Why Louisiana votes Republican, even with more registered Democrats on its rolls
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As Louisiana voters help decide the next president, no one seriously expects the state to support Vice President Harris, despite having more registered Democrats on its rolls.
Why it matters: The reason for that says more about the state's political history than it does about Harris.
Catch up quick: For most of American history, the South was solidly Democrat.
- But the party itself "was bifurcated," says Dillard University urban studies and public policy professor Robert Collins. "Northern Democrats were a little more liberal, and Southern Democrats were more conservative."
- Then, in the 1960s and early 1970s, the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts and President Nixon's "Southern strategy," which marketed racial issues as matters of "states' rights," changed everything.
- The goal, Collins says, was to "flip a lot of Southern Democrats … over to the Republican Party, and it worked. Not all at once, but it worked."
Around the same time, Louisiana transitioned to its jungle primary system.
- It allows any registered voter to make selections in the state's open primaries, canceling the need for a runoff if a candidate secures more than 50% of the initial vote.
- The result, Collins says, is that Louisiana has a lot of "ancestral Democrats."
- They're socially conservative people who initially registered as Democrats and just never saw the point in changing the paperwork.
In short, the South has always been conservative. It's just manifested in different ways on our voter registration.
What's next: Louisiana's status as a majority Democrat state is going to change, Collins says, as younger voters enter the rolls and identify as Republicans from the jump.
- "It's really only a matter of time before the percentage of Republicans eclipses the number of actual Democrats," Collins says. "When will it flip? … I'm not sure but it's definitely going to flip."
The intrigue: "If anything," Collins says, "the South is digging in and becoming more conservative."
- But "the modern phenomenon of the South is that you have these ruby red states and very blue cities."
- And New Orleans is a perfect example of that.
The bottom line: Louisiana stays dependably red not because its Democrats aren't voting.
- It's because you can't count on a Louisiana Democrat voting along that party line.
Go deeper: Louisiana hasn't gone for a Democratic presidential candidate in 20+ years