By: Sean McElwee, co-founder Data for Progress; Colin McAuliffe, co-founder Data for Progress; Ryan O’Donnell, Senior Data Science Advisor, Data for Progress; Henry Hoglund, Senior Polling Advisor, Data for Progress

A new Data for Progress survey shows that Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards, a Democrat, is favored in the gubernatorial primary election on Saturday, October 12, commanding a strong plurality of the vote (48 percent) over his closest Republican competitors. The Louisiana secretary of state is currently projecting a 45–46 percent turnout, and with strong turnout numbers, Governor Edwards might well clear the 50 percent threshold he needs to avoid a runoff election in November.

We also find that a wide breadth of modeled likely voters support a broad range of progressive policy positions, including criminal justice reform, Medicaid expansion, a $15 minimum wage, and the government negotiating prescription drug costs.

Data for Progress has been testing a new method for short, ten- to twenty-question surveys that can help progressive organizations achieve low-cost responses in small geographies. The method, called Volunteer-Initiated Text-to-Mobile Survey (VITMS, pronounced “vitamins”) is a standard text-to-web instrument delivered through volunteers.

Here we present the results of a test that Data for Progress ran in Louisiana, ahead of the 2019 gubernatorial jungle primary election. We were in the field October 4–10, and surveyed 1,525 registered voters which we modeled to a likely voter electorate using a commercial voter file - our margin of error is +/-3.4 percent with a 95 percent confidence interval. Our topline finding is that Governor Edwards has a strong plurality of voters when we push the lean voters into a firm choice, and that an outright majority for Governor Edwards is within the margin of error.