On the one hand, it’s just a label. Guillory’s overall voting record
since his election in 2007 to the state House and then special election to the
state Senate in 2008, according to the Louisiana
Legislature Log voting index (where 100 means all votes in a year were of
the conservative/reform variety) gives him an average of just 56 – exactly the
overall average of the entire Legislature over those five years putting him a
shade on the side of Republicans who typically espouse conservatism and reform
ideas. His one year in the House and first in the Senate were much lower – a
32.5 compared to nearly 72 in the next three years, going from a district 58
percent black and 69 percent Democrats to one 54 percent black and 63 percent
Democrats. The district now is 55 percent black, 61 percent Democrats.
On the other hand, the symbolism carries import politically both
positive and negative. No group in America even is close to the loyalty that
blacks display to Democrat candidates of any color, but at the national level
black Democrat candidates score slightly better support. Whether that gets
scrambled by having a black Republican candidate is another matter. Guillory
has joined an extremely small group; while current data is difficult to come
by, a decade ago only a half dozen black Republicans sat in state legislatures,
and every one of them represented a majority white district. Possibly no black
Republican ever has won election to a state legislative spot in a
majority-minority black district since the 19th century.
These daunting historical odds means one of three things must have
shaped Guillory’s thinking on this. First, it could be a prelude to an attempt
for higher office. But there seems to be nothing obvious in the area or state for
which he could run that does not have a Republican incumbent or other announced quality candidate that he could
consider a promotion. Second, it could be he’s thinking of retirement, as he
will be 71 by the end of his term and wants to go out on his own terms. Or, he
could be considering defying history and actually running for a final Senate
term now under this label. At first blush, harboring such ambitions may seem far-fetched,
but there are two considerations that make such a move less than fanciful.
For one, until the past two decades party identification didn’t mean
all that much in Louisiana state and local politics. Being part of the American
south long dominated until recent years by the Democrats as a legacy of the
Civil War eroded to some degree the meaningfulness of a party label, but
something else was a factor beyond this one shared by its neighbors in the
region. The state’s political culture, more than any other state’s, developed to
focus on individuals, where the populist impulse shied away from trusting
institutions and instead taking chances with individual politicians. Even to
this day, Louisianans generally emphasize more the personal aspects of a
candidate, and consequentially less his partisanship or ideology, than citizens
of other states when it comes to voting decisions.
In Guillory’s case, this is reinforced by another reason, the peculiarities
of his district. That area in and around St. Landry Parish politically was dominated
by the Cravins family for two decades, and in time Guillory partly maneuvered into
becoming and partly found himself assigned to being the standard bearer for anti-Cravins
forces. When he won the Senate seat he defeated one of them to succeed her son,
and then for reelection defeated her husband trying to reclaim the seat. Thus,
it could be that this cleavage in area politics so overrides other
considerations, added to the personalistic nature of Louisiana campaigns, that
the switch will not change that many voters’ minds that have given Guillory
recent majorities.
Regardless of that dynamic, it’s clear if a reelection campaign transpires,
local and state Democrats will pull out all of the stops to deny him, judging
from the
visceral and venomous reactions they evinced upon learning of the change –
issues about which they seemed perfectly content to keep silent as long as he
termed himself a Democrat. And here’s why they are so upset, from his
evaluation of his former party in the Opelousas
Daily World:
Guillory said that “one of the
biggest disappointments has been that party’s role in the breakdown of our
families, their support of dependency over self-reliance, of everything but
traditional marriage, of abortion on demand. Their policies have encouraged the
high teen birth rate, the high school dropout rates, high incarceration rates.
Children are encouraged to get something they call a ‘crazy check’ (urban slang
for Social Security payments for people deemed mentally incapable of working).”
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