The joke in Louisiana in certain circles is that this is a red state, but we suck at it. After Saturday, there is at least a chance this could change.
On Saturday, there was a red wave crashing from Shongaloo (that’s near Arkansas) to Port Fourchon (that’s near whatever hurricane inevitably brews in the Gulf of Mexico), which did to the Democrat Party in Louisiana what most non-Democrats earnestly would like to see nationally.
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Jeff Landry — the state’s iron-ribbed conservative attorney general who has spent the past seven-plus years at war with the federal government over its various overreaches (he is involved in almost all of the big multi-state federal lawsuits challenging the Biden administration, and he’s the reason why so many of them come out of the Western District of Louisiana) — is now Louisiana’s governor-elect.
Landry captured 51.6 percent of the vote against a 15-way jungle primary field in what’s likely to be the last statewide election using that deficient format — Louisiana will almost certainly be returning to closed party primaries after next year’s legislative sessions — while the leading Democrat, former Secretary of Transportation and Development Shawn Wilson, pulled just 25.9 percent. In total, Republican candidates captured more than 64 percent of the gubernatorial electorate in the governor’s race, a catastrophic result for the Democrats. In fact, Democrat candidates for governor came in at just under 30 percent of the vote, 35 percent if so-styled independent Hunter Lundy, an ancient Democrat trial lawyer who shed his party in a listless bid to reclaim the white-Democrat legacy of outgoing Gov. John Bel Edwards, is included in the count.
Even uglier were the down-ballot statewide races, an indication of just how awful the Louisiana Democrat Party’s fortunes have become. Democrats captured only 20 percent of the vote in the lieutenant governor race, 30 percent in the secretary of state race, 30 percent in the attorney general race, and 32 percent in the treasurer race. Those last three will go to runoff elections next month, and, in all three cases, there is a Republican — First Assistant Secretary of State and former state Rep. Nancy Landry; former Freedom Caucus founding member and Trump White House deputy chief of staff John Fleming; and state Solicitor General Liz Murrill — with more or less impeccable conservative credentials virtually assured of a massive victory.
Turnout was 35.8 percent for the gubernatorial election. It’s common to decry such low numbers, and some of the more insane observers on the left are griping about vote suppression — which, in Democrat terms, is defined as an insufficient amount of street money paid to their voters to pull them off porches and out of basements. But the truth is that low-turnout races are what wave elections are made of, and Louisiana’s electorate Saturday night was probably the best-informed and smartest the state has seen because there wasn’t a massive amount of out-of-state money poured into the fray.
And, interestingly enough, Amendment No. 1 on the ballot was a prohibition of “private” money pouring into elections office in Louisiana, the so-called Zuckerbucks bill. For three years, state Rep. Blake Miguez, head of the House Republican delegation and a founding member of the Louisiana Freedom Caucus (and, now, state senator-elect after pulling in a whopping 61 percent of the vote in a five-way race despite nearly half a million dollars spent against him), brought that bill only to see Edwards and his flunkies in the legislature kill it either with a veto or parliamentary skullduggery. This year Miguez brought it as a constitutional amendment, which Edwards couldn’t veto, and it passed.
By a 73–27 margin.
Louisiana will have at least a 70–35 supermajority in the state House of Representatives, and it could conceivably be as high as 74–31. In the Senate, 28 of 39 seats will be Republican. There will be just one white Democrat left in the state Senate and, conceivably, only three in the House. All the other Democrats are black, and there is talk of a handful potentially switching to Republican.
State Democrat Party Chair Katie Bernhardt is almost certainly going to be ousted at that party’s next meeting, and word has it that there is a bloc of Democratic Socialists of America members who will make a strong run at a takeover — which would absolutely end that party’s relevance in the Bayou State.
Democrats have become so irrelevant that moneyed interests formerly attached to that party now spend campaign funds attempting to pick which Republicans win. More than $2 million was spent in just a few legislative races on behalf of RINO “Bud Light Republicans” against real conservatives. Some $700,000 was spent against Rep. Alan Seabaugh, chair of the Louisiana Freedom Caucus and the most outspoken conservative in the legislature; Seabaugh won 54–46 anyway against Mike McConathy, the retired basketball coach at Northwestern State University who said he liked Edwards but not Donald Trump. Most others running against trial-lawyer money, dark out-of-state money, and Edwards status-quo mob cash polled above 60 percent.
The cycle isn’t over, as three statewide races and 18 legislative runoffs are still on the ballot. But so far it’s a wipeout both of Democrats and the “moderate” Republicans, an earthquake of such magnitude that informed observers are pointing to a brand new era of governance in Louisiana and a long-overdue end to Huey Long’s populist-socialist paradigm, which has persisted even as the state has turned red largely because of social issues, wherein its very religious population categorically refuses to accept the woke pieties of today’s Democrats.
So this is a major barometer of prospects for 2024, right?
Would that this would be so. I can’t say that it is.
The real problem in translating Louisiana’s results to national results the following presidential year is that they don’t match up all that often. Just look at the current century: In 2003, Democrat Kathleen Blanco won election in Louisiana as governor, but in 2004 George W. Bush was reelected. In 2007 and 2011, Republican Bobby Jindal won with little opposition; the following years Barack Obama won the presidential races. In 2015, Edwards’ election predated Donald Trump’s 2016 victory, and then Edwards was reelected in 2019 ahead of Joe Biden’s 2020 win. (READ MORE from Scott McKay: The Red Wave Builds in the Bayou State)
The trend is opposite the presidential races, except for the 2019 result. It should be noted that Louisiana went heavily Republican in every single one of those presidential races.
Moreover, Louisiana is a deeply red state with deeply blue-state problems owing to Longite government, and its cities are almost all blue and collapsing. This is a red state, but its politics often seems as though it’s what a blue state would look like if the big blue cities weren’t big. And that’s really the case — New Orleans’ population is much reduced from 30 or 40 years ago; Baton Rouge has been utterly stagnant for this entire century; Shreveport consistently is among the nation’s leaders in population loss. So the votes simply aren’t there for Democrats anymore — and even to the extent that they are, Democrat voters have largely given up.
And Landry ran an utterly flawless campaign, something national Republicans are quite incapable of doing.
All of which means Louisiana might finally be joining the ranks of Southern states worthy of participating in the Great Sorting, the massive immigration to red states from the leftist dystopias of California, New York, Illinois, and others.
But it doesn’t mean that this red wave is destined to next descend nationally. Maybe it will, but that’s simply not in evidence. Yet.
