Louisiana Nov 16, 2019 Run-Off Election Results thread

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

The only election that matters is about 11.5 months from now.  If trump wins reelection Democrats literally are a laughing stock for decades.

Dude shut up and take your humiliating defeat with a modicum of self-awareness

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

If JBE wins, there's no doubt: the suburbs and urban areas are all that's responsible. Most of rural LA has swung 25-40 points to Rispone compared to 2015, despite JBE being a popular pro-life Democrat who gave hundreds of thousands of poor white trash healthcare and balanced the budget. Really no reason left to pander anymore...

What makes you think being pro-gun and pro-life only matters to rural voters? It's a big part of why JBE is winning in the suburbs tonight

The difference in the suburbs between 2015 and tonight is built off of a large cohort of GOP-DEM converts who didn't vote for JBE 4 years ago and who don't really care about all of that to the same extent; they're mostly post-Trump former GOP exiles. More than anything, these types are "anti-gun" in the way you look at them.

Let's also not forget that black voters are likely responsible for a hefty portion of this, considering JBE is only outperforming his 2015 margins in a handful of suburban areas (Jefferson - & Tammany by a hair).

Then why did they vote for Republicans in every other race tonight?

Because nobody knows any of those other downballot losers and no-names.

Ok, but you were literally just saying suburban voters voted for JBE because they're exiles from the GOP who have lost their connection to it.

For top-ticket and/or "polarized" races, they are Dems now. Old habits die hard: plenty of examples of people who have abandoned the GOP in federal and/or top-ticket statewide campaigns who still voted GOP downballot in 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019...

Yep. It took almost a decade for these gains to be seen downballot in Virginia. Really interesting case study in what causes the other shoe to drop in these downballot races.

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

I don't really care JBE won anyway. He's a DINO.

Either this is extreme goalpost-moving or you think abortion is literally the only distinction between the parties. JBE is not a Progressive but calling him a DINO is silly.

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

As of 11:23 PM ET

49 precincts are outstanding (1 in St James; remainder is EBR & Orleans)

It looks almost as if... trends are real.

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

As for the national implications of Kentucky and Louisiana: yeah, it's true that we largely won on the basis of Bevin being a steaming pile of f**k and Edwards continuously remaining popular, but - to put it the way another poster above me put it - if this is actually a lasting trend in our favor, which we can apply to Georgia and Texas, the GOP is absolutely boned next year.

Assuming that the GOP hasn't max'ed out their rural numbers yet.

True but the story of the 2019 races is that the marginal gains in rurals is not enough to offfset h hemorrhaging in suburbs and cities (large and small).

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

The final swing map:



As I mentioned earlier, I'm still impressed by the scope of JBE's turnout apparatus. Even if he had done no better than he did in 2015 in the counties that swung to him, he'd have pulled this off by around 10k votes. Not that he did anything whatsoever to justify the rural swings against him, but he lost just the "right" amount of them to still pull this thing off even if Orleans, Jefferson & St Tammany hadn't moved in his direction.

Here are some more precise numbers on turnout:

https://twitter.com/Taniel/status/1195934409398083586

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

There's been emphasis on Edwards getting his vote out, but the highest turnout I found for any parish was mega racist hick LaSalle at a whopping 66.4%.  The only parish above 60% that I've seen so far.

Turnout in the first round in LaSalle has 65.0%, only a slight increase. Orleans however, went from 38.7% to 49.2%, quite a notable difference, considering statewide turnout went from 45.9% to 50.7%. Parishes like East Baton Rogue, Jefferson, and Caddo also had considerable turnout increases, while increases in turnout in the parishes that Rispone won handedly tended to be smaller, with a few exceptions

I decided to run the numbers since I was interested in observing how the margin would've changed if the turnout remained constant with the first round, and found that the margin of victory would've decreased from 2.67% to 1.33%, a fairly small decrease, but still large enough that it could've been a decisive factor in a closer election.

We're going to hear a lot about (and on this board have already heard some variations of) how off-year Trump-era elections aren't predictive of 2020 because WWC voters only turn out for Trump on the ballot.

There's plenty of evidence, this race included, that it's much more complicated. In 2018 we saw pretty high (for an off-year race) turnout in blood red rural areas and there are some high turnout areas in this race too. The more obvious trend is that people overestimated the power of urban areas because they saw high turnout when Obama was on the ballot but those votes aren't reliable. Now Dems are taking turnout in these areas more seriously and are seeing larger marginal increases in turnout there than Rs are getting in rural areas.

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

Why did Edwards do so bad in Acadiana? He was a southern moderate like Bill Clinton. Clinton dominated in Acadania in 92 and 96.

Incredibly naive, non-native guess: isn't Acadiana incredibly reliant on oil and gas refining? Much moreso than the rest of the state. My impression from reading AR Hochschild's book is that aside from small farming/fishing operations natural resource production was the primary industry in Cajun country.