This has been coming for a while, as the rumor mill has been blasting away at it since November, but this morning it finally happened: Sharon Hewitt is running for governor.

Republican Slidell state Sen. Sharon Hewitt has joined the 2023 Louisiana governor’s race, the only woman in the campaign so far.

Hewitt made her announcement official Friday morning in a video to supporters and donors.

“I believe I have a unique set of skills that have prepared me for this role as a business person, community leader, legislator, wife, mother and grandmother,” said Hewitt, who is serving her second term in the Louisiana Senate, in an interview with USA Today Network.

Hewitt joins early front-runner GOP Attorney General Jeff Landry and Republican Treasurer John Schroder as the major candidates in the race.

Two Republican heavyweights, U.S. Sen. John Kennedy and Lt. Gov. Billy Nungesser, opted out of the race during the past week. Republican U.S. Sen. Bill Cassidy opted out late in 2022.

Hewitt, 64, an engineer and former Shell executive, is chair of the Senate Republican Caucus and chair of the Senate and Governmental Affairs Committee, which shaped the state’s 10-year redrawing of political boundaries last year.

Among her platform priorities are economic development, education and crime prevention, she said.

Here’s the money quote from Hewitt’s announcement: “Politicians have failed our state for decades, saddling us with a failing tax code, struggling schools, and rising crime in our cities. It’s time for a governor who will get things done. That’s why I’m running to lead this great state I love.”

All right.

What do we like about this? Well, we haven’t had a female Republican gubernatorial candidate of any note since…maybe ever, so there’s that, and the fact that Hewitt has a private-sector background is unquestionably a good thing. It’s something that both Landry and Schroder also share, so that speaks well of the Republicans in the field.

She’s a state senator, which is a position that isn’t quite the launching pad for a gubernatorial run that another statewide office or a congressional seat or even the Public Service Commission historically is, but it’s not unheard of. Mike Foster, who might well be the most successful governor of the modern age, was a state senator before running.

We might need more than a Mike Foster given the tragic state of Louisiana’s economy and public sector performance, but we could do worse.

And we wouldn’t count Hewitt out as a candidate in this race given the history of Louisiana’s gubernatorial contests. More often than not, when there are multiple candidates in an open race Louisiana voters have shown a pattern of lifting up somebody thought a dark horse candidate and making them governor despite all the smart money being on others. Dave Treen was such a dark horse, for example. So was Buddy Roemer. Foster was certainly that. To an extent, so was Kathleen Blanco. Certainly John Bel Edwards was.

Other than Foster, all of them were disastrously bad governors, and that might not bode exceptionally well for Hewitt.

The history with Blanco might not bode so well, either. Because Hewitt can’t do the “first female governor” thing with this campaign. Not when it’s already been done and the results were terrible. Voters – and including women – really don’t care about that stuff anymore. Being a woman is neither an aid or a hindrance to a campaign, and running on it is more likely to make you Julie Stokes than Kathleen Blanco.

And as we said above, she’s a state senator, not a statewide official with wide name recognition like Landry and Schroder. That can be overcome, but it’ll take money. We’ll talk about that below.

Hewitt has a couple of other problems, though.

First is we’ve now got Schroder, Hewitt and also freshman state representative Richard Nelson who are all from St. Tammany Parish. They’re going to cancel out each other in the geographic base they share. It’ll be interesting to see how any of them can overcome that fact.

And another problem is that Hewitt has positioned herself as a conservative just like Schroder has. And that’s good, because the state has a lot of conservative voters. But the problem is that Landry has made himself the dominant conservative voice in Louisiana politics over the last couple of years, and if your base is the same as Landry’s base and your base likes Landry better than you, you aren’t going to win.

Schroder seems to have that problem. Hewitt has it even worse.

How do you get the base to like you better than Landry? Well, it helps to have a record you can run on.

Does Hewitt? Well…

In last year’s regular session she authored no less than 34 bills, 16 of which became law. That’s a lot. Were any of them a particularly big deal?

Not really. Most were administrative things which would affect very few people in any significant way. Hewitt did pass a bill allowing public high school kids to enroll in apprenticeships or post-secondary education programs outside of their high schools, which is a school-choicey thing constituting good policy. She passed another bill which prohibits the sale of certain abortion-inducing drugs without a prescription.

On the whole, though, Hewitt didn’t do anything in 2022 she could build a gubernatorial campaign on. And 2021 wasn’t any better.

The biggest problem she’s going to have in getting Republican activists behind her is the unfortunate fate of her efforts at returning Louisiana to a party-primary system. This is something the party has wanted very badly for some time now, and Hewitt volunteered to take it up as a legislative measure a couple of years ago.

And then nothing happened. She didn’t even bring a bill. The RINO’s in the Senate griped about the idea of having to vote on the question and Edwards indicated he’d veto it, so Hewitt didn’t bother.

That’s likely going to be an obstacle for her. Another obstacle was that Hewitt was all in on the idea of bringing a failed casino boat from Bossier City to Slidell so that the Northshore would have gambling. The locals absolutely hated that idea even though Drew Brees got involved and tried to help push it, and it failed in a local election.

Most of the people predisposed to vote for Hewitt are not going to say that moving bankrupt casinos from one end of the state to another constitutes economic development of the sort she’s running on.

Hewitt didn’t even make herself heard on the question of mask and vaccine mandates or the reopening of Louisiana from Edwards’ pointless and damaging COVID lockdowns.

And then there’s the finance issue. The last campaign finance report made public by Hewitt is her 2021 annual report filed in February of last year. She only showed $289,000 on hand in that filing. Surely she has more than that now, but we’ve not heard a whole lot about Hewitt’s fundraising prowess of late, so how much she has is a real question.

And let’s remember what the price of poker is in this race. Jeff Landry, between his campaign and his leadership PAC, has $6.5 million on hand right now. He’s going to raise another $20 million by the time it’s over. You can’t beat that with $289,000, or even $1,289,000. If Hewitt doesn’t have $2 million, or can’t raise it very soon, she’s wasting her time running for governor.

Having said all this, we’re not opposed to Hewitt being in the race. She isn’t a RINO, and she’s not a nobody. She’s been kind enough to speak a couple of times at Hayride events we’d held over the years.

But she doesn’t have a record of being a change agent in a significant way, and that could be a problem. After all, Louisiana has lost 67,000 people in net outmigration – equivalent to the population of Kenner, and more than 1 percent of the state’s total population – in just the last two years.

We’re in crisis. We need somebody who is willing to make significant change. We need, essentially, a conservative Huey Long to excise a lot of the long-standing damage to our political culture and economic climate that Long and his flunkies did, damage which has never been effectively fixed.

Hewitt might be that. But she’s a long way from proving it. It isn’t something you can find in her legislative record. She’s going to have to show it with messaging. And she’ll be doing that from the standpoint of a major financial disadvantage.