Landry’s Poll Says He’s Got An Almost Insurmountable Lead

It isn’t a surprise that a candidate’s campaign poll has him doing well, but the numbers in a survey released by Jeff Landry’s gubernatorial campaign indicate there isn’t much of a race to be had on the Republican side given the current field.

The campaign hasn’t really started yet, but he’s almost at a majority among Republicans and independents.

A poll paid for by Jeff Landry shows the attorney general as the dominant choice among Republicans and Independents in the 2023 governor’s race.

Landry’s campaign considers the poll, which surveyed 504 Republican and Independent likely voters from Feb. 13-15, an important tool to show Landy has widespread support within the GOP base.

Landry led the field with 48% in the poll, which was conducted by KA Consulting. No other candidate was in double figures.

Following Landry were Treasurer John Schroder at 6%, state Sen. Sharon Hewitt of Slidell at 3% and state Rep. Richard Nelson of Mandeville at 2%, all Republicans.

Independent attorney Hunter Lundy of Lake Charles came in at 2% with Democratic Louisiana Transportation Secretary Shawn Wilson at 1% and 37% undecided.

Also in the poll, Landry is at 58 percent among independents and GOP voters. That puts him second among political figures surveyed; Donald Trump, who’s expected to endorse Landry (Don Junior already has), sits at 78 percent.

And among independents and Republicans the right track/wrong track number is 65 percent wrong track, which is actually surprisingly low.

What we see in this poll is something we’ve remarked about several times – namely that especially for Schroder and Hewitt, their problem is their bases of support are with conservative voters, and those voters like Landry better than they like Schroder and Hewitt.

That’s hard to fix without some gigantic scandal that takes Landry down.

And maybe there is one, but the problem is Landry’s been running for things for well more than a decade now and so far nobody has come up with anything particularly damning. The Baton Rouge Advocate made much of an allegation a staffing company owned by Landry and his brother had hired illegal Mexicans to work on an LNG project, but the problem with that supposed scandal was that the staffing company in question was a subcontractor, and it was the general contractor who the feds found was hiring the Mexicans, the general contractor went to jail, it turned out Landry and his brother were the ones who reported him, and the general contractor was the one making the allegations from prison.

And that was the big Jeff Landry scandal. Reaction to that was a big, fat nothing – people saw it as evidence the Advocate was out to get Landry, not that he’d done something wrong.

Assumedly there will be something they’ll throw at him. The “politics of personal destruction” is what governs gubernatorial races in this state; seldom does the top of the ticket turn on issues or philosophy.

But so far, though history mitigates against this, it just doesn’t look like there are a lot of twists and turns ahead in this race.

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Yes, Garret Graves could get in. We’ve talked about why we don’t think he will. Graves could impact the race, but he also might not.

And an old rumor which got new life yesterday was that Clay Schexnayder, the term-limited Louisiana Speaker of the House, is re-thinking a gubernatorial run.

Schexnayder has $660,000 in his campaign account. That’s enough to pay his campaign consultant, which is perhaps what this is about. It isn’t enough to beat Landry. Not that Schexnayder could do that with an unlimited amount of money; he’s not sellable to the general public.

We doubt that will happen. If it does, we’d be surprised if Schexnayder got more than five percent of the vote.

The guess here, based on what we keep hearing, is that Shawn Wilson will get into the race and that’ll be the field. And if that’s how it goes, the most likely scenario is a Landry-Wilson runoff that Landry wins in a landslide.

And maybe, just maybe, we’ll have a governor’s race which is a referendum on issues and governing philosophy and not what dirt who has on whom.

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