This past weekend, three Louisiana Republican gubernatorial candidates attended something called the Black Church Gubernatorial Forum, held on the campus of Southern University in Baton Rouge. The event was put on by a group of black pastors whose political affiliation is uniformly Democrat and mostly left-wing.

A few things can be taken from these appearances.

First, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that Democrat candidate Shawn Wilson and independent Hunter Lundy, a lifelong Democrat trial lawyer running as a Christian conservative, appeared at this event. For context, this forum was certainly not geared toward Louisiana conservative and Republican voters.

To say the least. The forum’s organizers outlined the agenda to be discussed by the candidates as…

• childhood education
• access to the governor’s office
• candidates administration
• HBCUs
• community violence
• working poor
• health literacy
• health disparities

In other words, a typical promise-fest covering all the free things to be conferred on the black community from the taxpayer dime – things which over generations of largesse have yielded scant little in the way of results for their intended recipients.

Everybody knows this.

But the forum was quite well attended by Republican gubernatorial candidates nonetheless. Stephen Waguespack, Sharon Hewitt, and Richard Nelson all made their way to the podium to pander to the assemblage. Jeff Landry and John Schroder, the other two major Republican candidates, declined to attend.

If you are curious, here is the event flyer for this forum:

As it happens, we have a summary of comments and actions made by Waguespack, Hewitt, and Nelson at this leftist forum.

Of the three GOP candidates listed, Waguespack has positioned himself the most as the moderate-conservative, Chamber of Commerce business candidate–considering his stints as Bobby Jindal’s chief of staff and the CEO of the Louisiana Association Business & Industry (LABI). Here is a Facebook post of Waguespack boasting about his attendance at this forum.

 

If you listen to Waguespack’s answers during the forum, you’ll find that all of his answers were tailored to appealing to Democrats, or at least middle-of-the-road moderates and RINO voters. This approach makes sense given a pro-Waguespack Super PAC’s TV attack ads on Jeff Landry.

That’s more about messaging to the audience and it’s excusable – “when in Rome.” Why he’s in Rome in the first place is a question, but so be it.

Now, we’ll move onto the second Republican gubernatorial candidate: Sharon Hewitt. After the forum ended, an event attendee asked Sharon Hewitt for her thoughts about Trump and Trump supporters. You could call Hewitt’s answer her “basket of deplorables” moment – and probably the end of her political career, for that matter.

“His [Trump] voters, the Far-right crazies … I don’t think I’ll vote for him [Trump] again if he’s on the ballot.” These comments stand in contrast to how Hewitt portrays herself on her campaign website. On her campaign website, she claims that she “fought against the radical Left and worked for family values” as a State Legislator. She even called herself a “conservative Republican” in her campaign announcement video.

Hewitt is just another politician who speaks out of both sides of her mouth. When she talks to conservatives, she talks a big game about being a principled conservative fighter. But when she talks to moderates and far-left progressives, Hewitt is willing to throw the “Far-right Crazies” who elected her under the bus.

You’ll remember that Sharon Hewitt was supposed to carry a bill returning Louisiana to a party primary elections system rather than the awful jungle primary we currently have. She refused to even file it, to the consternation and irritation of Republican voters and conservative activists. Now she trashes them as Far-Right Crazy Trumpers.

It’s even worse than that.

During the forum, Hewitt even talked about her support for a 4 Republican-2 Democrat Congressional map in Louisiana. Just one year ago, Hewitt drafted Legislation with a 5 Republican-1 Democrat Congressional map. So when Hewitt attended this gubernatorial forum, she was willing to disregard the interests of Louisiana Republicans and conservatives in order to pander to liberal and moderate voters.

But if you thought Hewitt’s response was terrible, then just wait for Richard Nelson. Nelson is the young, libertarian Republican candidate running for Governor. Listen to Nelson’s anti-conservative, “big-brained centrist” rhetoric:

Nelson, who calls himself a “bipartisan” state representative, talks a big game about fiscal responsibility and bad government policies. So then, what was Nelson’s vote on the pork-filled House Bill 560 that showered tens of millions of dollars upon Democrat districts? Oh wait, he voted YES. Not to mention, he also voted in favor of Senate Continuing Resolution 3–which busted the State budget spending cap and unleashed ruinous, wasteful pet project spending on Louisiana (including $1.5 million for Sen. Cleo Fields’ pet project, the Louisiana Leadership Institute, and a $250,000 splurge for band uniforms for Southern University). If Nelson couldn’t stand firm on these irresponsible bills, then can you really depend on him as your Governor? The answer is pretty clear here. Again, look at Nelson’s actions over his cute messaging.

Louisiana does not need a bipartisan, centrist-friendly governor. We’ve tried that, and all it gives us is a bigger and bigger government and a smaller and smaller economy, complete with poor educational results, shooting galleries for cities, moral degradation and a demoralized population making plans to leave. Conservatives are rightly tired of Republican politicians who will make a deal to sell them out at the first chance possible.

Pandering to black pastors and their parishioners at Southern sends a signal to conservative voters that some of the pols they’re being asked to consider voting for don’t really care about us. That said, the attendance of Waguespack, Hewitt, and Nelson at the Black Church Gubernatorial Forum does make some sense from a political standpoint.

Namely, that Waguespack, Nelson, and Hewitt all know that Jeff Landry will likely lock up the lion’s share of the conservative portion of the Louisiana electorate (which is a core of 45 percent of the electorate). Landry is polling at or near 30 percent in virtually all of the most recent surveys, which puts him at a solid two-thirds of the conservative vote. Schroder is drawing five or six percent in most of the polls, meaning there is very little conservative vote Waguespack, Nelson and Hewitt can add to their totals.

And with Wilson the only major black or Democrat candidate in the race, he’s got the inside track for some 40-45 percent of the vote. As Scott McKay pointed out last month, at present Wilson is polling in the 20’s in most surveys, which isn’t a particularly strong showing.

Making the jungle-primary runoff, then, might involve attempting to move to the Left and capture the undecided Democrat vote, and then try to consolidate that in the general with whatever RINO-lane support is gettable to beat Landry.

Essentially, this is a gubernatorial-race version of the end-around that Clay Schexnayder used to become the Speaker of the Louisiana House.

So by attending this Liberal forum, this trio signaled their decision to run as the RINO, moderate candidates in the jungle primary. This Republican trio believes that they have a shot as the RINO, moderate candidate due to Shawn Wilson’s weakness as a candidate.

One wonders whether the Black Church Gubernatorial Forum’s organizers weren’t aiming to identify someone in the RINO lane they could throw Wilson over for given how weakly he’s polling with the Democrat lane all to himself.

All this said, there isn’t any realistic chance that any one of the RINO trio (Waguespack, Hewitt, and Nelson) can make a run-off even with Shawn Wilson’s lackluster poll numbers. The RINO trio are still only polling in the single digits individually, and we’re about three months away from the October primary election. None of them have the kind of money needed to vault over either Landry or Wilson. Hewitt, for example, just released a new TV ad – and her current buy for it is all of $10,000, solely in the New Orleans market. That’s barely more than a waste of time and money.

But the sad reality is that Louisiana’s jungle primary system does not benefit Conservative voters and it needs to be trashed like so many other vestiges of Louisiana’s pathetic political past. Other Southern States with a closed primary system–like Tennessee and Florida–have much more conservative legislatures and governors than Louisiana.

Louisiana is overwhelmingly a conservative state. Issue polling and federal election results make that clear. But our elected officials do not currently reflect that reality due to the jungle primary. Hopefully, electing an authentic conservative to the governor’s mansion this year will change the tide in Louisiana politics away from RINOs and more towards MAGA, America First candidates.

We should look forward to the day the Louisiana Legislature will have solid conservatives like Arizona’s Wendy Rogers or Florida’s Anthony Sabatini filling the Legislature instead of RINOs like Clay Schexnayder, Joe Stagni, and Fred Mills.

Louisiana conservatives must elect a conservative fighter to the Governor’s mansion this Fall–not a RINO. Our state’s future depends on it. And pandering to the hard-core Democrat vote in hopes of displacing a Democrat in the runoff, while perhaps justifiable as a desperation heave, sends a signal that Waguespack, Hewitt and Nelson can’t be trusted to supply the conservative leadership we so painfully lack.

 

Nathan Koenig is a is a frequent contributor to RVIVR.com, a national conservative political site affiliated with The Hayride. Follow his writing on Twitter @ConservativeTin and on Instagram @tincanconservative. Email him here: thechristianmajority@gmail.com