He made it “official” Friday afternoon, in case you missed it.

KTBS.com

Campbell’s entry into the race, which he has threatened for weeks, isn’t your typical bid. As of right now there is no filing listed on the FEC website for him and he doesn’t have a Senate website up. All he has is a Facebook post linking to the video above.

This kind of “soft open” gives the impression that Campbell’s bid isn’t all that serious, so we’re not convinced it’s actually going to happen. Campbell did get Gov. John Bel Edwards to offer him verbal support, which is more or less a payoff for the money Campbell raised for Edwards’ gubernatorial campaign last year.

The problem is that Caroline Fayard is already in the race, and the Louisiana Democrat Party doesn’t do particularly well in jungle primaries when they run multiple candidates in statewide races. While we would find a Fayard-Campbell Democrat primary for the Senate to be absolutely fascinating in an Alien-vs.-Predator sort of way, amid a crowded jungle primary for Campbell to get in creates serious jeopardy that the Democrats might not place anyone into the runoff and you might end up with John Kennedy against John Fleming or Charles Boustany in an internecine Republican finale.

Particularly if Edwards gets dragged in to actually campaigning for Campbell. That would make him something of a credible candidate. He also might catch something of a Bernie Sanders wave among a few constituency groups – first, Democrats in North Louisiana, second, older voters who still have some affinity for Longite socialism since Campbell is the foremost remaining practitioner of it, and third, hard-core leftists. Fayard is more likely to pick up the Mitch Landrieu tea-and-crumpets crowd in New Orleans, younger voters and South Louisiana “centrist” Democrats. Assuming there is a split among black voters, which right now is an unknown, it’s entirely possible these two could cancel each other out.

Which is interesting. You would think that the model the Democrats established last year – run one candidate amid a brutal field of Republican heavies who beat each other bloody while ignoring your man, and then ride the momentum from that lack of opposition into a strong position for the runoff – would be their enforced practice going forward. Instead, they’ve broken from it at their first opportunity with both Campbell and Fayard in the race.

The state’s Democrat Party is hardly made up of geniuses. Something that patently stupid would still seem a bit out of character. Which, combined with the rather lazy effort at launching a campaign by Bananas so far, makes us dubious that this is actually a real thing.