There’s a poll out which would indicate that Waguespack is making headway, but there is some reasonable doubt on the question. From the Baton Rouge Business Report…

A new poll shows Republican and former Louisiana Association of Business and Industry President Stephen Waguespack closing the gap on leading GOP contender Jeff Landry in the governor’s race, USA Today Network reports. 

The survey was paid for by the political action committee supporting Waguespack’s candidacy.

The poll, conducted by Remington Research Group and commissioned by Reboot Louisiana, is the first survey released that shows anyone except Landry and leading Democrat Shawn Wilson with double-digit support.

In the survey of 896 likely voters for the Oct. 14 primary election, Wilson leads with 27%, followed by Landry at 25%, Waguespack at 16%, Republican Treasurer John Schroder at 7%, independent attorney Hunter Lundy at 4%, Republican state Sen. Sharon Hewitt at 3%, state Rep. Richard Nelson at 0% and 18% undecided.

Reboot Louisiana is the Waguespack PAC which got him in so much trouble with that attack ad they dropped on Landry a few weeks back. If you’ll remember, that was repaid by a pretty sharp scolding from Steve Scalise about running attack ads.

A lot of people thought that was going to cost Waguespack, in that it would push some anti-Landry Republican vote into John Schroder’s camp rather than Waguespack’s.

But so far we don’t see much evidence that’s happened.

Outside of this poll, which we don’t even have to tell you is a Waguespack poll, there isn’t much evidence he’s moving up. Pretty much everything else we’ve seen of late has his support at about a third of that 16 percent number – including the recent Democrat poll by John Bel Edwards’ pollster which had Landry at 31, Wilson at 21 and everybody else at six percent or less.

And then there’s the WPA Intelligence survey which came out yesterday which…let’s just say it differs significantly with the Reboot Louisiana poll. Here’s the press release on that one…

Executive Summary

In this survey of likely 2023 Louisiana primary election voters conducted June 15 – 17, 2023 on behalf of Protect Louisiana’s Children, Jeff Landry continues to lead Waguespack in name id (92% vs 67%), favorability (46% vs 15%), and on the ballot (35% vs 6%).

 

Landry Maintains Commanding Lead in Name ID and Favorability

Landry leads Waguespack in name id by 25-points. While Waguespack is now known by two-thirds (67%) of likely primary voters, his unfavorable rating has increased 11% causing him to be upside down by two-points with likely primary voters. In contrast, Landry’s name id has increased to 92% with 46% of likely primary voters viewing him favorably and just 22% viewing him unfavorably.

 

	Name ID		Fav		Unfav		Net Fav
	May	June	May	June	May	June	May	June
Landry	87%	92%	49%	46%	19%	22%	31%	24%
Waguespack	38%	67%	13%	15%	6%	17%	6%	-2%

 

Landry Increases Lead in Race for Governor

Waguespack’s ballot share among likely primary voters (6%) is still in single digits. On the other hand, Landry’s ballot share has increased 3-points to over one-third (35%) of likely primary voters.

 

April 30 – May 2	June 15 – 17	Change
Landry	32%	35%	+3
Wilson	18%	17%	-1
Waguespack	2%	6%	+4
Schroder	6%	3%	-3
Lundy	2%	4%	+2
Nelson	1%	<1%	–
Hewitt	2%	2%	–
Istre	1%	<1%	–
Someone Else	4%	2%	-2
Undecided	32%	31%	-1

Again – you’re under no obligation to give any more weight to the WPA poll than to the Remington poll or the Kitchens poll (that was the Democrat poll from last week). Maybe the truth is somewhere in between the three.

What we would say is what we’ve said all along – that this is still very much a Landry-Wilson runoff, and Waguespack and Schroder stand in each other’s way of having a chance to disrupt that likely matchup.

The other critique of the Remington poll is that what’s really going on here, as the narrative goes, is Reboot Louisiana had a big chunk of change which actually was raised out of state by Garret Graves, and Waguespack inherited it when Graves opted not to run, and in order for Reboot to reload – they were up on the air with TV ads and now they’re taking a bit of a hiatus, which would be an indication they’re burning money a little too quickly – they’ve got to have something to show their donors.

So magically here’s a poll showing Waguespack making headway.

The counter to that is to say that the poll is correct, that Waguespack is making headway, that those TV ads were effective and that the campaign is in fact moving forward.

We’d say that we probably wouldn’t expect a Landry PAC poll to reflect that, even if it was true, but we would expect to see it show up in polling we’d see somewhere else. It didn’t appear in the Kitchens poll. But maybe the next one will show it.

So perhaps that’s something to watch.

Again, we have no problem with the idea of Waguespack as governor. We like him. We think he’d do fine, just as we’re happy with Landry or Schroder as the winner as well. We just haven’t seen much evidence telling us that Wags has real viability with the Landry-Wilson runoff seeming so impenetrably likely.

But perhaps Remington has found a leading indicator that we’re wrong. Time will tell.