The Upper Mississippi Delta region is home to some of the strongest and most intractable racial polarization anywhere in the country. Since the mass re-enfranchisement of black voters in the 1960s, white voters have overwhelmingly preferred Republicans while black voters have strongly backed Democrats.
Long-term shifts driven by educational and national polarization have yet to do much to change this dichotomy, either. Suburbs around most southern cities are largely still solidly red, except those in the more educated metros of Charlotte, Atlanta, and Raleigh — conspicuously all cities with relatively high proportions of white voters not native to the South. This does not mention rural areas, where the Democratic floor with non-college rural white voters has continued to fall.
With all of this in mind, the recent election results in Louisiana were unsurprising. Attorney General Jeff Landry easily won the governorship outright with 51% of the vote, obviating a runoff. Statewide Democratic and Black turnout continued to crater, accelerating the decline experienced in 2022 and relegating Democrats to a “superminority” for the first time in living memory. In this context, the 42-point overperformance from Democratic State Senator Katrina Jackson stands out as an exceptional outlier.
Jackson represents seven parishes in northeastern Louisiana, comprising the majority-black sections of Ouachita (Monroe) Parish and the Mississippi Delta to the east. Her district was demographically constructed to elect a black-preferred candidate of choice. Historically though, this area is deeply conservative and religious, as is much of Northeast Louisiana. However, due to its high black population, with the seat being 34% white and 64% Black, it is regarded as a safe Democratic seat.
The safety of the seat does not entirely insulate it from swings, however, and the actual margin of victory has varied dramatically depending on the strength of black voter turnout. Before 2023, the closest that Republicans came to carrying the seat was in 2022, with a narrow 8-point composite victory for Democratic Senate candidates. One year later, the picture of a changing regional dynamic became even clearer, with Democrats barely carrying the seat in the landslide gubernatorial race.
Boosted by a combination of low black turnout and some strong persuasion effects among the voters who did turn out, Republicans clawed their way to a virtual tie in this region, losing the Biden +30 seat by just 0.6%. As Drew Savicki’s map shows below, Democratic strength in the governor’s race was confined to majority-black sections of the cities and towns in the district.
Katrina Jackson, on the other hand, won by over 40 points. She outperformed both Biden’s and even John Bel Edwards’ margins from his 2019 statewide victory, despite dealing with an electorate that was whiter and more Republican than that of any previous cycle in recent memory.
To better understand the nature of this overperformance, it is instructive to examine Jackson’s policy positions. Jackson is the author of Louisiana’s Senate Bill 342, which raises the maximum prison sentence for illegal abortions from five to ten years. This bill was also signed into law by an anti-abortion Democratic governor, John Bel Edwards. While her high-profile role as an avowed pro-life Democrat puts her firmly against public opinion in most of the country, it undoubtedly helps her in this deeply conservative area.
Given how so many elections have been a proxy for abortion rights in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson decision, Louisiana would certainly not be a place where Democrats should have expected to gain support. As Split Ticket has written in the past, its deeply religious and rural nature makes it very unsuitable to support a party increasingly driven by urbane social liberalism. But given that Jackson was not only an individual legislator against abortion but rather the primary sponsor of an extremely stringent restriction that received widespread media coverage, it makes sense that she would stand to gain from this position among social conservatives who would have otherwise voted Republican.
Secondly, by being in a safe Democratic seat, she did not face the same negative campaign headwinds that she would have in a more competitive seat. According to Louisiana pollster John Couvillon, Jackson actually got along quite well with many key Republican figures in the parishes of Richland and Ouachita, boosting her cross-aisle appeal. There is indeed precedent for incumbent black politicians in safely blue seats earning some crossover from otherwise negatively polarized conservative whites due to their reliability and dependability as a legislator.
With Republicans having easier target seats to flip than Jackson’s, her anti-abortion goodwill and the partisanship of the seat likely combined to produce this impressive result. But in a year when black turnout was at a historic low, what coalition did she have to set the Democratic record in the modern era? The one, previously unthinkable answer, is the most obvious: flipping a significant chunk of conservative rural white voters.
Using regression analysis based on racial data from the state of Louisiana on the people who voted, Split Ticket estimates that Katrina Jackson won about 39% of the white vote — a truly astonishing number in the modern era in perhaps the most racially polarized region in the country. By comparison, the Democrats who ran for governor combined to get about 2% in the same seat. It is likely that Jackson actually won the white vote in several small towns and precincts — this would be a spectacular feat by any stretch of the imagination, but it is especially impressive when contextualized against the sliding Democratic margins in these areas.
Even among black voters, Jackson outperformed the gubernatorial Democrats. We estimate that she earned 96% of the black vote, compared to her gubernatorial counterparts earning just 84% at the top of the ticket. Her weakest showing with black voters was in Richland Parish, where she earned 88%, partially due to her opponent being a black Republican from this area. In virtually every area, Jackson outperformed her gubernatorial counterparts.
The above data would tend to line up with our preexisting research that suggests moderation on issues of key salience is correlated with electoral overperformance. However, it is critical to remember that the nature of this moderation and the issues on which it helps may look different for each candidate, party, and district — for example, the type of rhetoric that leads Democrats to overperform by double digits in the deep South might well cause them to underperform in Wisconsin, Michigan, or Ohio.
Katrina Jackson’s 42-point overperformance as a Black Democrat in the deep South is just another example of how idiosyncratic these things can be.
I’m a political analyst here at Split Ticket, where I handle the coverage of our Senate races. I graduated from Yale in 2021 with a degree in Statistics and Data Science. I’m interested in finance, education, and electoral data – and make plenty of models and maps in my free time.
I’m a computer scientist who has an interest in machine learning, politics, and electoral data. I’m a cofounder and partner at Split Ticket and make many kinds of election models. I graduated from UC Berkeley and work as a software & AI engineer. You can contact me at lakshya@splitticket.org