BATON ROUGE – One thing seems to be sure in the last series of polls forecasting who will win the gubernatorial race in Louisiana Saturday: It’ll be a long night of watching and waiting for election results.

“This race will go down to the wire,” pollster John Couvillon said in his independent poll released Thursday afternoon by his company JMC Analytics.

Incumbent Governor John Bel Edwards lost some support in the most recent poll while businessman Eddie Rispone did not see an increase, Couvillon reported.

The poll found 45.5% of people surveyed favored Rispone, a Republican, compared to 45% for Edwards, a Democrat.

In a previous poll for a national TV company, Edwards was at 48%, 2 points above Rispone.

Undecided voters still favored Edwards in the new poll, but only by half a percent.  They accounted for about 9% as of Thursday, two days before the election. The percentage of undecided voters increased.

“This race will boil down to the extent to which black Election Day turnout will increase in the same manner that early voting turnout did” and to the extent that voters who previously backed U.S. Congressman Ralph Abraham in the primary defect from the Republican general candidate Rispone to Edwards, Couvillon said.

Bernie Pinsonat, a pollster featured on WBRZ’s election coverage, predicted a similar close night – that the winner won’t be named early in the evening.

Polls open at 7 a.m. close at 8 p.m. Saturday.

President Donald Trump is in northwest Louisiana Thursday campaigning for Rispone. Click HERE to watch the president’s remarks live after 7 p.m. Thursday.

Edwards conducted TV interviews Thursday morning, ahead of the president’s arrival.

WBRZ election night coverage starts as soon as the polls close with results on WBRZ and WBRZ Plus, the area’s only 24-hour local cable news channel.

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