Registrant totals show continued GOP momentum

It’s official: for the first time in around 150 years, Louisiana has more registered Republicans than Democrats in the electorate, with implications.

Official beginning-of-month statistics give Republicans an over 2,000-registrant lead over Democrats. Compared to the year’s beginning, the GOP has added over 12,000 voters while Democrats have lost over 18,000. As the electorate increased by around 6,000, this means that all other voters gaining made up the 12,000 or so difference.

It’s hard to overstate the significance of the shift. Not even two decades ago when Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal became the first lifelong Republican to win the Governor’s Mansion, Democrats held a two-to-one advantage (and there were 134,000 fewer registrants then). That means the GOP has increased 52 percent since, while Democrats have dropped 41 percent. Even more dramatically, 65 years ago Democrats comprised 99 percent of the electorate.

Trump, markets hand win to LA CCS foes

They may have lost at the Louisiana Legislature, but concerned residents and carbon capture and sequestration foes picked up a win courtesy of the politician who backed the opponent of the U.S. Senate candidate they supported, pointing the way to future successes.

Today, the other shoe dropped when Air Products confirmed that it would abandon its so-called Louisiana Clean Energy Complex, after last year suspending continuation of work on it. The project would have produced “blue” hydrogen, meaning through a process that didn’t emit a lot of carbon. That carbon would have been sequestered around and under Lake Maurepas, which generated significant opposition from those near it including some local governments.

Such was the alarm, with fears that without any history of sustained large scale sequestration to draw upon and isolated past instances of crises in transportation rendered CCS too risky, that dozens of bills hit the Legislature this past session to restrict or prohibit CCS, including a few aimed specifically around Lake Maurepas. Legislative leaders and Republican Gov. Jeff Landry’s tacit acceptance of CCS caused these to go nowhere.

Conservatism to see few gains in LA fall votes

In essence, Louisiana’s Senate, one Board of Elementary and Secondary Education spot, and two Public Service Commission posts have been settled, resulting with arguably little in the way of conservative advancement.

That’s not because Republicans won’t triumph in all of these contests come November. That basically was set in stone upon qualifying, with first the party primaries of May 16 and then the ensuing runoffs Jun. 27 setting the exact field. Who gained the respective nominations mattered to determine the advancement of conservatism.

For the Senate, Rep. Julia Letlow’s win over GOP Treas. John Fleming hardly will cause an ideological ripple, if actually regress slightly from conservatism. Her lifetime voting record is actually slightly more moderate than that of who she and Fleming vanquished in the primary and who she replaces, Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy, although both are to the political right roughly equidistant between centrism and perfect conservatism. Fleming’s record in Congress, by contrast, was much further to the right.