With that statement, he tries to
make the point that for this specific election, Democrats have had everything
go their way. Despite general majority public support for his issue
preferences, Vitter has run an indifferent campaign that only occasionally
exploits that advantage. He carries with him the taint of Washington, an uncomfortable
past admission, and a take-no-prisoners style of politics that while
adhering to Louisiana’s populist heritage does so at the cost of making it too
easy for members of his own party to get hung up on personality rather than
issues that then becomes divisive.
These dynamics allowed his runoff
opponent Democrat state Rep. John
Bel Edwards to take his blank slate and manipulate the less attentive public
into thinking he is much more moderate than his lifetime Louisiana Legislature Log voting score of
25, one of the most liberal/populist among all legislators in his period in the
Legislature, shows he really is. These also have kept the contest discourse
much more on personality than on policy, to the GOP’s disadvantage as over the
past decade Republicans have proven if they make elections ideological, they
win.
In other words, with so much going
for them, Cook argues that if they cannot win this election, they can’t win any
meaningful power in the state, and this makes the party “dead and gone.” But
regardless of the outcome, he only got the not “gone” part right.
Consider that this all comes
against a backdrop where Democrats’ standing in the state continues to
deteriorate. After the elections, likely the party will have retreated slightly
in legislative seats, falling to at or near inability to prevent veto overrides
or constitutional amendments. It remains entirely outgunned on the Board of Elementary
and Secondary Education, and adding insult to injury its two members there favor
many school choice policies the national party loathes. With the offices not
facing elections this fall, conservative majorities control both the Supreme Court
and Public Service Commission. It almost certainly, again, will be shut out
from the statewide elected executive offices below governor.
If Edwards manages to pull the
upset, he will have not put a foot wrong and Republicans will have engaged in
their frequent exercise of forming, then executing, a circular firing squad.
That circumstance does invoke one regularity in American politics that can work
against the GOP: the emotive, intellectually incoherent and unsustainable
nature of Democrats’ liberalism allows them in elections to focus on gaining
power, as opposed to the Republicans’ insistence on following principles
derived from the erudition demanded by conservatism, which can cost them
elections.
But outside of that structural
advantage, Democrats as they currently constitute themselves have no other
against Republicans in Louisiana. And because of this, the party is dead; it
cannot win meaningful power except by the grace of its opposition. That could
change, if the party would change, meaning its elites would abandon hard core
liberalism and move to the center. That’s the chimera Edwards presents and that
his campaign had, up through the general election, done well enough to put him
in there with a chance. However, there’s no evidence that he would try to
govern from the center and thereby provide at least one impetus to change the
party’s culture.
Regardless of these elections’
outcomes, Louisiana’s Democrats are dead, but not gone, at least in their current
form. They cannot govern without any significant impact except if Republicans
make mistakes. They are zombified – a well-deserved fate given how they ran the
state into the ground in their decades in power – and resurrected only on
occasions fortuitous to them. Whether their influence will disappear if Vitter
holds off Edwards is another matter, but they will not revive until they
respond to the demands of a changed electorate by changing their culture towards
the ideological center.
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