The lunch rush is just ending at Cotten’s Downtown in Lake Charles when Kate Cotten steps away from the grill and settles into a booth to talk about her congressional run.
Cotten is a longtime Republican and small business owner. And she’s challenging Rep. Clay Higgins for Louisiana’s 3rd Congressional District seat, a tall order. Higgins has won reelection four times with strong margins, despite a history of controversy.
The field of candidates in this district is a somewhat crowded one. Democrats John Day, Caleb Walker and Priscilla Gonzalez, and no party candidate Tia LeBrun, fill out the rest of the ballot.
Cotten initially expected at least one other Republican candidate to enter the race and believes voters should have a choice other than the incumbent.
She tells me she entered the race on the final day of qualifying because no other Republican signed up besides Higgins, giving him an uncontested path to the Republican nomination. The primary, originally scheduled for May, was essentially scuttled after the U.S. Supreme Court tossed Louisiana’s congressional map.
“I’ve always been a Republican,” Cotten says. “I don’t think that means to blindly support your party.”
Instead, Louisiana’s congressional races are moving ahead with de facto “jungle primaries,” meaning she’s still on the ballot in November. But Cotten is not actively campaigning or “hitting the streets.”
Her primary goal is to ensure that Republican voters who refuse to vote outside of their party still have a choice on the ballot because “there’s more than one type of Republican.”
Higgins was the lone voice of dissent in a House vote on releasing the Epstein files in 2025, a move Cotten calls an unusual departure.
“I have a lot of questions about that one specifically,” Cotton tells me. Higgins has continued to defend that vote on principle, arguing the disclosure hurt Epstein’s victims.
A campaign sign for Democratic 3rd Congressional District candidate John Day is in the corner of the restaurant window. Cotten says Day is a friend.
Before launching his campaign, Day often had breakfast at Cotten’s Downtown, where the two had “interesting political conversations,” he says.
“I think that the division is something that both parties are absolutely getting wrong,” Cotten says, adding that she and Day share the belief that the government needs more “middle-class, normal working people.”
Day says he and Cotten are “cut of the same cloth, as we’re both looking for people, I guess, ‘within our party’ to represent us better than Higgins,” adding that Cotten is just the type of “hardworking American” he looks forward to building relationships with.
“Both parties are so focused on the parties themselves that there’s too many extremes and not enough of what we actually, in real life, have more in common with each other than we have different,” Cotten says.
Cotten’s been a Republican since registering to vote at the age of 18, but believes the party has changed dramatically over the years.
Day is the national director of sales for a heavy equipment outfitting startup in Lake Charles and was registered no party until February, before qualifying as a Democrat.
On the major issues Cotten believes are facing Southwest Louisianans, development looms large.
Her experience as a small business owner remains central to how she views the federal government, which she says she once perceived as being more supportive of the little guy, but now sees big business development as the focus.
“Their definition of small and my definition of small are totally different things,” Cotten says, adding that, for example, it is currently cheaper for her to use imported shrimp for her restaurant than to source it directly from the Gulf, which is not so far away.
“I think that our economy is a little bit upside down right now. We have a lot of development going on in Cameron,” she says, wondering about the long term environmental impact of industrial development despite promises of long term jobs.
“Growth and expansion just for the sake of making more money is not worth not having an earth left for kids,” Cotten says.
If elected, before she would set her own plans for D.C., Cotten says she would hold a series of town halls to listen and understand what was most important to constituents on a local level.
“It’s not about me or my agenda,” Cotten says. “I just want to say that I’m pretty grounded morally.”
