Don’t believe the propaganda campaign designed to prevent greater conservative governance that will come in Louisiana and from its members of Congress through its modestly modified electoral system.
A special interest group representing leftist and Beltway Republicans commissioned a poll trying to discourage the institution of semi-closed primary elections. This kind of election nominates candidates to run in a general election, almost always with a runoff provision, by allowing only voters who affiliate with a major party or not with the other major party to participate in one major party’s primary. Currently for all offices, Louisiana uses a blanket primary system, which isn’t really a primary but a general election (with a runoff provision), as any voter regardless of affiliation may vote for a candidate of any or no party who all run together.
But last year the state changed the method for congressional, Public Service Commission, Board of Elementary and Secondary Education, and Supreme Court contests from blanket to semi-closed. This creates a purer expression of partisan will for general election candidates because it prevents the other major party affiliates from trying to influence which candidate members of a party prefer.
In a state with a fairly significant imbalance in the ideological identification of the mass public, like Louisiana whose electorate is disproportionately conservative, this kind of primary tends to create more ideologically coherent programmatic policy-making by the majority, diluting less its agenda. Thus, those in the minority, the left in Louisiana, resist its imposition as it reduces their ability to influence policy.
So, it’s no accident the group would want to try to disparage implementation of semi-closed primary elections in the state, the first round of such elections occurring next year. In doing so, it hopes to have policy-makers reverse the change at some point, much like it did after the 2008 and 2010 election cycles. It tries with a poll that sprinkles in a little misdirection and methodological shortcomings.
The poll is conducted by JMC Analytics and as far as sampling is mostly good (on the demographics it seems to have over-sampled in the Lafayette region and under-sampled the Shreveport area) although some of the questions head into push polling territory (trying to elicit answers in a certain direction by highlighting certain aspects of an issue in wordings), but if a pollster is paid to ask specific things, he asks specific things. As a result, in its last several questions it also likely falls prey to response set bias, or asking about fairly similar where respondents can lapse into an unthinking repetitive response.
All in all, it alleges that a majority of voters don’t like the new system if not wishing it reverted back or was delayed in implementation. Further, they would be less likely to support elected officials who back it.
But unmentioned are other important considerations that negates the broad claim that voters don’t want the system and the implication they will take that out on legislators who do. First, comparing this to a previous poll, awareness of the switch from blanket to closed primaries for the few offices had gone from 34 to 56 percent – and so did support for them, proportionally more than opposition. The more people realize what the new system is, the more disproportionately they support it.
Second, understand that this is at the bottom of the heap as far as issues go that concern voters. Louisiana State University’s 2025 Louisiana Survey apparently had not a single respondent name this as the state’s most important issue, and it’s reasonable to assume it makes hardly any voter’s top ten. Voters may have feelings about the electoral system, but with almost zero salience attached to that almost all care little, if at all, about what it should look like.
Finally, the same applies to politicians. Voters will evaluate candidates far more heavily on other criteria than on their support of which primary system, so that preference will have zero impact on their electoral fortunes. And, note as well that the previous attempt in the state concerning congressional elections was rolled back because it adopted a cumbersome election calendar, not because of an entirely nonexistent public outcry against it.
Greet the data from these polls with a shrug. A closed primary system boosts political parties, who do a superior job of collating interests and encouraging production of an agenda that allows government to act more decisively by strengthening linkages among elected officials. In a conservative state, that means conservatism that disempowers the left, so leftists will try any trick to stop further erosion of their power, including hyping meaningless polls.
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