One Week til Election Day: How Powerful are Louisiana Voters?

With the 2020 election a little over a week away and voters’ influence varying from state to state, the personal-finance website WalletHub today released its report on 2020's States with the Most and Least Powerful Voters.

WalletHub compared the relative clout of 2020 voters in swinging the presidency and control of the United States Senate. In order to properly measure the immense amount of data, they calculated a Voter Power Score for each state and for each type of election.

In a presidential election, voter power varies widely by state. While all votes are theoretically counted equally — one person, one vote — the choices of swing-state citizens are more influential. For example, it’s safe to assume that Alabama will vote Republican and California will vote Democratic in the upcoming election. By contrast, the electoral results of swing states such as Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Michigan are up in the air, giving their voters more impact.

The same principle applies to voter power in the Senate. For example, it’s extremely likely that a Republican senator from Kentucky and a Democratic senator from Delaware will both be re-elected. But voters’ choices for senators in swing states hold much more power because they determine which political party controls the Senate.

And Louisiana? For a state that almost certainly will go overwhelmingly for Trump on November 3, why is it ranked in the top half (#22)? The answer is local elections. Thought Louisiana, as a whole, is predominantly red, the cities across the state are overwhelmingly blue, giving voters a much stronger influence in regional and statewide elections.

Presidential Election - Top 5 States with the Most Powerful Voters