This morning at The American Spectator I’ve got a column up talking about how the statewide election cycle is shaping up…

And while the South has experienced a renaissance of capital formation, in-migration, and economic growth over the past eight years, Louisiana has been mired in decline. Over Edwards’ time in office, almost 200,000 people have vanished in net out-migration, a number that would rate as the fourth-largest city in Louisiana were it a municipal population. Morale among Louisianans is at an all-time low.

Why? Because while other Southern states like Texas, Tennessee, and Florida have no state income tax and other Louisiana neighbors like Mississippi and Arkansas are now in the process of phasing theirs out, Louisiana maintains its own punishment of economic achievement — at the same time carrying on with one of, if not the, highest combined state and local sales tax burdens in America.

We’re an island of taxation in a sea of freedom among our neighbors, as Louisiana Freedom Caucus PAC board member Barry Hugghins is wont to say.

This is all very depressing stuff, and Louisianans are very much depressed by it.

But as we’ve interacted with people through polling, events, fundraising efforts, and candidate calls over the past several months, we’ve noted that along with that depression is a seething rage and a determination to do something about it.

There’s a red wave building in Louisiana.

You don’t have to take my word for this, though. The signs are all around. Here’s an example: former Louisiana Democrat Party executive director Stephen Handwerk, whose claims to fame involve his work on behalf of a Barney Frank-affiliated political action committee and his membership in the unofficial “mean girls” club which for a time filled up Twitter with nasty tweets about David Vitter and Eddie Rispone during John Bel Edwards’ 2015 and 2019 gubernatorial campaigns, is now leaving Louisiana because of how scary the state is for “alphabet people” like him…

Shortly after taking his hand off the bible in his first term, Governor John Bel Edwards signed an executive order protecting LGBTQ people from discrimination. He followed in the steps of previous Democratic governors.  Jeff Landry, our current attorney general, fought tooth and nail to be able to discriminate against us. We lost that round in the courts, sadly. Even with that loss, the governor never stopped fighting for us.

During this governor’s service, we beat back terribly discriminatory legislation against our families. We even witnessed the Governor hiring our first-ever openly trans press secretary, too!  Never once did our governor flinch in his support or realization that we are residents and taxpayers just like everyone else and that we deserved to be treated no better than, but certainly not worse than others in this state.

Recently, fueled by hate and disinformation, we have seen legislation banning books that acknowledge our existence and that stand between our kids and us in healthcare decisions. Even now as I write this, Attorney General Jeff Landry, who is trying desperately to be the next governor, is chasing women across state lines as they flee the state to save their own lives and receive healthcare.

Hate crimes are on the rise. Bigotry is on display everywhere you look fueled by an unchecked right wing that is hell-bent on fomenting this “us vs. them” mentality – as if Equality was some sort of zero-sum game.

We quickly came to the conclusion earlier this year that it is no longer safe for us to live in Louisiana. If you are a woman, LGBTQ, Black or really anything other than a middle-aged white heterosexual man, it is just not safe to live in Louisiana.

Handwerk’s overwrought shrieking is fairly comical, considering that this is all a fraud. He’s leaving Louisiana because his husband, who’s the actual breadwinner in the household, got a well-paying job in Michigan.

In other words he’s leaving for the same reason some 200,000 people on net have left Louisiana during Edwards’ time in the governor’s mansion – better economic opportunities elsewhere. He just doesn’t want to admit that, because it would be an indication that this is what you get when left-wing Democrats run things, and he himself is a left-wing Democrat.

So when the truth hurts, make up some other damn thing to say. And Louisiana Is A Homophobic Wasteland sounds more sympathetic than Louisiana Is Run By Democrats Like Me So Everybody Is Broke.

This supposed dark turn among the people of the state isn’t cultural, it’s political. Handwerk sees that the public is turning hard against the cultural Marxism of the national Democrat Party which he’s fully invested in, and that’s the red wave coming, so he’s denouncing it on his way out.

Of course, if this bigotry he decries is so noxious, then it ought to be relatively easy to recruit candidates to counter it, no?

No. At least, according to the candidate list for this fall’s elections.

We can’t find a single statewide race where the Democrats have a viable candidate. They’ve got a couple of people who can force a runoff in races where there are multiple GOP candidates. Dustin Granger for state treasurer is one, Gwen Collins-Greenup in the secretary of state race is another, Shawn Wilson in the gubernatorial race is obviously a decent bet. Maybe one of their candidates for attorney general can make a runoff. In all of those cases the Democrat would be lucky to pull more than 40-42 percent.

And it isn’t much better in legislative races.

Other than Jay Luneau, we can’t see a single white Democrat in the Senate races who has a realistic chance to win. The black Democrats will hold all the majority-black seats outside of Luneau’s, but right now it looks an awful lot like you’ll have 28 Republicans and 11 Democrats in the Louisiana Senate, which is the worst number ever in Louisiana for that party.

And in the House, it’s almost that bad. Republicans are going to hold at least 70 seats, possibly more, and outside of the majority-black districts we’re seeing no more than a tiny handful of races where a Democrat is likely to win. Aimee Freeman and Mandie Landry (or one of her challengers) in uptown New Orleans, Mack Cormier or Joanna Cappiello-Leopold in Belle Chasse, perhaps Robby Carter can hang on in St. Helena Parish against a black Democrat challenger, and that’s about it. And if the rumors are true that Chad Brown, who ran unopposed for his seat in Iberville Parish, will take a job working for newly-elected insurance commissioner Tim Temple, the special election next year for that seat is likely to produce either a black Democrat or a Republican.

In other words, the Louisiana Democrat Party has never been in worse shape than it is right now.

Which means it isn’t just Handwerk who’s now dumping on the state. This showed up at the Hard Left Daily Kos website…

LA Ballot: Louisiana will become the first state in the nation to let voters weigh in on a proposal to ban private funding for elections this fall, an effort that comes after years of conservative conspiracy theories about Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s role in the 2020 presidential election. No one has released any polls of the Oct. 14 contest over Amendment 1, which will take place the same day that the Pelican State holds its all-party primary for governor, but a prominent local voting rights advocate tells Bolts’ Alex Burness he’s pessimistic about opponents’ chances.

Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, announced in October 2020 that they would donate $350 million to the Center for Tech and Civic Life, a nonprofit that provided grants to cash-strapped election officials at a time when the pandemic resulted in a massive increase of mail-in voting; other organizations, including Google and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, also made large contributions. “Honestly, I don’t know what we would have done without it,” one local elections administrator in Pennsylvania told NPR. “This grant really was a lifesaver in allowing us to do more, efficiently and expeditiously.”

But while CTCL’s grants, as Burness writes, went to 47 states, Louisiana was not one of them, even though Republican Secretary of State Kyle Ardoin at first encouraged parish clerks to apply. (Parishes are the state’s equivalent of counties.) But Attorney General Jeff Landry, a far-right Republican who is now the frontrunner to succeed termed-out Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards, responded by telling clerks that state law forbade them from taking outside money, even though there was no such law on the books. Landry went on to file a lawsuit baselessly alleging that CTCL was trying to send the money to certain areas of the state as part of “an inherently insidious and corrupting effect.”

The head of the state’s association of election clerks, Debbie Hudnall, told the Louisiana Illuminator in response that there was no sign at all that CTCL had any partisan agenda. Hudnall, though, said that Landry’s team said he’d sue any clerk who tried to obtain funding, an account the attorney general’s office denied. Landry nevertheless succeeded: Louisiana, along with Delaware and Wyoming, was one of just three states that did not receive any funds from the nonprofit.

Following Donald Trump’s defeat that fall, Big Lie spreaders responded by throwing out evidence-free accusations that the money from Zuckerberg was used to advance an imagined pro-Joe Biden conspiracy. The Anti-Defamation League warned that such rhetoric was an antisemitic dog whistle insinuating that “rich Jews are controlling levers of power.” (Zuckerberg is Jewish.)

However, Republicans in Louisiana were eager to join in. “The use of private money to finance public elections, or ‘Zuckerbucks,’ is the gravest danger that our nation faces, bar none,” wrote state GOP chair Louis Gurvich last year. “Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong-in [sic], and the Ayatollah combined do not threaten our republic as severely as does the loss of confidence in the fairness of our elections.”

Legislatures in 25 states have now passed laws to restrict or ban private money from being used for elections, but Edwards has used his veto pen to prevent Louisiana from becoming the 26th for now. However, while GOP legislators haven’t been able to muster up quite enough support to override the governor, who has blasted their efforts as an “unnecessary political ploy,” they enlisted the help of 10 House Democrats in June to place their new plan on the ballot as Amendment 1. Unlike the bills Edwards blocked, though, the amendment also says it would ban election funding from “foreign government[s],” text critics argue was inserted to raise the specter of another nonexistent threat.

Burness writes that there’s been no well-funded campaign to promote or defeat the proposal, though Peter Robins-Brown of the nonprofit Louisiana Progress believes it’s sure to pass. Burness summarized Robins-Brown’s fears, writing that “without context, many people of varying political stripes will likely be persuaded by the argument that a private or foreign interest shouldn’t be sending Louisiana money to perform basic governmental operations.”

Robins-Brown also said that Amendment 1 wouldn’t fix any actual problems plaguing Louisiana’s under-funded elections. “If you’re going to do this, you also need to make sure that election administration is fully funded, and that’s where I think there’s the element of potential bad faith here,” he told Burness. “You’re going after this one piece of the larger puzzle without addressing the underlying problem, which is underfunding of election administration.”

That problem, though, isn’t being addressed in the state. “The state is scrambling to make sure they have enough machines for everyone, but we can’t get them anymore,” said Bridget Hanna, the Republican clerk of reliably red Ascension Parish, who told Burness her equipment is now nearly two decades old. “We’re just hanging on.”

So we have “underfunded” elections, we hate blacks, women, gays and transgenders, and Democrats aren’t even bothering to run for office around here anymore.

It sounds like the Left is giving up on Louisiana. One wonders why things would be so bleak for them after eight years of John Bel Edwards in office, but there you are.

In any event, the hard right turn is coming. It’ll be obvious on October 14 if it isn’t right now.