Leftist group's beliefs, not message, fail in LA

The story remains the same, and helps explain why the group dedicated to putting leftist women in office has crashed and burned in Louisiana.

It seems the national group Emerge America is in retreat. In its decade of existence, it has established chapters in over half the states, recruiting and training female Democrats to run for office. It has roughly 1,300 of serving in elected office, eight members of Congress and 24 statewide officials among its alumnae. But discord has set in among a few of its state chapters, and some essentially have been cut loose.

That’s happened in Louisiana, in which the organization began operating in 2017, where almost two years ago the then-leader of the state’s branch left and hasn’t been replaced, with the organization asserting its strategic profile was served better by having the state’s leftist women interested in its services attend regional and national training, as well as having alumnae available for mentoring. This has disconcerted some, who see the move as surrendering and selling out leftist activist women to whom it had proffered promises of assistance.

Not that Emerge Louisiana ever had much success. It started to great fanfare in 2018 and 2019, but then the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic hit it that caused many organizations to pause, if not wilt. It had a small 2022 class, but nothing since. And it can claim only 10 electoral successes, almost all confined to the state’s most Democrat-friendly parish Orleans, and just one state officeholder, ultra-left Democrat state Rep. Mandie Landry, who also hails from there.

Contrast this with the success that conservative women running as Republicans enjoyed this fall. Incoming Secretary of State Nancy Landry and Atty. Gen. Liz Murrill will assume statewide elected posts in less than a month. The Board of Elementary and Secondary Education will see the return of Sandy Holloway and the introduction of Stacy Melerine. In the Legislature, three GOP women outnumber a pair of female Democrats in the Senate, and in the House, the GOP has 18 women incoming and/or repeating while the Democrats have just 10 including Landry.

Reviewing all legislative candidacies, in districts with at least one Republican woman running, a GOP female won three-quarters of the time. As for Democrats, their distaff partisans won only half of such races, with four fewer total such contests than for Republicans, meaning 75 percent more Republican women were elected than Democrat females.

That Republican women run and win at higher rates than do Democrats continues the pattern that has emerged in the 21^st century and echoes 2019 election results, regardless of Emerge Louisiana efforts. This is as because dynamics haven’t changed: the center-right electorate of Louisiana responds strongly to conservative appeals, magnified by the built-in advantage that conservatism philosophically and empirically enjoys over liberalism.

A fatal conceit broadly shared by the political left is that if only it can get the messaging correct, it will win elections, even in conservative strongholds like Louisiana. That’s exactly backwards of the actual dynamics that leftism enjoys success only when its messaging skews the realities of data and history through lenses of “isms” enough to detract from objective conditions. When the inherent contradictions of conditions on the ground versus the left’s message become too detached, it can’t win elections.

The wages of Louisiana’s long history of liberal populism have created a near-permanent rupture between leftist successful messaging capability and the contrary reality realized by a critical mass of the voting public. The rest of the country may be catching up: the same dynamic in the short-term increasingly is operating against national Democrats, causing increased defections from their coalition that point ominously to a GOP sweep of the majoritarian branches in 2024.

As always in 21^st century Louisiana, the lesson is this: if Democrats want to win elections, objective conditions necessitate that they pull back from the severe ideological left turn the party has taken in the century. If Emerge Louisiana hasn’t learned this, it might as well fold up shop here.