Set LA gov field pushes Landry, Wilson to front

Qualifying for this fall’s Louisiana governor’s race went off as expected – predictably since to make a serious effort once must start campaigning months in advance of the due date. So, where do things stand?

Among the 16 candidates were a retread here and there among the several significant ones, the latter being Republicans state Sen. Sharon Hewitt, Atty. Gen. Jeff Landry, state Rep. Richard Nelson, Treasurer John Schroder, and past top gubernatorial appointee Stephen Waguespack; Democrat and recent cabinet member Shawn Wilson, and independent lawyer Hunter Lundy. They gained this distinction by having large enough campaign war chests – in Lundy’s case, mostly self-financed – with at least occasional media references to their candidacies.

Although clearly Landry by this metric is in a class of his own. Having spent millions already and with over $9 million available, that banked figure means Hewitt has in her account 3.8 percent of that total, Nelson has 3 percent, Schroder has 24 percent, Waguespack has 24.2 percent, Wilson has 6.5 percent, and Lundy has 23 percent. That is, all together the significant candidates have 84.5 percent of Landry’s total.

This means, as long as it isn’t frivolous and stupid, that the Landry campaign holds all the cards to make an inevitable general election runoff, along with Wilson for whose campaign money doesn’t matter as much because of the pathological loyalty many black voters have for, especially a black, Democrats. To be sure, Wilson is a weak candidate, but he won’t draw less than a quarter of the vote and perhaps could go as high as a third.

That creates a problem for all other candidates not named Landry. Currently, according to every recent poll unconnected to a campaign or interest group and just of all of these but one backing Waguespack, no other candidate but Landry and Wilson draw even higher single digits. And given that Landry polls in the same quarter to third range as Wilson, anyone other that them must either hack votes from Landry or cannibalize practically all support from others save Wilson in order to ace out Landry from the inevitable runoff.

To do that, they will have to spend some resources boosting themselves, but most of it attacking Landry and each other. Their problem is Landry has the resources to fend off attacks against him and to go negative on them, if not drown them out completely. It’s almost an impossible task.

Perhaps the Republicans other than Landry – discounting the novelty candidacy of Lundy who seems to be attracting old-school white Democrats, but really applicable to the two much more monied candidacies of Schroder and Waguespack while the resource-poor Hewitt and Nelson candidacies have become the longest of shots – can hold out hope that something like 2015 can occur where frontrunner Republican former Sen. David Vitter had a money and polling advantage but went down to current Democrat Gov. John Bel Edwards.

Back then, as with Landry and Wilson now, Edwards and Vitter basically ran even in polls. But those numbers and finance figures were very different than today. Vitter at that point eight years ago had about $5 million banked, but his two major Republican opponents former Lt. Gov. Scott Angelle and then Lt. Gov. Jay Dardenne, had, respectively, just over a million and just under $2 million, so they were in a somewhat-better position to try to overtake Vitter. More importantly, they didn’t have nearly as much ground to make up; both were polling into double digits, with Angelle close to Vitter in a race to the runoff where eventually he would lose to him by just four points.

In short, Landry is in a better position than Vitter was in 2015, and has the money and a slew of endorsements and backers that would make going negative on him much less effective than when Angelle and Dardenne teamed up on Vitter as a response to try to make the runoff against Edwards. Even the entry of retread black Democrat Omar Dantzler, who in his many campaigns has run to the far left and will take a small chunk out of Wilson’s vote, won’t be enough to push Wilson down enough to allow Schroder or Waguespack to leap over him.

Unlike the frontrunner in 2015, Landry has created enough separation from his main rivals and has enough resources to fend them off while negating the negative campaigning that will come to try to close the gap that will fail to injure his chances against Democrat Wilson in a runoff. That pairing remains overwhelmingly likely, and an eventual Landry triumph that probable as well.