New Orleans’ pro-criminal district attorney is  now openly talking about entering the race for governor, just as we’d heard he was earlier this week. Who Jason Williams thinks would vote for him is a question, but then again the same out-of-state George Soros leftist money that put him in his current job might very well show up to back him for his next quest.

So perhaps we should take this seriously, as hard as that will be to do.

Orleans Parish District Attorney Jason Williams said Wednesday that he is considering getting into the governor’s race because of recent attacks by Attorney General Jeff Landry, the Republican frontrunner, against him and his city that he called “racist.”

Williams emphasized that his interest stems from others urging him to enter the race, and that he had not been contemplating a statewide run.

“People have encouraged me to be open and have a conversation about this,” Williams said in an interview. “I haven’t decided if I’m running.”

Gov. John Bel Edwards said he hopes Williams stays out.

“He can attack Jeff Landry from wherever he is,” Edwards said in an interview. “I think it would be a mistake for him to get into the race. I would encourage him to get behind (former transportation secretary) Shawn Wilson, and I’m encouraging everyone in the state to do the same.”

Edwards appears to be the only one who thinks it’s a bad idea for Williams to get into the race. Everybody else is either quiet or happy about it.

Among the happiest would be Stephen Waguespack and John Schroder, because in the event Williams would steal all the black votes out of New Orleans from Wilson and largely split the black vote statewide, the threshold for a second Republican to get into the runoff with Landry becomes much lower and possibly even attainable.

The problem there becomes which one, because if Waguespack and Schroder split the non-Landry GOP vote somewhat equally, with a few percent of that being siphoned off by Sharon Hewitt or Richard Nelson, you’re still looking at either Wilson or Williams in the runoff with Landry.

And if it’s Williams, the chance of beating Landry is absolutely nil. White Democrats would likely vote for Landry over Williams, and the Louisiana Democrat Party would have an exceptionally difficult time ever shaking a pro-criminal image.

Not that Shawn Wilson, the transportation secretary presiding over an utterly incompetent department which hasn’t managed to complete a pair of flyover ramps from I-10 to the New Orleans airport just three blocks away in four years since that new airport terminal opened, has any real chance of winning the election either.

There are people out there who will tell you that this Williams For Governor idea is a Waguespack trick. We find that a bit questionable, and in that Advocate piece Williams denied he’s been consulting with Waguespack. Of course, that isn’t how it works, obviously – your handlers talk to the other guy’s handlers, and then you can deny you talked to the other guy without technically lying.

Then again, Williams parroted the narrative a pro-Waguespack PAC is pushing – namely that the crime wave in the state’s major cities is Jeff Landry’s fault. So it’s understandable that people might see collusion there.

We could say more about this, but right now it’s really just an idea rather than a real thing.

But now might be a good time to reiterate that Louisiana ought to have party primaries. With party primaries it’s a lot harder to get the kind of manipulation that people suspect is at hand with Waguespack’s camp and Williams. In a party primary system Jason Williams’ only calculation would be whether he can beat Shawn Wilson for the nomination (and then obviously whether he could win the statewide election). Not this Butterfly Effect idiocy whereby Williams getting in would benefit some Republican candidate who might or might not then do favors down the road in recompense, etc.

We’ve had more than enough of that crap. It’s one of the key reasons why this state is such a dysfunctional mess. Jeff Sadow’s piece about how the Senate is slow-walking Danny McCormick’s constitutional carry bill is just another example of how the political animals keep this state from moving forward, and the jungle primary with all of its attendant manipulation and shenanigans is yet another.

We should have already moved to party primaries for federal and statewide races in advance of this election cycle. We haven’t. One thing we can say is that if Jason Williams does get into the race and the effect it produces is two Republicans in the runoff, then John Bel Edwards can choke on his tears as one of the leading opponents of reinstituting party primaries.