A year out from Shreveport’s 2026 mayoral election and a month removed from Republican Mayor Tom Arceneaux’s reelection campaign announcement, finally a Democrat opponent has emerged which tells more about the tone the contest will take than who will be an actual threat.
Arceneaux won in 2022 because of the negative impression his runoff opponent Democrat former state Sen. Greg Tarver had created among some activist Democrats and in the electorate who should have been natural supporters. This means Arceneaux had a target on his back from the moment he took office in the eyes of black Democrats, who feel a majority-black electorate never should have allowed a white Republican into the mayoralty.
Arceneaux has had his ups and downs given a tough situation, as a result of poor decisions by his Democrat predecessors over the previous quarter-century, exacerbated by a City Council gerrymandered to produce five Democrats of seven able to pass legislation over his head. This has produced a largely-cautious, almost technocratic approach to governing by the GOP mayor.
Events of the second half of this year epitomize his up-and-down tenure. In the summer, he announced and simultaneously commenced his Block by Block program, which after years, even decades, of public demand for and incessant policy-maker jawboning over Arceneaux actually did something about urban blight. It has made major inroads into sprucing up problematic areas, but at first wasn’t a hit with councilors, piqued that they weren’t involved in planning. Translation: they wanted a chance to claim credit and/or dilute Arceneaux’s.
Then Arceneaux come budget time blew a lot of good will by proposing fee increases to expand the initiative. This is on top of a water and sewer increase the previous year, just another in a long string necessary to fulfill the dictates on a consent decree regarding the city water and sewerage systems. The proposed two percent fee for 18 months on that bill became a nonstarter.
This is part of inherited messes and sometimes clumsy handling of them that gives opponents plenty to pick about Arceneaux’s term. And first out of the gate is one of the farther politically left, more useless members of the Caddo Parish Commission, Stormy Gage-Watts.
In some sense that is redundant, because the Commission over the past decade has pivoted hard left not only because Democrats have taken decisive control of it, but because of their agendas. Within the past year the Commission having already set a minimum wage over twice that of the state’s for its employees extended it to contractors, voted to blow millions of dollars on public pickleball access when nongovernment entities provide more than enough, wanted to impose traffic control cameras onto some parish roads until state legislators wisely circumscribed their use, proclaimed itself a distributor of free food, declared that at some point it would pay for free early childhood education, and its Democrats authored an illegal resolution honoring a socialist lawmaker.
Gage-Watts thoroughly emanates from this milieu, so even if she isn’t a political heavyweight (or even an obvious resident of Shreveport which the mayor must be by the time she qualifies for office), a bigger, more resource-hungry government policy agenda will have an airing and presented as a serious option. Against any quality black Democrat she won’t be as serious a candidate, given the poor history commissioners have had trying to leap to the mayor’s office, the grandstanding that she shares with a few commissioners that substitutes poorly for effective messaging, and her relative inexperience in campaigning (she hasn’t run a contested campaign in a decade).
But others of higher quality will follow because black Democrat activists see Arceneaux as illegitimate and an accident they will put to rights in 2026. He had to have governed nearly perfectly without great controversy in order to gain reelection, and while undramatic and competent that tenure is unlikely to be enough to succeed in that. A vulnerable incumbent outside the party presents the chance of a lifetime for Democrats who normally would have to fight off a Democrat incumbent for reelection, so expect more such candidates to emerge.
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