Analysis: US Rep. Clay Higgins dominates election, gets fourth term with largest win yet

Republican Congressman Clay Higgins handily won a fourth term in the U.S. House of Representatives Tuesday with his largest margin of victory yet as a slate of seven challengers failed to notch victories outside of Southwest Louisiana’s few urban areas. 

Higgins finished this falls’ primary election with an unofficial 64% of votes cast across his nine-parish district, counting almost 120,000 more votes than runner-up Holden Hoggatt, a Republican who won 11% of ballots cast. 

Though Higgins’ record for support remains 68% of votes cast in 2020, this year’s 55-percentage-point spread over second place is the congressman’s largest margin of victory in any election to date. 

Higgins was able to grow that gap despite an amped up opposition campaign from Hoggatt that mocked the congressman’s well-known Crime Stopper videos and targeted his controversial history in attack ads this fall. 

Notably, Hoggatt, a Lafayette prosecutor, was unable to beat Higgins in all but one of the 479 precincts in the 3rd Congressional District that voted for a Republican candidate. 

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Hoggatt’s sole win on Election Day came from Ward 1, Precinct 7 in Iberia Parish, where only one ballot was cast. He came second to Higgins in 305 precincts, with support largely concentrated in southern and western Lake Charles, as well as central Lafayette just south of downtown. 

Higgins was otherwise dominant in early voting and on Election Day, finishing first in 478 of the district’s 554 precincts. 

In 423 of those precincts, Higgins garnered more than 50% of the vote, suggesting voters across Southwest Louisiana were generally undivided among the race’s four Republican candidates. 

Only Hoggatt and Democrat Tia Lebrun managed to get majority support in any precinct across the district. Lebrun’s sole majority came on a 52-vote margin in a precinct in south Franklin where 155 votes were cast. 

Higgins was similarly dominant in early voting across the district, winning a majority of ballots cast ahead of Election Day in each of the district’s nine parishes. 

Instead, opposition to Higgins came largely from a pair of Democratic candidates who split the district’s denser population centers in Lake Charles, Lafayette, New Iberia and others. 

Majority Black precincts in Lake Charles, Crowley and Rayne typically went to Democrat Lessie Leblanc, who finished atop 41 precincts with 10% of the vote. Meanwhile, Black parts of Lafayette broadly preferred LeBrun, who won 33 precincts and ended the election with 9% of votes cast. 

While four other candidates combined for just under 5% of votes cast in the 3rd Congressional District race, only one of them was able to win a precinct on Election Night, as Independent Gloria Wiggins, of Franklin, won St. Mary Parish Precinct 44 just outside Morgan City by nine votes over Leblanc.