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.

Say it were just a two-up race between Landry and Davis. The key to Democrat success in statewide elections over the past year has come from a specific playbook: run a blank slate who mouths generalities and avoids admitting his leftist issue preferences while trying to promote anything that could establish centrist credentials, then hope that infighting among conservatives can bring a weakened candidate to an open seat contest while whipping up imaginary straw horses and bogeymen to frighten the Democrat base into turning out.

Davis got away with that this time, almost to victory, but he has no hope of doing so next year, in large part because Landry would be his opponent. Landry would run a campaign hammering Davis for what he is – big spender, against government spending reform, tax-hiker, pro-abortion, Medicare for all, etc. – and is part of the so-called “one percent,” running a huge farm but yet calling himself a “common man” despite his uncommon wealth (at his reported ownership of 2,000 acers and the 2022 average value of farmland in Tensas Parish, it’s worth nearly $6 million). No one can get elected in the state with that agenda, once exposed.

A Landry campaign would expose all of that and more, subverting the left’s playbook. And it can because he had, at the beginning of this year, closing in on $11 million banked for reelection. And he’s proven to be a far better candidate statewide than did Letlow. And he’s an incumbent with a pretty good record on which to run – continued sustained economic growth, a halt to the massive growth of state spending under his predecessor, and backing a number of popular reforms.

 Add to that the distinct possibility that national Democrats will mistake their midterm success, and especially with a few extremists who lucked into their wins by taking advantage of the short attention spans typical of midterm voting, fortunate timing, and hard choices made by Republican Pres. Donald Trump, as any kind of broad approval of any number of their extreme ideas, whereby they can make enough noise (but get little accomplished with Trump standing in the way) about these to poison the perception of Democrats statewide.

 If Democrats were smart, they would back off and hope Republicans flub their opportunities, criticizing if that happens but spelling out their agenda only in the vaguest of ways. But because of their arrogance and mistaking their secular millennialism for reality, history shows that with rare exceptions they won’t be able to help themselves in expressing who they are. That includes the Louisiana cohort, now emboldened by this pyritic election result, and if that happens state Democrats likely will see no better results next year than in 2023, and perhaps even be worse off.

 The Louisiana electorate hasn’t changed overnight. As long as state Republicans pay attention with democrats thinking as they do, their dominance isn’t going away.