If you expect candidate choice to go down significantly as a result of Louisiana expanding its (semi-)closed primary election roster, you would be wrong. If you think it would increase accountability, you’d be right.

Starting next year, closed primary elections return for federal offices and will become implemented for Public Service Commission and Supreme Court seats. But along with that, qualification methods changed beyond what was necessary to create a primary system.

Until now, to qualify under the blanket primary system, candidates had two options: get up a petition turned in by a certain date with varying numbers of signatures and locations of signers depending upon the office, or just pay up a certain amount during qualification that varied in amount as to office and what category of political party, if any, in which the candidate would enroll where the two major parties had the highest fees. Both methods remain but now are very different.

Going forward, candidates must choose whether to contest the primary, which is available only to those who sign in under a major party label, for which they retain both qualification options. But if not wanting to run as a Democrat or Republican, a candidate for the four offices obviously would eschew the primary and skip directly to the general election ballot, but can only qualify through the petitioning process. As these kinds of races are either in large districts or with the Senate statewide, that process can become an enormous–and perhaps expensive–undertaking.

This has led to speculation that for these contests in the future significantly fewer candidates will run, because paying up was a smaller barrier to entry. Senate contests are the most notorious for attracting candidates other than Democrats and Republicans; in the past two such contests 28 candidates qualified, of which half weren’t of the two major parties.

Yet that view misunderstands the motivations for running for office. Most often those who don’t run under the major labels run, frankly, for ego. They like seeing their names in the media and garnering publicity from the low-level campaigning they perform. That’s why some run time and time again, even for different offices, and they choose the off-brands because it’s cheaper in qualification fees.

And they congregate more towards the top because federal offices get greater publicity. From 2020 to the present, 170 candidates qualified for these four kinds of offices. Of them, 36 didn’t choose a major party label, or just over a fifth. Subtract the two Senate contests, and it falls to 22 out of 142–or 15 percent. Remove the 18 House of Representatives contests and only 4 of 31 of the PSC and Court candidates (5 contests each, one being a special Court election last year) or 13 percent shunned a major party label.

If getting your name out there is a major draw, the solution is simple: run under a major party label. The cost might be a bit higher, but that’s probably not going to discourage most of those that fit this bill. So, prepare to see primary lists with a few longshot candidates for each party, especially for the Senate which already had been attracting such candidates under those labels; their numbers henceforth simply will increase.

There’s another, rarer, kind of non-major party candidate who also won’t desist from running under the new rules: the gamer. These candidates, usually with leftist sympathies running in a district whose voters lean to the conservative side, try to distract the electorate from delving too deeply into their issue preferences by not picking a major party label. They know by choosing the out-of-favor label they doom their chances of winning, so they choose (almost always) a no party or independent designation, avoiding the shorthand of issue preferences that a label conveys.

At this level of offices, perhaps the most noted practitioner of this strategy is no party Supreme Court Chief Justice John Weimer, who first ran for the bench in 1995 as a Democrat and again in 1998 as a Democrat and yet again for his first Supreme Court wins in 2001 and 2002. But by 2012 he strategically switched to no label as his southeastern coastal district became brighter red, and repeated that in 2022. Under these new rules, expect him to be the last for a long time to be able to pursue that strategy.

This is to the benefit of the state. Under the new rules, a candidate trying to hide a general worldview or certain issue preferences – with the exception of one of five PSC, two of eight Court and, two (likely soon to be just one) of six congressional districts where Democrat-leaning constituencies reside, a leftist – will have great difficulty doing that. Either they run in a Republican primary and risk being exposed, or they must go to great effort to march directly to the general election where their chances of winning are reduced, as compared to now, as there won’t be the possibility of multiple major party candidates eating into each other’s vote totals.

It’s a better system, because there will be greater clarity for voters in their choices – always the strong selling point of closed primary systems. And joining the candidates who have tried to game the blanket primary system in the past who might be less likely to run are those few genuinely committed to a minor political party, to whom the new process might discourage. Still, in the past five years, only eight of the 170 labeled themselves from a minor party – although perhaps some of them might have run in a major party closed primary.

In short, about the only race that might see any noticeable drop off in candidates will be for the Senate, and hardly for any of the other three (Weimer, again for purely strategic reasons, was the only such judicial candidate, in fact). However, any presumed loss of “choice” by having fewer longshots available on the ballot will be more than compensated for by an election system that doesn’t have as much potential for confusing, perhaps intentionally, voters about what are candidates’ actual worldviews and issue preferences.