campaign. While early voting turnout has significantly increased statewide—especially, as noted below, in areas where Edwards is expected to do well—it actually
decreased in parishes where Scott Angelle, one of the Republicans whom Vitter defeated in October's jungle primary, performed best.
Early voting turnout is down by 3 percent in the five parishes in which Angelle got his highest score, and it is down a full 20 percent in St. Martin Parish, where Angelle received 62 percent of the vote. These are mostly conservative areas of Louisiana, and while this doesn't mean that Angelle voters won't end up turning out to vote for Vitter on Election Day, it at least indicates that Vitter has his work cut out for him to mend divisions and ensure that the GOP base shows
up.
The story is very different in Democratic-friendly parishes. In the seven parishes in which Edwards took more than 50 percent of the vote in the primary, turnout rose by 29 percent. That includes a big 40 percent rise in Orleans Parish (home to the city of New Orleans), where Edwards got 72 percent of the vote in the first round. Compare to that to the fifteen ruby-red parishes in which Edwards got under 30 percent: There, turnout rose by only 8.5 percent.
There are two other signs of solid early turnout among voters Edwards needs to show up. First, the share of the early voting electorate who are registered Democrats is 52.6 percent. That's significantly higher from early voting in both the primary (50.6 percent) and in the 2014 Senate runoff (49 percent).
The share of the black vote also stands at 29.7 percent, up from 27.7 percent in the primary and 28 percent in the 2014 runoff. (However, the share of the black vote in the early voting electorate for the November 2014 Senate jungle primary was 33 percent.) By contrast, the share of the white vote fell from 71 percent to 68 percent. Another way to capture this: The raw number of black voters who voted early increased by 21 percent between the primary and the runoff, while the number of white voters who voted early increased by just 4 percent.
The increased black turnout is even more striking in certain parishes. St. Tammany Parish, a large and strongly Republican area north of New Orleans, saw a 58 percent increase among black voters, while Jefferson Parish saw a 71 percent increase. Vitter hails from Jefferson, but Democrats need to do well in this large suburban parish to have a shot statewide. One of the most interesting transformations is in Shreveport’s Caddo Parish. Not only did early voting turnout increase by 37 percent, but the voters’ racial breakdown went from 63 percent white and 35 percent black to 51 percent white and 47 percent black. Like Jefferson, Caddo is another large parish that Edwards needs to do well in.
As explained above, none of this means anything if registered Democrats and African-Americans don't turn out on sufficiently on Saturday; if Republicans flood the polls; or if Angelle's supporters decide they can hold their nose and select Vitter. We will know it all—including how turnout patterns affected the results—on Saturday night.