State Politics: Making a hard right turn

Making a hard right turn

While Louisiana politics have historically been dominated by Democrats, Republicans began to assert control starting in 2008. BY DAVID JACOBS

IN THE 1964 presidential election, Louisiana was one of five states formerly part of the Democrats’ “solid South” that supported Republican Barry Goldwater, following the Democrats’ embrace of the Civil Rights Act that Goldwater opposed.

However, as most of the South turned just as solidly for the GOP, Louisiana took its time joining the party. But when the shift happened, it happened quickly.

Though Dave Treen, the state’s first Republican governor since Reconstruction, took office in 1980, the position would flip back and forth between parties in the decades that followed. Edwin Edwards, the four-term Democratic governor who relied on Black and Cajun voters to provide the base of his support, mounted two separate political comebacks to return to the fourth floor during Business Report’s lifetime.

In Edwards’ final win in 1991, he outpaced sitting governor Buddy Roemer in the primary. Roemer had been elected as a conservative Democrat but switched parties while in office in a doomed attempt to fend off challengers from the left and right

In the subsequent runoff, Edwards trounced former Democrat David Duke, who had made a successful run for the state Legislature as a Republican. While the overall margin was 61%-39%, Duke, a former Klansman, nonetheless won 55% of the white vote and even 40% of white Democrats.

Duke’s race foretold white conservatives’ wholehearted embrace of Republicans, and he would later argue that he deserved credit for the political movement that brought Donald Trump to the White House.

“Perhaps the messenger was rejected in this state of Louisiana, but the message wasn’t,” Duke said following his 1991 loss. “The people believe in what I believe.”

As recently as 2005, Democrats held every state-level elected post. But also in 2005, David Vitter took office as the state’s first Republican U.S. senator since Reconstruction, and Vitter would go on to be one of the key architects of the coming Republican dominance. He played a lead role in creating the Louisiana Committee for a Republican Majority, raising money for candidates throughout the state and helping the GOP win control of both houses.

The nadir for the Democrats may have been 2011. Democrats had just spent four years getting pummeled by Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal and his allies in the Legislature, where the GOP held solid majorities in both chambers. And in that year’s election cycle, Democrats barely even contested the statewide offices, allowing Jindal to win reelection with nearly 66% of the vote against token opposition.

Term limits had a lot to do with helping Republicans gain the upper hand by dislodging entrenched incumbents. Many white Democrats jumped on the bandwagon and switched parties, including Westwego state Sen. John Alario, a former Edwards ally who gained Jindal’s blessing in his successful bid for Senate president.

When Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu lost her 2014 reelection

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CHANGING DYNAMICS: Democrat Edwin Edwards dominated state politics from the 1970s through the mid-1990s but state voters moved decidedly right as Bobby Jindal became governor in 2008.

WHO’S IN CONTROL? Democrats generally ran state government until 2008 when Republicans began taking control.

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bid to Baton Rouge Republican Bill Cassidy, the minority party lost its last statewide elected official, and the Deep South lost its last Democrat in the U.S. Senate. The John Breaux-style conservative Democrat no longer seemed viable.

As to why the Democrat label suddenly became toxic in much of Louisiana, it’s hard to overlook the 2008 election of Barack Obama as the nation’s first Black president, given the prominent role race plays in American politics. But policies unpopular here, ranging from support for abortion rights and gun control to Obama’s offshore drilling moratorium following the Deepwater Horizon disaster, helped cast Democrats as the enemy to many voters.

So the emergence of a little-known state representative from Amite named John Bel Edwards caught many by surprise. Even after he had secured the endorsement of the state Democratic Party, some prominent Democrats urged him to bow out of the race to give breathing room for a moderate Republican who might have a better shot to knock off the heavily favored Vitter.

But Edwards, a pro-gun, anti-abortion former Army Ranger, gained credibility with voters otherwise uncomfortable with Democrats, while Vitter was

TREND BUSTER: John Bel Edwards, running as a conservative Democrat, won election as governor in 2015 but that success has not repeated itself in the state Legislature. tarnished by a prostitution scandal. Edwards easily beat Vitter in 2015, then held off Baton Rouge businessman Eddie Rispone to narrowly win reelection in 2019.

Edwards’ success has not trickled down to the rest of his party. The same year he was reelected, Republicans gained a veto-proof supermajority in the state Senate, and as the governor reaches his two-term limit, a viable Democrat successor has not emerged. White elected Democrats are an increasingly rare species, and while the pundits have been wrong before, there’s little expectation the GOP’s dominance will end anytime soon.

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Louisiana’s political winds began shifting to the right with the election of President Ronald Reagan, prompting many Democrats to switch parties. A look at statewide officeholders who went from D to R:

BUDDY ROEMER

Roemer

MIKE FOSTER

FOX McKEITHEN

JOHN KENNEDY

SCOTT ANGELLE

BUDDY CALDWELL

JIM DONELON