Louisiana votes Republican for president, and has in every election since 2000 — and all but twice since 1980. Donald Trump carried it by 22.0 points in 2024, widening from 18.6 in 2020 — a 3.4-point move that ran with the national current. The Democratic vote is concentrated: of 64 parishes, only seven backed Kamala Harris. Orleans Parish, which holds New Orleans, was the bluest in the state at D+67.0, and Orleans and East Baton Rouge together supplied better than 30 percent of every Democratic vote cast statewide. The reddest ground is rural and coastal — Cameron Parish, on the southwest marsh, ran R+86.3.
The seven Democratic parishes trace the state’s Black geography. Beyond New Orleans and Baton Rouge, they run up the river and into the northeast Delta: St. John the Baptist at D+29.1, East Carroll at D+17.6, Madison at D+6.2, with Shreveport’s Caddo Parish at D+4.6. Black residents make up 30.5 percent of Louisiana, one of the largest shares of any state, and the split underneath the politics is the old one — the majority-Black parishes and the two largest cities against the white rural and Acadian south, which votes Republican by margins that reach past 80 points in the marsh parishes.
Underneath, Louisiana is poor and, unusually for the Deep South, more Catholic than Protestant. Median household income was $60,756 in the 2024 ACS, 48th of the fifty states, and its poverty rate of 19 percent ranks second-highest in the country; a quarter of its children live below the line. It is the only Deep South state where Catholic adherents outnumber Evangelical — 26.8 percent to 25.0, seventh in the nation in Catholic share — the legacy of French and Acadian settlement that also gives the state its 9.6 percent French ancestry.