BATON ROUGE, La. — A new poll is giving the first glimpse of how the Nov. 16 race for the Louisiana governor's mansion could play out.
What is the poll
The poll by We Ask America appears to be the first publicly-released post-primary poll of the Louisiana gubernatorial race, where incumbent John Bel Edwards faces off against Republican businessman Eddie Rispone.
Pollsters asked likely Louisiana voters about their approval for political figures from President Donald Trump to Rispone and Edwards.
If the election was held immediately, 47 percent of respondents said they would vote for Edwards, and 47 percent went for Rispone.
Six percent of likely voters were still undecided, according to the data compiled by We Ask America.
What do the numbers tell us?
The top line from the poll is that Republicans have rallied around Rispone, who secured 27 percent of the vote in the Oct. 12 election, where he competed against Congressman Ralph Abraham (24 percent) to be included in the two-man runoff against Edwards.
The weeks leading up to that election turned vicious, with both candidates running attack ads against the other and each painting the other as a political insider.
But the state's divided Republican voters appeared to rally after Abraham's defeat as GOP officials, including Trump, began endorsing Rispone after the Saturday election was called.
Ed. Note: Trump's claim about Edwards' polling numbers is untrue. Edwards had been polling around 47 percent for weeks before the election and before Trump's visit to Lake Charles.
As for Edwards, the poll showed no slipping.
In the October election, he won 47 percent of the vote, about 40,000 votes below the 51 percent majority he needed to secure the governor's mansion for another four years outright.
The new poll appears to show the same number: 47 percent would vote for him if the election was held today. And in the general election in November, He doesn't need a majority of voters, just more than Rispone.
Should we trust this poll?
The pollster, We Ask America, has been around since 2016. The company has a C grade in polling ratings by political analysis site FiveThirtyEight. But the outlet's ratings appear to be based on polls from We Ask America that did not call cell phones, which make their predictions less reliable.
We Ask America specified in the methodology for the Louisiana poll that they called cell phones and received 180 of their 600 responses from mobile calls.
FiveThirtyEight lists a slight Republican bias in the 52 polls by We Ask America they reviewed. But the company was able to successfully predict races 82 percent of the time.
As for the poll itself, there is a margin of error of about +/- 4 percent, meaning the numbers for either candidate could be off by around that much.
Analysts have predicted a close runoff even before Rispone and Edwards won their places on the ballot, and this poll appears to be in line with those expectations.
As more polls are released and it gets closer to Nov. 16, the race could become clearer. But with Rispone refusing any runoff debates, it's unclear how he plans to appeal to the undecided voters in Louisiana.
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