There wasn’t a whole lot in the way of noteworthy results from the December elections in Louisiana which concluded Saturday. No federal races went to runoffs, all three constitutional amendments on the ballot easily passed and but for a few local races here and there, it was a lot of nothing.

So much so that in the two races anybody would care about, namely the Shreveport mayor’s race and the District 3 Public Service Commissioner’s race, turnout was 30 percent and 14 percent, respectively. Talk about your low-impact politics.

But we can derive something from both. Namely, it’s increasingly true that old-fashioned liberal Democrat politics is dead in Louisiana.

A year and a half ago, that wasn’t so much true. If you’ll remember, after Cedric Richmond took a job in the Biden White House and left the state’s 2nd congressional district seat open, Troy Carter – who was billed as a more “moderate” Democrat than Karen Cater Peterson and Gary Chambers – won comfortably. We were regaled with lectures from the James Carvilles of the world that Democrats weren’r really interested in “wokeness.”

That was a lie, though. Troy Carter is as woke a Democrat as you’ll find. He votes in lockstep with the Congressional Black Caucus, so much so that his Heritage Action For America lifetime score is…zero. That Carter is slightly more moderate in his tone than Karen Carter Peterson is not a fact transferable to his record of governance. He’s a hard-core leftist who simply didn’t advertise the fact as such.

And the voters didn’t go for Carter because he was less woke, as Carville suggested. They voted for him over Peterson because she was obnoxious and unhinged and most Democrats knew she was crooked – which a little over a year later became manifest when she was indicted for embezzling money out of the Louisiana Democrat Party’s coffers.

Fast forward a bit and you can see that Carville was definitely wrong in his claims about wokeness. When Susan Hutson and Jason Williams won races in New Orleans for sheriff and district attorney, and when nobody even seriously challenged LaToya Cantrell for mayor, it became obvious that the Soros-affiliated organizations which had been pumping money into black politics in New Orleans for years had completely captured the city. New Orleans is something akin to a Marxist-Leninist state now, where criminals are given first-class treatment and the law-abiding and productive are preyed on in every way possible – from traffic-camera tickets to failed infrastructure to overregulation to senseless COVID lockdown policies.

And those same socialist non-profit organizations threw more than a million dollars into the PSC District 3 race.

That district is the one which chiefly involves Orleans Parish, though it snakes its way upriver – just as the 2nd congressional district does – in order to pick up parts of Baton Rouge and particularly the northern part of the city which is majority black.

PSC District 3 has been the personal fiefdom of Lambert Boissiere III, an old-money black Democrat from a political family, for going on a couple of decades now. Boissiere is no conservative, but he’s been known as, in the parlance of Louisiana lobbyists and political types, “transactional” in his approach to government. His vote could be had for a price, whether simple good advocacy or perhaps the usual – or not-so-usual – trades which are always made in Louisiana politics.

Boissiere’s name had been floated for various other openings – a run for Congress, a long-shot run for governor, mayor of New Orleans – but the word on him was he wasn’t your most high-energy politician. He was happy to stick around on the PSC and get re-elected every few years, a relatively inoffensive black Democrats who stayed mostly out of the newspapers and managed not to get indicted.

And on the PSC Boissiere would often vote with the body’s conservatives when it came to more speculative items which put at risk Louisiana’s unusually cheap electric rates. As Democrats go, he wasn’t too bad.

But the new woke wave wasn’t having any more of Lambert Boissiere. Not in a district where the Soros-affiliated nonprofits which had overrun the electorate in that city could find someone else.

Several candidates entered this year’s PSC race against Bossiere, including a gay black Democrat named Davante Lewis, whose curriculum vitae wouldn’t quite suggest “competent utility regulator.” Lewis is a schoolteacher by trade, or he was before he got a job working for the Soros-affiliated Louisiana Budget Project. The PSC race wasn’t his first run for public office – he lost a Baton Rouge Metro Council race two years ago.

But Lewis throttled Boissiere on Saturday by a 59-41 count. And now, this is a national story…

Tonight LGBTQ Victory Fund candidate Davante Lewis won the election for Louisiana Public Service Commissioner, District 3. With this victory, he is now the first out LGBTQ person ever elected to state office in Louisiana history and the first Black out LGBTQ person elected to office in state history. There is currently just two out LGBTQ elected officials in Louisiana, according to LGBTQ Victory Institute.

Mayor Annise Parker, President & CEO of LGBTQ Victory Fund, issued the following statement:

“For far too long, Black people and the LGBTQ community have lacked equitable representation in government – with the scars to show for it. Davante shattered this lavender ceiling because voters were enthusiastic about his life-long service to Louisiana, his commitment to working families and his keen ability to forge and activate diverse coalitions. We are confident these qualities and his exceptional career as a climate champion and public policy expert will make him an effective leader for all Louisianans, especially the LGBTQ community who have faced a sharp uptick in homophobia and transphobia this year. His election is a shining example that when LGBTQ people run, we win.”

A record number of Black out LGBTQ candidates ran for public office this year. There are currently just 115 Black out LGBTQ elected officials serving in the U.S., none of whom serve in Louisiana.

It’s funny, because none of the mailers Lewis’ campaign sent out said anything about his sexuality. That’s of course quite defensible, since being gay has nothing to do with regulation of utilities. But when the fact that Lewis is one of the Rainbow People becomes a major headline after his race is over and lots of his new constituents are finding out about this fact afterward, it’s perhaps an uncomfortable surprise.

Because Lewis’ sexual proclivities weren’t the issue in PSC District 3. Boissiere’s supposed submissiveness to Entergy was.

And after he took that beating on Saturday, Boissiere’s farewell message was a bit of a clarion call to his fellow “transactional” Democrats that the barbarians had come in past the gates…

I want to begin by thanking my family, friends, volunteers and supporters for the tireless work they put in both in the primary and in this runoff election. Unfortunately, we came up short and we are all disappointed in the results. I congratulate Devante Lewis and wish him well.

For almost twenty years, I have proudly served the people of Louisiana as the District 3 Public Service Commissioner. Throughout my tenure, I have focused on helping families by keeping utility rates as low as possible given the rising costs of fuel. I have led the efforts to expand broadband internet access to rural and underserved communities. I have worked to expand the use of solar and other renewable sources of energy and am proud that on leaving the commission, we now have 10 solar farms.
There used to be an old adage in politics attributed to the former U.S. Speaker of the House Tip O’Neil that “all politics is local.” Unfortunately, I think that those days are over.

My campaign was targeted by an out of state PAC which spent over a million dollars in “dark money” to defeat me. While I have served with distinction and am the only African American on the commission and one of only two democrats, this was not enough for this “progressive” group. This is not the first time out of state organizations have poured massive amounts of money into local campaigns to buy elections. They have ideological agendas and could care less about the people of Louisiana. This is a dangerous trend that must be stopped. Our citizens and elected officials should be aware that this may be the new paradigm in upcoming elections. It is concerning to me and should be to all of our Louisiana citizens that pouring this amount of money and distorting the facts and sometimes pushing outright lies, can succeed. These PACs are funded by people and corporations who do not live in Louisiana and are influenced by their national agendas and not by what best serves Louisianians. We all need to wake up to this new political reality. Turnout was under 15%. It’s more important than ever that people exercise their voice and vote.

I am honored to have served the people of District 3 and will leave office knowing that I have done everything in my power to help the people who live in my district and throughout Louisiana. I am humbled by the support I have received and once again wish to thank the many people who supported me in the ten parishes I represent.

You can chalk this up to so much whining by an out-of-gas politician if you want, because that’s certainly what it is. Nevertheless, Boissiere isn’t wrong. He lost because he was badly outspent with out-of-state Hard Left money.

In this respect, Boissiere might commiserate with Luke Mixon, the “centrist” white Democrat who, despite support from John Bel Edwards and the white Democrat establishment in Louisiana, was bested for second place in the Senate primary by Chambers while John Kennedy won re-election easily. That race showed, just as Lewis’ victory did, that out-of-state woke dollars get more votes out than the usual union-and-trial-lawyer money does in this new Soros age.

Even in Louisiana.

Which brings us to the Shreveport mayor’s race.

The incumbent, Adrian Perkins, had been elected four years ago on the strength of Soros money. But Perkins was such a spectacular failure that two other black Democrats ran against him and one, state senator Greg Tarver, a “transactional” black Democrat along the lines of a Boissiere or his fellow state senator Cleo Fields, swept into the runoff as Perkins’ campaign faded into mush. Tarver was up against a white Republican, Tom Arceneaux, whose campaign sounded for all the world like something a Lewis or Chambers might run. He didn’t preach at the Black Lives Matter temple, but he sounded quite progressive notes throughout the campaign.

That earned Arceneaux the endorsements of both Perkins and another former mayor, state representative Cedric Glover. Tarver was endorsed by Edwards.

And Arceneaux won a 56-44 landslide election, which was a shock to many – including our own Jeff Sadow, who saw the race in conventional racial demographic terms.

It’s a viable conclusion from this that the red wave which hit Louisiana in November and led to a massive blowout for Republicans in all of the federal races save Troy Carter’s is still inundating the land. That’s true. A 56-44 Republican victory in a 55 percent black city only happens in a big Republican year.

But the most appropriate reaction is that you can’t get the vote out on the Democrat side anymore if you can’t mobilize the Hard Left. And Tarver couldn’t do it, just like Boissiere couldn’t. Some of that Soros vote ended up with Arceneaux, and not much of it ended up with Tarver, which sunk him.

That vote will galvanize behind Arceneaux’s Democrat opponent in four years. He needs to understand that he isn’t going to maintain a coalition long which includes Adrian Perkins’ people.

But be that as it may, Louisiana’s Democrat Party is scrubbing away the vestiges of those old liberals who used to control their party. Perhaps they’re doing it to their own detriment, but they’re doing it nonetheless.