Following an Advocate story over the weekend, there’s a lot of talk centered around the Louisiana governor’s race about whether Jeff Landry is steamrolling his way to office with the support of the plaintiff bar.
Big donations from trial attorneys helped power John Bel Edwards to victory in the 2015 and 2019 governor’s races.
This time, however, lawyers are pouring money into electing Attorney General Jeff Landry, a Republican who has been Democratic Gov. Edwards’ biggest foe.
Landry and the groups supporting him have raised at least $700,000 so far from trial attorneys, who have long been supportive of Democrats. The amount outpaced how much Edwards – who once sat on the board of the trial attorneys’ association in Louisiana — raised from them at this point in the 2019 race.
The lawyers’ support for Landry adds to the uphill climb for former Transportation Secretary Shawn Wilson, a Democrat who is running as Edwards’ political heir. Wilson has been counting on trial attorneys to fund attacks against Landry that weaken his support.
But behind the scenes, trial lawyers say that Landry has been cultivating them, telling them they would have nothing to fear from him as governor and that he would be their best choice among the five Republican candidates.
That argument has won over some lawyers – including John Carmouche, whose Baton Rouge law firm spent millions attacking Edwards’ opponents in 2015 and 2019. Others now support Landry simply because they expect him to win the election. A recent poll found him leading the field with 36% of the vote.
We’ve talked about this before, but one thing which the last three governor’s races in Louisiana proved pretty conclusively is that given the way politics and money work in this state, it’s a dumb idea to antagonize the trial lawyers if you want to win.
In 2011, Bobby Jindal – who had done nothing to antagonize the plaintiff bar before his 2007 run, and saw very meager opposition from Foster Campbell, Walter Boasso and John Georges that year – made peace with the trial lawyers and in fact held a good many big-money fundraising events hosted by members of the plaintiff bar. There was zero serious effort made at tort reform during his time in office, which many criticized, but on the other hand Jindal had no opposition at all because the Democrats’ chief source of campaign funding in Louisiana went dormant.
But in 2015, David Vitter came out strongly as a tort reformer and put a detailed plan together which was generally recognized as likely burning most of the plaintiff bar to the ground. For Vitter’s trouble he was set upon by the hyper-funded Democrat political action committee Gumbo PAC. Gumbo PAC’s ads never had anything to do with tort reform or the legal profession at all. Instead they were about hookers, because the Democrat political consultants in charge of Gumbo PAC’s millions of dollars in campaign funds saw that as the only real opportunity to burn Vitter down.
And some $15 million or so in independent expenditures later, Vitter wasn’t a conservative U.S. Senator with a fairly distinguished policy record but instead a whoremongering villain bent on oppressing all the usual oppressed people. Vitter limped into the runoff trailing blood, the two other Republicans in the race carping at him all the way, and he was slaughtered in the runoff by a trial lawyer Democrat in John Bel Edwards.
Then in 2019, Eddie Rispone, a business leader and a tort reform champion able to self-fund his race, opened his campaign by buying billboards along I-1o and putting up signage to the effect that he bought the billboard so one of the trial lawyers couldn’t. Rispone supported legislative efforts to limit advertising by attorneys, and came out strongly against “legacy lawsuits” and the coastal lawsuits against oil companies.
That pricked up the ears of the plaintiff bar and Gumbo PAC roared into life again. And just like in Vitter’s race they didn’t attack Rispone on tort reform or lawyer advertising or any of that. Instead there was a never-ending procession of ads like this…
Any astute observer of Louisiana politics over the last 15 years or so would recognize that to antagonize the trial lawyers would be to ask for a much more difficult race for governor.
And Jeff Landry is nothing but an astute observer of Louisiana politics.
So yes – Landry has broken bread with the Glenn Armentors and Gordon McKernans of the world. As a result, the Republican Party of Louisiana has mostly-full coffers as it hasn’t had for quite some time, because the plaintiff bar has been dumping money into Landry-affiliated organizations.
Does this mean that Landry is owned by the trial lawyers? Baton Rouge industrial contractor Lane Grigsby, who has for a long time been the most visible opponent of plaintiff-bar political activity, says no. As quoted in the Advocate story…
Grigsby, the Baton Rouge business owner, expressed little worry that Landry will side with trial lawyers.
“I don’t believe Jeff will give up anything on tort issues,” Grigsby said. “He recognizes that Louisiana is among the leading states in lawsuit abuse. If a good tort reform hits his desk, it will be signed with fanfare.”
To Grigsby, the donations simply represent an effort to buy access to the candidate favored to be the next governor.
“Where else are the lawyers going to put their money?” Grigsby asked. “Shawn Wilson? They don’t have a choice. They don’t play with losers. They want to maintain at least a cordial relationship. Just because you give a politician money, you don’t buy them.”
Grigsby isn’t moved by arguments that, for example, Landry threw in with Carmouche and the other plaintiff lawyers in those coastal lawsuits against oil and gas. That wasn’t one of the great moments in Louisiana political history, but on the other hand all Landry did in signing off on the Freeport McMoRan settlement was to pass it along to the state legislature, where it then died. It was an example of not standing in the way of bullets from Carmouche while also not giving him anything.
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It might not have been the most principled action he could take as a pro-oil and gas politician, which he’s proven to be through a myriad of lawsuits against the Biden administration (most recently over the BOEM’s sue-and-settle deal supposedly protecting the Rice’s whale), but it did make for smart politics.
We’ve said this for a long time: Louisiana operates on the 45-15-30-10 rule. The 45 represents the 45 percent of the state’s electorate which is unapologetically conservative and will vote for the rightmost candidate it can find. The 15 represents the 15 percent who are mostly conservative but often find ways not to vote with the 45; in Edwards’ two races, most or all of them went away from Vitter and Rispone. The 30 is the 30 percent of the vote who are black, and the 10 is the white liberals and leftists.
You have to be able to get half of the 15 if you want to win statewide. Vitter and Rispone proved you can’t do that if you energize the trial lawyers to spend money against you – it’s not that the trial lawyers are popular in Louisiana, but millions of dollars in negative ads will peel off votes of the 15 from a conservative candidate.
But here’s the question: if Landry’s strategy of not antagonizing the plaintiff bar works and he goes in as governor, does he then have the chutzpah to roll the trial lawyers over and craft a meaningful tort reform plan? Or does he do like Jindal and leave those issues alone, which would probably greatly impinge upon his ability to restart Louisiana’s economic growth after eight years of utter stagnation and decline under Edwards?
Barring some other separate peace he might strike with them – we’d be perfectly happy, for example, if Landry cut a deal with the trial lawyers to push legislation opening the doors for a rash of lawsuits in Louisiana targeting Big Tech, China and well-heeled environmental groups pushing climate nonsense which damages our energy sector in exchange for some relief on car wreck lawsuits – Landry’s either lying to somebody or he’s going to get stuck trying to play King Solomon and split the baby between the warring groups.
Which is why we think the legislative elections are so crucial this year. Because if Landry is going to be the governor and he’s made no explicit promises to anyone, something the Advocate piece says is the case, then the direction things move in will depend on the makeup of the House and Senate.
The trial lawyers are definitely playing in those races. Whether their candidates have much of a chance to win is going to be an interesting question.
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