Louisiana runoff election will be an expensive test for the parties

Democrats and Republicans have spent months preparing for the possibility that the hotly contested race between incumbent Sen. Mary Landrieu and GOP Rep. Bill Cassidy to represent Louisiana in the U.S. Senate would not be decided on Nov. 4 and instead would stretch into a December runoff.

Now that that possibility is a reality, they get to deploy their plans.

The battle to win the bayou will be a complicated and expansive fight on the airwaves to turn out voters who just voted, with both sides investing millions in an effort to jazz their bases once again and stave off election fatigue.

More than $25.6 million in candidate campaign cash and over $17.3 million in outside dollars were spent in Louisiana in advance of the Nov. 4 general election, according to the Center for Responsive Politics — and the next wave of the fight likely will be enormously costly, too.

As of Friday, the National Republican Senatorial Committee already had booked $3.3 million for television ads in Louisiana for the runoff, and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee has placed a $2 million ad reservation, with the expectation of more to come.

The Louisiana runoff will be held on Saturday, Dec. 6. Here’s what you need to know:

The People

Landrieu is a three-term senator who won her first and second terms via runoffs. The most important base of support for Landrieu, as Yahoo News reported in October, is the city of New Orleans, where her brother, Mitch, serves as mayor. Turning out African-American voters in New Orleans is key to a Landrieu win and it’s an area where she overperformed in her 2008 race, when many worried she’d struggle to find new voters to replace supporters displaced by Hurricane Katrina.

In 2008, Landrieu beat her Republican opponent in Orleans Parish — the heavily populated, 60-percent-African-American urban center of Louisiana — by nearly 100,000 votes. She won the statewide race by approximately 120,000 votes, capturing the endorsement of just over 52 percent of the overall electorate.

Democratic operatives believe the Saturday special election date will give them a turnout advantage with some voters, given that they may be more free to show up at the polls than they would be on a Tuesday.

Cassidy, a three-term congressman and physician, ran a general election campaign focused on tying Landrieu to Obama and running against Obamacare. This approach was not unique among Senate Republican candidates, and Tuesday exit data and national voting returns suggest the tactic was highly effective.

Some voters in Louisiana, when approached by Yahoo News for a profile on the race, expressed what many predicted would be the fundamental question in the contest: Which is more important to the Louisiana electorate, Landrieu’s seniority or Obama’s unpopularity? For Cassidy to win in December, the latter has to prove true. Republican aides previously expressed concern privately that if Republicans were to secure the Senate majority before the runoff — as they have — it could take some of the juice out of the Republican stand against Landrieu.

At the time of publication, it was not clear whether Landrieu or Cassidy took more votes Tuesday, though neither candidate appeared to have a significant advantage over the other.

Money

In an era of dark money spending, runoffs have become even more exorbitantly expensive than they were a decade ago.

Think of it this way: In June, outside groups spent more than $3.3 million in Mississippi for a three-week Republican primary runoff, according to data compiled by the Brennan Center. And that was two sides of one party going after their own.

Sources in Louisiana suggest the upcoming runoffs between candidates from separate parties could cost anywhere between $5 and $10 million.

Turnout

Voter turnout for any runoff or special election is almost always smaller than in the general. But parties are particularly focused on turning out the right kind of voters for the second Election Day.

Taking into account a smaller electorate means several things, but mostly it affects how the candidates and parties distribute their resources.

Sources on the ground and involved in national party groups said that taking a runoff into account has sometimes meant elevating certain political investments, like choosing to fund field volunteers who can work door-knocking operations weeks after the November elections over direct mailers that likely would fill trash cans by the second election date.

Louisiana will see an influx of new ads and door-knockers, but after months of negative advertising on television already, operatives suggest that that opinions about the two candidates are largely cemented and the trick will be to get supporters to the polls. Again.

Most sources were coy about the specific tweaks their side might make between the general and the runoff, not wanting to telegraph changes or specific strategy to the other side.

Democrats were insistent that their ground game in Louisiana had been specially designed for a runoff and would be superior to that of the GOP. But Democratic campaigns across the country had made that same argument and counted on ground games to boost their candidates to victory despite an anti-Democrat mood among voters — and that didn’t work out that well for them in Tuesday's other elections.