GOP rolls worst electorate ever, asked to leave the state of Louisiana

I've never seen anything like it

Unless you’re a Baton Rouge politico, you probably haven’t spent a lot of time thinking about the four constitutional amendments Louisiana voted on back in March. They weren’t super flashy or high-stakes and they didn’t attract a ton of out-of-state attention. However, this was one of the first statewide elections of the second Trump term, and if we dig into the data behind these referenda, we’ll find something pretty startling for the Republican Party.

All four amendments were put forward by the Republicans, who are extremely dominant in this Trump+22 state, and yet all four amendments failed by a similar 35-65 margin. By itself, this isn’t particularly notable.Maybe these amendments failed because they weren’t well-written or they were bad ideas that Louisianans didn’t support. If that were the case, what conclusions could we possibly draw for any other election?

In reality, a major reason why these amendments failed is that Democrats voted at an absurdly higher rate than Republicans. And that does carry some big warning signs for the GOP in the upcoming midterms.

Looking at it by race, Black voters turned out at a significantly higher rate than White voters, compared to 2024. Overall, the electorate was 38% Black — I have not been able to find a single statewide election in modern Louisiana history with an electorate even remotely this Black. Last decade, Louisiana Democrats put together pretty decent turnout efforts for the re-election campaigns of President Obama, Senator Landrieu and Governor Edwards. All of them got an electorate that was 30-31% Black.

White registered Democrats also turned out at a significantly higher rate than white registered Republicans, however this table actually understates the effect, as something like half of Louisiana whites who are registered as Democrats are actually Trump voters and are therefore effectively Republicans for our purposes. The following table shows turnout among white voters, not just by party but also by region: New Orleans, major suburban parishes, and the rest of the state. This breakdown is helpful because Kamala Harris won nearly all white Democrats in New Orleans, around two-thirds of white Democrats in these suburban parishes, and around one-third of white Democrats in the rest of the state.

By focusing on New Orleans we can see what the statewide partisan statistics obscured: turnout among liberal white voters was absolutely bananas. White Louisianans who voted for Harris last November treated this election almost like a midterm, whereas their Trump-supporting counterparts treated it like a sleepy special election.

All in all, Louisiana is a Trump+22 state, but I’m pretty sure the electorate that turned up on March 29 would’ve voted for Harris, and perhaps by as much as 10%. Now for some caveats — this was a low turnout election, we’ll see around twice as many people vote in Louisiana’s midterm elections next year, and that electorate will certainly not be as Democratic as this. And it is worth re-iterating that this was not a partisan election, it was a vote on a series of constitutional amendments, although the vote was heavily split along partisan lines. There have also been a few other elections since November 2024—most notably Wisconsin Supreme Court and the two congressional specials in Florida—and while Democrat turnout was strong there, it didn’t quite reach this level.

Yet at the same time, if you’d asked me to name states where I’d expect Democrats to struggle in lower-turnout elections, Louisiana would’ve been near the top of my list. In other words: if things are bad for the GOP in Louisiana, they’re likely worse elsewhere.

To give my frank assessment, without any hedging: this electorate was just ridiculously, unbelievably, hilariously bad for the GOP. I’ve never seen anything like it, in any kind of contested election. Not even when Republicans nominated a pedophile for Senate in Alabama did we see such a difference in partisan turnout. It’s early days, but if this turnout dynamic is replicated even slightly in November 2026, it’s going to be a wipeout. Maybe when Trump told his voters they wouldn’t have to vote again after electing him in 2024, they took him literally?

The current state of the Republican Party

Oh and just a reminder about timelines — this election was held on March 29, four days before “Liberation Day”. I leave it as an exercise to the reader to discern whether the events that have happened since March 29 are likely to have improved or worsened the GOP’s standing.