We saw this coming, and we talked about it both last month and back in October. But, to channel Ron Paul, It’s Happening.

We now have Gary Chambers as a candidate for the United States Senate.

Activist and former candidate for Louisiana’s 2nd Congressional District, Gary Chambers, has launched his campaign for the United States Senate in Louisiana’s open primary to defeat Sen. John Kennedy.

Chambers says he plans to run and serve with a people-centered approach, champion perspectives, and policies that reflect his experiences working directly with communities across the state.

Chambers’ key issues for the campaign are listed below:

– Passing economic aid for the people of Louisiana, like Biden’s Build Back Better Act

– Guaranteeing the voting rights of all US Citizens through voting reform initiatives

– Advocating for Medicare for All at a national level so that no one has to go without proper medical care

“No Louisianan is alone, there are more of us ready to help our neighbors and lift our communities to give us all a fair shot at a bright future and prosperous life here in this state,” Chambers said. “If we work together, we can bring real change to Louisiana.”

Why do we love this so much? Because it signals that Louisiana’s Democrat Party, as constituted for pretty much all of our lives, is about to be dead.

We’ve talked about this in the past, so if you’re a regular Hayride reader please forgive the repetition, but essentially the Democrats in this state are invested in perpetuating a reality which is long gone – namely, that their political identity consists of being the smart, virtuous white justice-seekers in a sea of racist troglodytes, able to win elections by building virtuous coalitions from a minority of enlightened whiteys and big turnouts from the victims of racism in Louisiana’s black community.

Whole treatises were written about the “30-30 rule,” wherein Democrats could win statewide in Louisiana so long as blacks turned out at a rate of 30 percent of the electorate and they were able to pull 30 percent of the white vote.

This went on for several decades after the Republican Party came to life in Louisiana, but it ultimately faded away as Democrats kept losing statewide elections. Only John Bel Edwards in the 2015 and 2019 gubernatorial races, both of which fell perfectly his way after a host of circumstances aligned to his benefit, avoided the common fate.

And in the Democrats’ telling, the candidate has to be white and the black vote has to line up monolithically behind him or her, or else it won’t work.

Which means that the Democrats’ consultants, people like Trey Ourso and Richard Carbo, who are white but nevertheless specialize in dragooning black voters to the polls in the maximum numbers possible, depend on perpetuating this somewhat feudal reality within their party.

In October, Carbo found an airline pilot from Bunkie named Luke Mixon, a first-time candidate with no particular rationale to offer voters for electing him, and put him in the race against Kennedy. We’re calling Mixon The Alpaca, because he’s a hairy guy with an almost comically long neck and also because as a white, supposedly centrist Democrat politician he’s something of a rarity. But it’s so obvious what’s at stake here. Mixon has zero chance to beat Kennedy, who’s possibly the best electoral politician in the Senate, who won election six years ago with 61 percent of the vote and who can raise money at will.

This is all about Carbo catching a paycheck this year.

Chambers getting into the race is beautiful because it’s an assault on this entire fading status quo the white Democrats in Louisiana are so militantly invested in.

Because the fact is, the hippopotamus is going to greatly outpoll the alpaca. We’d be surprised if Chambers doesn’t beat Mixon 2-to-1 on the Democrat side of the jungle primary. And meanwhile, Kennedy is going to grab a good 58 or 60 percent of the vote in the first round, if not more.

He’ll do that because Chambers is almost certain to spend as much or more time beating on the Alpaca as he is Kennedy. His best strategy for fundraising is going to be to attack Mixon as the tool of the white status quo.

Because what Gary Chambers wants is to be the Stacey Abrams of Louisiana. And if he’s the guy who shatters that dying status quo on the Democrat side that’s literally what’s available for him.

Lots of black Democrats in Louisiana have been seething about this whitebread power structure in their party for years. They’ve been told they have to accede to white demands to run atop the ticket because black candidates can’t win, and the white candidates, who have usually been rich, connected trial lawyers from families with racist and segregationist backgrounds (John Bel Edwards being a perfect example), have then given all the plum campaign jobs and other patronage to their own folks and largely shut out the blacks who are essentially the grunts in this electoral army.

If we asked you to name a black Democrat political consultant of note in Louisiana, you’d come up with Donna Brazile’s name and then you’d be done. And Brazile doesn’t run Louisiana races much anymore, anyway.

So Carbo runs the Alpaca, and along comes Chambers who managed to raise $400,000 last year when he ran for Congress and didn’t get completely annihilated when he ran third in that primary. Chambers is going to go around the state talking about how black voters need to take control of the Democrat Party in Louisiana and use the Alpaca as a perfect example for why – after all, what’s Luke Mixon ever done for any of them that he ought to be the Democrats’ candidate in a statewide race?

Remember, as of the first of the year blacks make up 723,297 of the 1,208,461 registered Democrats in Louisiana. That’s 59.9 percent of the party. So when Gary Chambers starts in about how it’s Black People Time inside that party he is most certainly not wrong, and he won’t be wrong when he rails against the response from the old-school set which says “but y’all can’t win.”

Chambers is going to say, first, that electing the John Bel Edwardses of the world does zero for blacks in Louisiana and never really has, and second, he’s going to look at the Alpaca and say “You’re not really going to say this cat can win, are you?”

Between Chambers and the Alpaca, there’s really no contest as to who better represents Louisiana’s Democrat voters. Ideologically there’s no contest as to which one better represents the national party. Chambers is a woke communist cut from the same cloth as the Squad, and that’s who’s running the table inside that party now.

We love every inch of this. With Chambers there are lots of them. Here’s to a very beautiful Senate race to come. We almost want to get greedy and find some Republican who can split off just enough vote from Kennedy that we could get an actual Kennedy-Chambers runoff.

But we’ll settle for what we have. It’s plenty. And the long-term effects will be glorious.