Another poll shows top job Landry's to lose

It’s confirmed: Republican Atty. Gen. Jeff Landry is pulling away from the Louisiana gubernatorial field, rendering moot the mythology about how little-known or also-ran politicians score surprising victories for the state’s top office.

Another media consortium has put out a poll on the race, pegging Landry’s support at 36 percent. As in the other survey released earlier this week, former Democrat Gov. John Bel Edwards cabinet member Democrat Shawn Wilson pulls in 26 percent, and everybody else is in single digits with 14 percent undecided, say the likely voters. These numbers were slightly worse for Landry and slightly better for Wilson than the previous poll, but nevertheless reaffirm a Landry-Wilson runoff looms on the horizon where Landry will win decisively.

This provides another blow to the hopes of the anybody-but-Landry coterie of political activists, who keep hoping somehow another non-Democrat challenger will emerge to slip past Wilson into the runoff. The thinking is that a large portion of Democrats, some Republicans, and about half of all others don’t like Landry enough so that he would lose in a runoff to such a candidate.

Other data from the poll didn’t exactly provide much aid and comfort for that line of reasoning. Over three quarters of the sample formed an opinion about Landry, with half of it approving of him and just 28 percent disapproving, suggesting he could win a runoff against any opponent, if narrowly. Driving part of that, he grabbed 14 percent of the vote intention of black respondents, a little below that of the previous poll but at a level typically higher significantly than statewide GOP gubernatorial or Senate candidates.

Again, these are dynamics difficult to change with the amount of money the Landry campaign has at its disposal. For any single non-Democrat to make a charge, they have to pick off non-Democrat voters, and Landry has three-fifths of Republicans and almost a third of other voters in his column. But with a war chest around the eight-figure range, Landry has plenty of resources to minimize erosion of his support, while other don’t have nearly enough to chip away at him and grab from other candidates.

And they can’t depend upon Democrats to help them out. Wilson and the party brass know that, absent a live boy/dead girl scenario, he’s dead in the water, but they have to keep going because they have to field a quality candidate to keep the party refreshed and able to provide down ballot assistance. The debacle of 2011 they surely haven’t forgotten, when the party ended up backing an obscure schoolteacher rookie against Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal, who decimated the field. When the dust cleared, the GOP picked up seven House and nine Senate seats from 2007, although party-switching and special elections throughout the first three years of Jindal’s term meant in practical terms a pickup of five House and one Senate as a direct result of the 2011 elections. Wilson has to stay in and actively campaigning if Democrats have any chance of maintaining their Legislature numbers and to maximize their chances in some local contests.

As Landry began to run up huge fundraising numbers and anecdotal evidence that he was the guy to beat, background whispering among the chattering classes emerged not to speak too quickly of his coronation. Rather, they alleged that recent Louisiana electoral history supposedly showed front running gubernatorial candidates often were caught by surprise opponents who started out quite modestly.

That’s never been the case. The narrative seems to have its origins from the 1987 contest where Democrat Rep. Buddy Roemer had bumped along in single digits until breaking out close to election day, pushing Prisoner #03128-095, known outside the big house as Democrat Gov. Edwin Edwards, into second place and out of a runoff when Edwards withdrew. But it wasn’t that big of a surprise because Roemer made great pains to distinguish himself from the other main contestants – two other congressmen, one a Republican, and the secretary of state – with a campaign of fiscal conservatism and a record to match, unrelenting criticism of Edwards, and a base outside of south Louisiana while the others divided that area.

It seemed reinforced in 1995 race when Democrat state Sen. Mike Foster, up against a former governor, lieutenant governor, treasurer, and congressman, came from relative obscurity to win. Actually, that was in the cards long before election day as polling early on showed him with good favorable/unfavorable numbers, as long as he could become well-known to the electorate. He did, because of the record amount of money he threw into the campaign (a good chunk of his own), and because he strategically switched to the GOP label upon qualifying, just as that had become a meaningful asset in campaigning (keep in mind when Foster first won his Senate seat in 1987, Republicans had all of 5 seats in that chamber and 17 on the House side). The official GOP apparatus welcomed him, abandoning not only Roemer trying for another term, but also their official endorsee who didn’t even bother to qualify.

Sometimes the scenario is attempted to be applied to the 2003 election of Democrat Lt. Gov. Kathleen Blanco. But Blanco was the front runner who didn’t fade against Jindal and a Democrat attorney general, state senator, and party head,, who always placed in the top two in polls and who in the last four months of the year raised and spent nearly $4 million, not much less than Jindal, to consolidate a field that gave 60 percent of its vote to Democrats in the general election.

And the same applies to the 2015 election of Democrat state Rep. John Bel Edwards, who, facing no significant intraparty challenge, led almost every poll against a fragmented GOP field and spent over $7 million (about a million of his own) to build out name recognition. The only difference between him and Blanco was he led substantially going into the runoff but he had to pick off some Republican general election support rather than try to prevent erosion of second-choice votes.

There are clear lessons here. If you are a polling front runner, have relatively lots of resources, and have decent comparative approval numbers, you won’t get caught. For those who aren’t, you can catch him the front runner only if he has soft approval numbers, you don’t, and you have money close to that of him.

None of this applies to 2023. At 50 or so days out, Landry has led every poll with good numbers and money to burn. His opponents have no better, if not worse, approval figures with nowhere close the bucks to alter the dynamics. Simply, it’s his race to lose.