GOP has real shot at winning EBR mayor-president

If early voting is any indication, the GOP has a real shot at grabbing the chief executive’s job in the parish with the state’s most voters

East Baton Rouge Parish is where most of the runoff election action is for Louisiana thus fall. It’s got a slate of city-parish elections (now whittled to a couple of Metropolitan Council spots) topped by the mayor-president’s showdown between Democrat incumbent Sharon Weston Broome and challenger Republican high school football coach and administrator Sid Edwards.

It’s a pairing that surprised a number of media analysts that should not have, given that about a third of parish voters are Republicans and Broome had to split Democrats with eventual third-place finisher former state Rep. Ted James, as well as Broome’s unimpressive tenure heading the city that ranks low in quality of life and stagnant from 2010 to 2020 in population and estimated to lose numbers since. More recently, Broome fought then botched the transition of parish unincorporated areas into St. George that could cost the city hundreds of millions of dollars.

Edwards led with just over a third of the vote, and over 70 percent of the electorate voted against Broome, who couldn’t grab even 30 percent in the form of various other candidates. Typically, such a performance spells trouble for an incumbent.

However, demographics could give Broome some comfort. The parish with the most registered voters, East Baton Rouge has just under half of voters registered as white, but blacks comprise about 45 percent of the electorate, giving Broome, a black Democrat, a natural base against the white Republican Edwards. As it is, Democrats comprise about 45 percent of the electorate, and although GOP former Pres. Donald Trump scored two percentage points better this fall than in 2020 in the parish, he still lost it by 11 points.

Because of the contest’s significance, unsurprisingly almost 39 percent of the entire runoff early voting in the state has taken place in the parish; in fact, slightly more in numbers than the general election. In that first election, although blacks about mirrored their proportion of the electorate, 52 percent of early voting was comprised of whites. In partisan terms, Democrats made up 57 percent while Republicans were three points higher than their 27 percent proportion in the electorate.

Edwards did well in part because of turnout differential, with whites at over 72 percent and blacks just under 60 percent. Republicans in particular helped out with 77 percent turnout compared to about 65 percent for Democrats (white Democrats were nearing 70 percent with black Democrats at around 64 percent). This large difference between whites and blacks helped Edwards not only because most Republicans are white but also as it appears white Democrats voted for him disproportionately.

Particularly remarkably historically, in 2020 runoff turnout was only 54 percent of the general election’s in the parish, and early voting fell to just 38 percent of its prior total. But in 2024, runoff early voting actually was higher by about a thousand voters. Further, the white proportion increased to 59 percent and the GOP proportion zoomed to 39 percent, almost catching the Democrats’ number.

The significance of this is the dynamics of the runoff are likely to follow those of the general election. There’s little reason to believe a substitution effect would be stronger for the runoff that would mean whites and Republicans disproportionately would vote early instead of later as compared to the general election. If considering Edwards’ 34 percent as a base off of an electorate of 30 percent Republicans, for example, proportionally speaking one of 39 percent would imply a base vote of 44 percent for him in the runoff.

That means just a relatively small number of disgruntled James or other voters need come into the Edwards camp to hand him the win. If the dynamics hold, that won’t be that difficult of a task, and Louisiana would be in the interesting position for a southern state where its second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, and tenth largest cities – all central cities except for Bossier City and Kenner – all have white mayors, and all but two of them being Republicans.