It’s not too early to declare some winners and losers in Louisiana’s state elections this cycle, primarily because so many contests already have been decided or wrote on the wall what will come in next month’s runoff elections.
WINNER: Jeff Landry. The Republican attorney general wiped out all opposition in the gubernatorial race, in the most impressive display of the 1974 Constitution era. He became the first first-time candidate ever to win without a runoff and joining only Democrat Edwin Edwards (1983), Republican Mike Foster (1999), and Republican Bobby Jindal (2007 and 2011) in pulling off the feat of a general election triumph. That he did so bodes well for his powers of persuasion in herding the Legislature, which almost certainly will deliver supermajorities for his party, towards delivering on an agenda that looks to be the most transformative in a century.
WINNER: Billy Nungesser. The chattering class (see Loser below) thought he could give Landry a run for his money and were somewhat surprised when the Republican passed on that race to win reelection as lieutenant governor. Perhaps he knew something that other like GOP Treas. John Schroder and GOP state Sen. Sharon Hewitt didn’t, that Landry would win. His big win keeps him in office while others retire or hope to bag jobs in the Landry Administration.
WINNER: Jefferson Parish GOP legislators. Too often, a majority of this group abandoned a conservative agenda in favor of licking the boots of Democrat Gov. John Bel Edwards, which made a few of them targets in their reelection campaigns of conservative insurgents. Those challenged all survived, from narrowly to easily. Now they conveniently can flip-flop to back Landry’s agenda (with one exception: closed primaries that threaten their continued service) since they know they can’t stop it and thus try to keep their political careers alive.
LOSER: Louisiana Democrats. The party’s ruling white powerbrokers ran a poor gubernatorial candidate in the form of former cabinet member Shawn Wilson, knowing they had to have some black face to head the ticket to stave off extremist left insurgent black competitors. The inevitability of Landry also discouraged turnout, dooming any chance to prevent Republicans from doing no worse in legislative contests that ensured retention of a supermajority. Landry’s win and separate Board of Elementary and Secondary Education campaigns that also weren’t close now gives the GOP a commanding 9-2 edge on that body. And Republicans after Nov. 18 will have swept all statewide offices, after all but one of these contests put them within a few points of winning outright in the general election, if not Landry and Nungesser winning then.
Two other indicators demonstrate the reality of this rout. A white Democrat minister named Danny Cole raised and spent no money in running for governor, conducting his campaign solely through free social media and personal appearances, yet grabbed 3 percent of the vote, such was the dissatisfaction with Wilson. And in Caddo Parish, for sheriff former Shreveport city councilor Republican John Nickelson racked up 45 percent of the vote against black Democrat former Shreveport chief administrative officer Henry Whitehorn’s 35 percent, even though Nickelson has no law enforcement experience and Whitehorn has decades of it, in a parish with a solid Democrat plurality and bare white plurality. Statewide Democrats had zero coattails, and the results sends the strongest signal yet that unless it abandons its far-left agenda it will have no impact on policy-making on state issues.
LOSER: Legacy media. Whatever generally left-leaning newspaper and television outlets did, in terms of story selections trying to slow Landry or cajoling him to turn out for debates hoping to catch him off guard, failed. Landry as well as a number of conservative candidates simply ignored media requests and campaigned emphasizing cutting out intermediaries like the media – Landry showed up for exactly one of several media-sponsored candidate forums – by going directly to voters. As a result, the state’s chattering class had almost no influence on election outcomes and face increasing irrelevancy in trying to shape policy outcomes going forward.
LOSER: Clay Schexnayder. After four years of serving as House of Representative speaker kissing up to Edwards on budget and several other major issues, although the dictates of the GOP supermajority more often pushed policy in a conservative direction, Schexnayder hoped that this triangulation legacy could retain enough conservatives and capture enough non-conservatives in the electorate to attain the secretary of state’s office, aided by business-as-usual monied interests, to extend his political career and set himself up for future advancement. Instead, he finished a dismal fourth that extinguishes his hopes.
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