How Kamala Harris Turns Louisiana Blue in 2024

First off, I'm not crazy. This isn't a prediction that Kamala Harris will win Louisiana in the 2024 Presidential Election. In fact, the odds are stacked against her, and she probably won't get the state's electoral votes.

BUT...here's how it could happen.

Before we get into any math, lets establish some things. One of those facts has to be that a Democratic candidate for US President can win Louisiana. Its an undisputed fact that its happened twice in the modern era, and before that it happened 30 times in history (and no, we don't have to go down the "the parties actually used to be opposites" argument, we're just pointing out the historical data).

It also has to be acknowledged that Democratic candidates have a pretty regular pattern of winning state-wide elections. The state elected a Democrat Governor in both 2019 and 2015. There was a Democrat Governor in 2003, and for most of the 1980s.

The state has elected a Democrat US Senator as recently as 2008, and had actually been reliably blue prior to 2014, with Dems holding those two seats for all of the 1900s. In fact, 2015 was the first time the state had two Republican Senators since 1872.

All of this just to say, it is possible.

We would love to reference a robust poll from Louisiana that shows Kamala Harris versus Donald Trump with voters. But we can't...because there isn't one. Polling aggregator 538 has collected all of the Presidential polls from Louisiana that have been published, and the most updated one still shows a race between Trump and Joe Biden.

But what we do have are complete early voting numbers. The Secretary of State has kept these updates regular since early voting started. Now that early voting has concluded, we can see what it looks like...by registered party.

Yeah, we won't get the actual results until election day, but we can see how many people affiliated with each party voted early. This is what it looks like:

Registered Republicans: 431,485
Registered Democrats: 346,196
Unregistered: 185,683

Total: 963,364 votes

Just skimming the surface of the two parties, Republicans outpaced Democrats by about 50,000 early votes. But the 185,683 undeclared votes are lurking there. So we don't really know what to do with this data.

Nationally, there is a trend of long-time Republicans moving to endorse Harris in the Presidential race. Not just local mayors in blue states either, big time Republican names like Dick Cheney, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and former Trump Administration officials have all endorsed Harris.

We can call them names, and say that they hate Donald Trump until we're blue in the face. But they do have some following, especially Republicans who have won elections before. Obviously someone likes them enough to have elected them. So if their endorsements carry weight with even a small percentage of their followers, they could actually cause some of the Registered Republicans who have early voted over into the Harris numbers. So at the end of the day, we can't really even say that all 431,485 early Republican votes are for sure Trump votes.

Same coin, other side, there have been Registered Democrats that supported candidates like Joe Biden and John Bel Edwards who cannot find themselves voting for Harris. The biggest difference is that there isn't a big list of major names that are breaking from the Democratic Party to endorse Donald Trump. The biggest name that was a Democrat who has endorsed Trump is Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. But, and this is a big but...he was also the last major third party candidate running AGAINST Trump too, and he WILL be on the ballot in Louisiana. Meaning that anyone who was leaving Harris for RFK still has the option to vote for him.

Lets just humor the idea that a portion of those early vote Republicans cast a Harris ballot...even just 10%. Which means Trump still retains 90% of the Republican vote. That would make it look like this:

Early Voting with Names instead of Party
Trump: 390,336.5
Harris: 389,344.5
Unregistered: 185,683

Total: 963,364 votes

So even just a small number of those registered early voters following the Cheney path could really sway those early numbers...except the Unregistered number still floating out there.

We can be VERY sure that not all of those Unregistered are true Independents, but since we have nothing else to go on, we have to assume that for this exercise. Since we don't have a state-wide presidential poll that's been updated since Biden dropped, we have to use the National numbers. The latest Gallup poll shows that Independents are breaking 48% Harris and 47% Trump...very, VERY, close.

So lets do that with our early voting Unregistered...

Early Voting Unregistered with Names instead of Party
Trump: 87,271.01
Harris: 89,127.84

Now if we take the early voting numbers and mix these back in, here's what that looks like:

Early Voting with Names instead of Party, factoring in National Trends:
Trump: 477,607.51
Harris: 478,472.34

Don't take this as any kind of gospel. There are major network polls out there getting screen time with a +/- of 15%, which is just as worthless as this exercise. Nothing we just ran through is scientific in anyway, its just fun with numbers.

But it is good to understand that there is precedent for the state of Louisiana to vote Democrat in a statewide election, and these numbers are close enough that a small tilt one way, or the other, can suddenly make a race here more competitive than many of us think possible.