We’re asking the question because there is a bit of buzz out there saying that Graves will enter the Louisiana gubernatorial race on Tuesday. The congressman from the 6th District, which comprises most of Baton Rouge and a chunk of south-central Louisiana emanating from the capital city, raised the specter of a run in a radio appearance last week and it’s only gotten louder since. Now it’s starting to sound inevitable that he’ll run.

So let’s analyze this in advance of it happening.

First, Graves, if he runs, would position himself to the left of Jeff Landry and probably to the left of Sharon Hewitt and John Schroder. The RINO/moderate lane is the one where there is opportunity at present, as Landry, Hewitt and Schroder have all made reputations as conservatives and that lane is either crowded or it’s dominated by Landry; take your pick.

And Graves is well set to be the “center-right” candidate in the race, as that’s been his political identity. He’s got some conservative tendencies, in that he’s a critic of big-government incompetence, but Garret Graves has zero interest in things like the fight against leftist cultural aggressions, he couldn’t care less about abortion, he’s not a big law-and-order guy and his record on economic conservatism is so-so. On the Club For Growth’s 2021 congressional scorecard, for example, which is the last one available, Graves is rated at 77 percent. He’s the only member of Louisiana’s House delegation not in the 80’s.

We wouldn’t call him a RINO in the sense that we would say, for example, Jay Dardenne is a RINO, or Clay Schexnayder or Page Cortez are RINO’s. We also wouldn’t disparage Graves’ congressional record. He’s been quite good as a congressman.

But what makes Graves good is that he’s an appropriator. Garret Graves has been very adept at squeezing the federal government for money Louisiana can use for things like drainage projects, coastal restoration, roads and bridges. That’s what has made him laudable as a congressman, not fights about principle.

But does that translate to success as a governor?

Bear in mind that the last three congressmen who became Louisiana governors were Bobby Jindal, Buddy Roemer and Dave Treen. All three were terrible disappointments as governor, and largely for similar reasons. Coming from Congress you’re a legislator, and your focus is on federal issues which are different from state-level things, and your policy prescriptions very often turn out to be unrealistic if you don’t have the executive skill and the understanding of raw political power to turn them into concrete action.

So there’s the question whether Graves has the skill set to be the kind of powerful governor Louisiana is going to need in order to undo the damage the current governor is wreaking on us. Just remember, Louisiana has lost 67,000 people in the past two years, to net outmigration, including 46,000 people – a full one percent of our state’s population – in the past year.

We’re in free fall and we need radical change. That doesn’t just require the ability to write a reform plan down on paper, it means having the political will, courage and ruthlessness to turn what’s on paper into reality.

Garret Graves ran Louisiana’s office of coastal protection and restoration in the Jindal administration before he ran for Congress. He’s going to be painted as a Jindal minion. Graves was also a congressional staffer working for David Vitter, so it’s not completely fair to call him a Jindalite, but he’s going to be branded that way by Landry’s team and almost certainly Schroder’s and Hewitt’s. It will be interesting to see how he handles that.

There’s the money question. Landry is sitting on $6.5 million between his campaign and his leadership PAC. Graves doesn’t have that. He has $45,000 sitting in a leadership PAC account, as of the end of November, and he has about $2.6 million left over in his congressional campaign account. But federal campaign money can’t very easily be redirected into a state campaign, so how much of that $2.6 million Graves could access is a question. He’s certainly a capable fundraiser, so you’d think he’d be in a better position than Schroder and Hewitt, but catching up to Landry is a tall order for anybody.

Unless, of course, you go around to all of the status quo special interest folks and make them all the promises they want to hear.

Doing so then makes you the candidate of the status quo.

And yes, you can absolutely win as the candidate of the status quo. Louisiana history is replete with victories by status quo candidates who held themselves out as reformers to an unwashed public.

Are we saying that’s Graves? No, but to raise the kind of money he’ll need in order to catch up with Landry he’s going to have to line up with some special interests who will absolutely protect their rice bowls against some needed reforms. Landry has done a very good job so far of pulling in cash from people fed up with how things are in this state.

There’s another issue Graves will have to deal with, and that’s how much support around the state he can pull in. Two of his colleagues in Louisiana’s congressional delegation, Mike Johnson and Clay Higgins, have already endorsed Landry. The other two, Julia Letlow and Steve Scalise, will be interesting to watch. Sen. Bill Cassidy will probably back Graves, but Sen. John Kennedy is a bit of a different story; we’re not sure what Kennedy would do. There is a bit of unease left over toward Graves over the latest round of congressional redistricting; he threw a lot of weight around in an effort to get part of Louisiana’s coast into his district, which is understandable since he used to run coastal restoration efforts and he wants to keep that in his portfolio as a member of Congress. But how it was done irritated basically everybody else in the congressional delegation and there were a lot of noses out of joint among the state legislature as well.

Graves has a policy of not making endorsements in other races, too, which might well come back to haunt him now that he would be asking for endorsements. And yes, there are people out there who don’t like Jeff Landry. But that doesn’t mean they’ll line up behind Graves; not with Schroder and Hewitt in the race.

Then there is the similarity, to an extent, of a Graves gubernatorial run to a John Kennedy gubernatorial run. The argument against Kennedy running was that he’d just gone through $40 million in order to get another Senate term and then he’d be eschewing that in order to announce a run for governor before the term even began. Graves’ House term is only two years instead of six, but he did raise $1.9 million in the just-completed 2022 cycle in order to finance a campaign for that term and now he’s going to run for governor instead of fulfilling it.

And so he’s going to be absent from Congress because he’s running for governor when Republicans have only 222 seats out of 435 in the House. That isn’t good. Not to mention whether Graves will be able to leverage his membership in that House majority to get Louisiana all the road-and-bridge swag we count on Graves for.

Moreover, who replaces Graves in Congress if he wins the gubernatorial election? The 6th District is generally a Republican district, but it isn’t impossible for a Democrat to win it. It would be no surprise at all to see John Bel Edwards turn around and run for that seat, and to have a half-dozen Republicans chopping each other to pieces in a jungle primary. Edwards’ home in Amite isn’t in the district but that doesn’t matter per the Congressional rules, and he’s almost certainly going to buy a house in Baton Rouge when his term limit evicts him from the governor’s mansion. As Edwards is almost assuredly looking to 2026 when Bill Cassidy’s Senate seat comes open again, parking himself in Congress for a term and a half would work quite well for him.

Regardless of whether that outcome is likely, who finds it an appetizing risk?

All of that said, Graves is the best of the possible candidates to run in the “moderate” lane in this race. We don’t think he’s poorly suited to be governor. He’s smart, he’s a policy guy, he distrusts the stupidity of bureaucracy, he speaks passionately about Louisiana’s underachievement as a state and he has some experience with how things have worked within state government which could be brought to bear. Our readers know we’re more friendly to Landry than any of the others who’ve kicked around running, but we don’t hate the idea of Graves running.

But we would caution that the “moderate” lane in this race was always going to be where the money behind John Bel Edwards’ destructive two terms in office was going to congregate, and Graves, in entering the race from that lane, runs the risk of becoming the wrong man at the wrong time to sit in the governor’s mansion.