When it comes to Louisiana statewide races, we tend to take early polling with a grain of salt. Republicans usually start with an obvious advantage. But a new Public Policy Polling survey showing Republican Julia Letlow leading Democrat Jamie Davis by only four points is a little harder to ignore.
Granted, there have been some exceptions to Louisiana’s Republican dominance. John Bel Edwards, for instance, was not your typical Democratic candidate. He was charismatic, politically connected and a more conservative-leaning Democrat, and he managed to win statewide twice. Candidates like Edwards have become few and far between.
Let’s face it, Louisiana is a very conservative state. Donald Trump won more than 60 percent of the vote here in 2024, while Kamala Harris finished a little above 38 percent. Republicans hold every statewide elected office and have a majority in the Legislature. Many conservative voters who once remained registered Democrats have moved toward the Republican Party, especially now that party registration matters more in races like U.S. Senate, which Louisiana moved to a closed-party primary system this year.
All of that is what makes the new poll so unusual.
The first ballot question in the survey had Letlow at 41 percent, Davis at 37 percent and a whopping 22 percent of voters undecided. The poll was conducted by Public Policy Polling on July 21 and 22 and surveyed 518 registered Louisiana voters, according to information obtained by The Bayou Progressive. The Davis campaign commissioned and paid for the survey. Thirty-three percent of respondents participated through automated landline calls and 67 percent through text-to-web responses.
There is an important disclosure here. Big Easy Magazine has not located a publicly posted copy of the original three-page PPP report. We did not locate the poll among PPP’s publicly released surveys. The Bayou Progressive reported that the Davis campaign provided the outlet with the three-page PPP topline, which included the questions, overall results and demographic makeup of the sample.
For starters, the 41-37 question was asked before voters were given information about either candidate. That is important because it means the four-point margin was not produced after respondents sat through a bunch of campaign talking points attacking Letlow or promoting Davis. It was the clean ballot test at the beginning of the survey.
Interestingly, the specific findings contained in the report are much more telling than the general poll result. The sample does not look like one packed with Democrats.
Voters in the survey said they had supported Trump over Harris by 60 percent to 38 percent in 2024, almost exactly what happened in Louisiana in the actual presidential election. The sample identified as 47 percent Republican, 33 percent Democratic and 20 percent independent. It was 65 percent white and 28 percent Black.
That doesn’t prove the poll is right. There are still some pretty big holes in what we know about it. The survey used registered voters rather than likely voters, and according to The Bayou Progressive, neither PPP nor the Davis campaign provided a margin of error, detailed weighting methodology or demographic crosstabs. Those are things we would certainly like to see before declaring Louisiana a competitive Senate state.
But it does make the result harder to dismiss with a simple explanation that Democrats polled too many Democrats. What may be even more interesting is that Davis really isn’t the one posting the surprising number.
He received 37 percent on the initial ballot test. Harris received roughly 38 percent of Louisiana’s vote in 2024. So Davis, at least at the moment, is not showing evidence that masses of Republican voters have crossed over and joined some newly formed Democratic coalition.
Trump received more than 60 percent of Louisiana’s vote in 2024. In this survey, 60 percent of the respondents themselves said they voted for him. Yet only 41 percent initially chose Letlow.
Where did the other voters go?
Most obviously, a lot of them are sitting in that 22 percent undecided column. Without crosstabs, we cannot know how many are Republicans, Democrats or independents. But the overall math certainly leaves open the possibility that there are a significant number of Republican-leaning voters who, for one reason or another, have not committed to Letlow.
The favorability numbers add another wrinkle.
According to The Bayou Progressive’s review of the topline, 35 percent of respondents viewed Letlow favorably and 39 percent viewed her unfavorably. Another 26 percent were unsure. Davis was viewed favorably by 26 percent and unfavorably by only 18 percent, but that number comes with an enormous caveat: 55 percent of those surveyed did not know enough about him to have an opinion.
In other words, Davis has less baggage in this particular poll, but he also has a lot fewer people who know who he is.
There was another number buried in the survey that may help explain some of what we are seeing. Although 60 percent of respondents said they voted for Trump in 2024, only 47 percent approved of his current job performance, a finding that is not out of line with other recent Louisiana polling.
Letlow tied herself closely to Trump during the Republican campaign, and for good reason. He encouraged her entry into the race, endorsed her before she formally became a candidate and remained a major force behind her campaign. She went on to defeat state Treasurer John Fleming in the Republican runoff after incumbent Sen. Bill Cassidy was knocked out in the first round. Reuters described Letlow as heavily favored to beat Davis in November.
None of this means Trump has suddenly become unpopular in Louisiana or that his voters are abandoning Republicans. A person can be unhappy with a president’s performance today and still vote for his party in November. That’s not an uncommon occurrence.
It does raise a question, though. If some voters who supported Trump two years ago are unhappy right now, does Letlow inherit every one of those voters simply because Trump endorsed her? In large part for those who support her, that’s most likely the case.
But 41 percent suggests she hasn’t inherited them yet. And that could be a question of how unknown she is at this point outside of her congressional district.
That makes some of the recent headlines surrounding Letlow particularly bad timing. If part of her problem is simply that voters across the rest of Louisiana are still getting to know her, a story involving nondisclosure agreements and stock trades is probably not the introduction her campaign was hoping for. Gulf States Newsroom recently reported that Letlow signed an NDA involving a Meta entity connected to the massive Richland Parish data center project and later purchased shares of Meta and Nvidia. Her office has said Letlow did not direct the trades, was unaware they were being made and that the NDA had nothing to do with them. There has been no finding that she engaged in insider trading.
Still, politics is also about perception. When more than a quarter of the voters in this poll say they are unsure how they feel about Letlow, unfavorable headlines can matter simply because some voters are forming their first real impression of her. It is not exactly the sort of thing you want people learning about you while you are trying to introduce yourself to the rest of the state.
The Davis campaign also tested what happened after voters learned more about the candidates. After respondents were given positive biographical information about both candidates, the ballot moved to 42 percent for Letlow and 38 percent for Davis, with 20 percent undecided. Then came the message testing.
Voters heard a description of Letlow emphasizing her conservative record, Trump and Gov. Jeff Landry’s support and several policy issues. They also heard a much more favorable description of Davis centered around his background as a farmer, Medicaid, health care, costs and keeping young people in Louisiana. Respondents reacted considerably better to the Davis message.
When PPP asked again at the end, the result was unchanged: Letlow 42, Davis 38, with 20 percent undecided.
That should temper some of the Democratic excitement surrounding the poll. Voters may have responded well to Davis’s message, but it did not narrow the race.
From my perspective, there are clearly two narratives to consider from this poll.
The first is the one Democrats would prefer to tell: Jamie Davis is only four points behind a Republican in Louisiana.
The second interpretation is probably closer to what the numbers actually show: Letlow simply hasn’t consolidated the Republican vote yet.
Letlow still has enormous structural advantages simply by running as the Republican nominee in Louisiana. She is better funded, with her Senate campaign reporting more than $6.2 million in receipts and roughly $1.43 million in cash on hand through June 30. Davis reported just under $2 million in receipts and about $479,000 remaining.
Letlow does not need to persuade Louisiana to become something it has not been in years. She needs Republicans and Republican-leaning independents to come home.
I will say, though, she’s not exactly making that job any easier. The Meta NDA and stock-trading controversy is hardly an ideal issue to have following her around while she is still introducing herself statewide.
Even with Letlow dealing with that controversy, Davis still has to do considerably more. He needs strong Black turnout across Louisiana. He needs huge margins in Orleans, strong performances in Baton Rouge and Shreveport and better numbers in Jefferson Parish. But even all of that probably isn’t enough. Somewhere, he has to start losing rural and suburban Louisiana by less than Democrats have been losing it.
That may not be as far-fetched as it sounds. We’ve already seen Democrats overperform in some heavily Republican areas around the country, including Texas, where a Democrat flipped a state Senate district earlier this year that Trump had won by roughly 17 points, and with James Talarico currently leading in a statewide US Senate race against Ken Paxton. That doesn’t mean Louisiana is about to follow the same path, but it does show that voters in traditionally Republican areas aren’t necessarily as immovable as they have looked in recent elections.
That is where his background becomes interesting. Davis is a northeast Louisiana farmer and small business owner. He can talk about equipment, payroll, insurance, grocery prices and what it costs to keep a business running without sounding like someone handed him a list of talking points five minutes before the speech. In areas where the Democratic Party label has become politically toxic, that at least gives him a place to begin.
Louisiana has become extraordinarily partisan. A voter may like Davis personally, agree with him about health care or costs and still decide there is no chance he is voting for a Democrat for U.S. Senate.
That is the wall Davis has to break through, and so far this poll does not show that he has done it. What it does show is hesitation on the other side, and that is why this poll deserves more than a social media post and a shrug.
One campaign-funded survey of registered voters is nowhere near enough to call Louisiana a toss-up, particularly when there isn’t another public Letlow-Davis poll available to tell us whether this one is an outlier.
If we begin to see more credible polls with transparent methodology and reported margins of error, showing Letlow leading by 10 or more points, then that would suggest this four-point result was either an outlier or an early snapshot of a race before Republican voters consolidated behind Letlow.
If another poll shows seven or eight points, then we have a story that goes well beyond one Democratic campaign’s internal polling.
For now, Jamie Davis being at 37 percent is not what makes this unusual. Louisiana Democrats have seen numbers like that before.
Julia Letlow being at 41 percent is, and until we get another poll, that number is difficult to ignore.
