Gerrymanders finally deliver Caddo to Democrats

With the Shreveport City Council already gerrymandered to lock Democrats in the majority, last week’s elections did the same to the Caddo Parish School Board, four years late.

Having five incumbents running for reelection and data center tax revenue promises plus pay raises having been tossed out like Carnival throws over the past few months by the city, the four Democrats and one Republican cruised to Council victories, joining the GOP filler of one of the two open seats who didn’t draw an opponent. That left just one vacated seat tussled over by four Democrats, where the two Democrats, Billy Roy Anderson and Lester Smith advanced to a runoff.

Anderson hardly had any money as of mid-October, and Smith has a long record of activism. But Smith’s age and a recent bizarre police incident that got him cited, along with some key endorsements, might give community organizer Anderson an avenue to victory. Regardless of who wins, Democrats will have a veto proof majority on the Council.

BC interesting dynamics remain after marshal race

What appeared as a relatively dull contest when all was said and done obscures potential political intrigue surrounding Bossier City politics.

Incumbent Republican Marshal Jim Whitman won reelection comfortably last week over Republican City Councilor Brian Hammons. Whitman’s 62 percent to 38 percent margin capped a win in most city precincts, including winning overall Hammons’ own Council district.

A major reason why Whitman won by such a wide margin was he spent a record, even an excessive, amount of money on the effort. Through mid-October, he had paid out about $140,000 to retain his office, around $100,000 more than Hammons. The next closest ever city-wide spending came when GOP former Mayor Lo Walker was defeated for reelection in 2021, expending a few thousand less (and the counting isn’t over). Particularly when dealing with an obscure office with only 14.5 full-time equivalent employees, money is crucial in a campaign for it.

Interesting dynamics behind Caddo justice races

In contests dealing with the criminal justice system, Caddo Parish voters didn’t see any surprise winners, although how the contests turned out may not have been anticipated.

There wasn’t a whole lot of action for voters. Not atypically, only one district judgeship in the 1^st District was contested, and that took some special circumstances. In one of the two majority white registrant special election sections in the 1^st (another is majority black), veteran prosecutor Republican Hugo Holland, who is white, secured the Division F (Section 3) seat over local attorney Democrat Treneisha Jackson Hill, who is black, by two percentage points.

That was closer than might be anticipated given a district about even in partisan terms, but where white registrants outnumbered black ones about 3:2. All other judges in the section are white Republicans. Also, Holland would build a significant advantage over Hill in money, with his campaign committee raising $82,000 compared to her $18,000, although she started late in the campaign.

Dynamics suggest Arceneaux repeat win of 2022

Incumbent Shreveport Mayor Tom Arceneaux, a white Republican, remains the favorite to win reelection in a city with a majority black electorate and a near-majority of black Democrats, results from last week’s election show.

Arceneaux led the field with 36 percent of the vote. Perhaps mildly surprising, Democrat Caddo Parish Commissioner Stormy Gage-Watts barged her way into the runoff with 23 percent, followed by fellow Commissioner Republican John-Paul Young with 18 percent and then 16 percent for Democrat state Rep. Tammy Phelps, with three minor candidates splitting the remaining 7 percent. Conventional wisdom had it that one of the two elected black Democrats would make the runoff.

With her broader political experience and higher profile, it was believed by many that Phelps would outlast Gage-Watts, especially with endorsements from prominent establishment politicians like Democrats state Sen. Sam Jenkins and former Mayor Keith Higtower. Further, her geographic base took in much more of Shreveport than did Gage-Watts’.

LA Democrats set to overplay their losing hand

It didn’t take long for at least one now-prominent Louisiana Democrat to misinterpret 2026 midterm election results, especially his own, which by doing so will make any such gains made by the party disappear like a sand castle at high tide.

Shortly after it became clear that Republican Rep. Julia Letlow would defeat Senate Democrat nominee Jamie Davis, hubris got the best of him when he hinted that he might run for governor next year against incumbent GOP Gov. Jeff Landry. To that, Landry basically begged Davis to run against him.

As he should. Davis’ increased stature in the party doesn’t have much to do with him but mostly does have to do with the deviant nature of this campaign cycle and the shortcomings of his opponent. As previously noted, in the most favorable environment Democrats nationally have had for at least two decades and against an opponent who’s not a compelling candidate and who ran a lackluster campaign at best for an open seat after a bruising primary season, the party still couldn’t get a win with Davis as the front man.

Not such big election night for LA Democrats

While Democrats had a good election night generally, in Louisiana, not so much as elsewhere, which demonstrates the structural problems the party faces.

As election day approached, party activists began to get ahead of themselves and dream that their Senate nominee, former Tensas Parish Police Juror Jamie Davis, actually could pull a huge upset by defeating Republican Rep. Julia Letlow. Reality intruded when Letlow won although only by about two percentage points.

That created a glass half-empty/half-full scenario. The comparative result was the best the party had achieved since Democrat former Sen. Mary Landieu won in 2008, the last time they won a Senate seat, and Letlow was held over 100,000 votes fewer than the GOP’s Sen. John Kennedy received in 2022.

Stewart reelection worries behind dirty trick

Democrat First District Attorney James Stewart must be getting very nervous about his reelection chances against Republican state Sen. Alan Seabaugh.

Demographics favor him. Registration totals that made the books for the election next week show only several more black registrants than white out of over 150,000 on the rolls (Stewart is black, Seabaugh white), but Democrats outnumber Republicans 3:2.

However, Seabaugh, who resides in Caddo Parish although his senate district also encompasses Bossier Parish and smaller-populated parts of others, is a superb campaigner who has stumped with a disciplined message about Stewart’s laxness on holding criminals accountable (with data that back up that contention) and has utilized plenty of resources to spread that message. While chipping in $115,000 of his own resources, he also has raised a couple of hundred thousand bucks to go along with an existing $400,000 campaign kitty and spent through the middle of October this year nearly $200,000, main on eye-level and electronic media.

BC balanced budget to shore up future prospects

The significance of the Bossier City Council’s passing a balanced budget this week lies more in the fact of what ideally it should signal for the future.

When originally introduced, the general fund portion tapped into a small number of reserves, projections of revenues looked a bit optimistic, and the separate enterprise funds showed future strains ahead. The version passed this week had a few tweaks, but most prominently wiped out the dipping into general fund reserves.

This matters because it shows the Council and city taking responsibility to not unduly erode a margin of error in uncertain fiscal times. The general fund has plenty of reserves, mainly due to knock-on effects from massive federal government spending in the pandemic period that increased government revenue collection, causing the reserve to about triple from $23 million in 2019 to $66 million in 2025, so a hit of nearly $2 million wouldn’t have broken the bank.

N LA cases to provide property rights tests

Louisiana is reaching a point where it must affirm private property rights in dealing with private company’s abilities to expropriate property.

Owners of land in north Louisiana face a couple of challenges on this issue. In northeast Louisiana, in response to the Hyperion data center project that promises to infuse $50 billion into the economy and create hundreds of well-paying jobs, the large power needs have put landowners on alert that the electric utility Entergy, and to a much smaller extent the electric cooperative Northeast Louisiana Power Coop, shows signs they will pursue expropriation of land to provide the transmission line infrastructure to send power to Hyperion.

The Louisiana Constitution permits this, but only for a “public purpose” as outlined where whether that qualifies is justiciable. Some landowners think these transmission lines don’t qualify as these primarily, they argue, would help Hyperion.

Bad LA censorship law degrades election process

As election season winds down, maybe this will be the last conducted under an odious Louisiana law that chills free speech and degrades election decision-making.

Federal constitutional law sets only the most obvious and basic parameters regarding campaign communications. Basically, only the standards governing defamation apply: i.e., a public figure such as a contestant for office can have any expression made against him except those that are patently untrue and done with malice. And there’s no constitutional prohibition against making whatever claims about a candidate’s self, regardless of their veracity.

Just so. Except in those intentional defamatory cases, the political process should be allowed to play out to separate the wheat from the chaff, especially when this deals with claims made by a candidate about himself. If outright lies about past behavior or statements are made, electioneering by opposing forces quite often uncovers the falsity.