As gubernatorial campaign gears up, Louisiana voters inattentive and disgruntled

Just as few voters are paying attention to the gubernatorial campaign today as there were in March, according to a new survey sponsored by the Manship School of Mass Communication’s Reilly Center for Media and Public Affairs, and conducted by LSU’s Public Policy Research Lab, or PPRL.
Only 29 percent of voters in the state are closely following news about the election, roughly equivalent to the 25 percent who did so in March.
Large majorities remain too unfamiliar with Public Service Commissioner Scott Angelle, Lt. Gov. Jay Dardenne and state Rep. John Bel Edwards to even offer opinions about them.
Among those who express opinions about these candidates, as well as about U.S. Sen. David Vitter, the share of favorable and unfavorable opinions are essentially unchanged since March.
With greater name recognition, Vitter continues to lead in both the share of voters with a favorable opinion of him with 45 percent and the share with an unfavorable opinion with 30 percent. Dardenne follows at 29 percent favorable and 8 percent unfavorable, Angelle at 18 percent favorable and 5 percent unfavorable and Edwards at 13 percent favorable and 8 percent unfavorable.
Voters do not yet see much of an ideological difference across the candidates. They tend to see all four major candidates as somewhere between “moderate” and “somewhat conservative.”
“These results should caution us against over-emphasizing early horse race polls,” said Professor Michael Henderson, who is the research director of PPRL. “Most voters do not have fully developed opinions about the candidates yet. As they learn about the candidates, we will see real movement in polls asking about votes. Until voters start following the campaign, however, those polls will not reflect meaningful, persistent trends.”
Even as opinions of the candidates have shown little change, there has been a steep rise in the share of Louisiana residents who think the state is heading in the wrong direction. This share rose from 45 percent in January to 59 percent in July. It reaches 62 percent among registered voters. These voters have not coalesced around a single candidate.
“The electorate is in a sour mood, but no candidate has galvanized these voters yet,” Henderson said.

About the Survey
Data in this report are from a randomly selected, statewide representative group of adult residents of Louisiana. Data were collected via telephone interviews conducted from July 7 to Aug. 3, among a randomly selected state sample of 1,023 adult residents 18 years old or older. The survey includes a traditional landline telephone survey combined with a survey of Louisiana cell phone users. The combined sample includes 511 respondents interviewed on a landline and 512 respondents interviewed on a cell phone. The combined landline and cell phone sample is weighted using an iterative procedure that matches race and ethnicity, education, household income, gender and age to known profiles for Louisiana found in the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey. The sample is also weighted for population density by parish using parameters from census data. Results in this report are for 879 respondents reporting they are registered voters. The registered voter sample has an overall margin of error of +/- 4.7 percentage points.