Despite the fact that he’s only polling around one percent in the latest Louisiana governor’s race survey, Richard Nelson exiting the race and backing the frontrunner is potentially a big deal.
Potentially. We’ll see.
Today, I am withdrawing from the #lagov race, and endorsing @JeffLandry.
I am proud of the impact we've made on this race, and thankful for my supporters and especially my family for the sacrifices they've made.
My heart will always be committed to Louisiana, and that is why I… pic.twitter.com/IPBvpqhxK4
— Richard Nelson (@NelsonforLA) September 20, 2023
You’d say it was a waste for him to give up his legislative seat for a long-shot gubernatorial bid, but it wasn’t much of a secret that Richard Nelson didn’t like being a state representative.
It’s kind of hard to blame him after having to deal with the backstabbing and incompetence of “Man Of His Word” Clay Schexnayder as Speaker of the House for four years, but we digress.
Nelson has put his name in for the open job as the president of the Louisiana Association of Business and Industry, and he’d be an interesting choice for that position. We have no idea how he ranks among LABI’s candidates, but now we’ll have a better opportunity to see how that’s going to play out.
But as it relates to the makeup of the governor’s race, Nelson’s exit and endorsement of Landry likely puts another 1 or 1.5 percent into Landry’s column, which on straight numbers using yesterday’s Trafalgar Group poll of the race would kick Landry up from 37.7 percent to 39 percent.
But the question we don’t have an answer to is whether Nelson getting out moves any undecided vote to Landry. Trafalgar found just under 15 percent undecided among their respondents, and while it’s likely that half of that or more are Democrats who aren’t sold on Shawn Wilson, there is a contingent among that group for whom Nelson was an option.
Can Nelson deliver three or four percent out of those undecideds to Landry? We don’t know. Maybe.
It’s hard to quantify what political momentum can do for a candidate.
The other factor, or perhaps the other shoe to drop, might be Sharon Hewitt. Now that Nelson is out, Hewitt – who Trafalgar has at 4.1 percent in the latest survey – currently sits at the bottom of the pack.
She’s eminently qualified for a cabinet position. She’s been very muted in her criticism of Landry, unlike, for example, Stephen Waguespack and John Schroder. Could something percolate there?
Maybe. Who knows?
What we’re driving at is the only real drama left in the gubernatorial race – which is whether Landry can stitch together a coalition which gets him to 50 percent plus one on Election Night in October, and therefore close out the race before it gets to a runoff.
That’s not a more-likely-than-not scenario, but it’s not impossible. Particularly when Wilson’s campaign is as low-energy as it is and Waguespack, Schroder and Hunter Lundy are all scuffling around in the 5-7 percent range. Give Landry Nelson’s votes and he’s at 39, add Hewitt’s votes and he’s at 43, give him 3-4 more percent out of the undecideds and now he’s at 46 or 47, and all he has to do is pick off a few more votes either through a really good get-out-the-vote effort or from Waguespack or Schroder or Lundy voters who know their guy is going to lose and just vote for the one who’s going to win, and maybe he might close out the race.
From a conservative perspective that could be a great thing – in that it would give Landry the kind of mandate Bobby Jindal had when he won big in the 2007 gubernatorial primary. Of course, Jindal was saddled with a Democrat-majority legislature, so the sweeping reforms the state needed simply weren’t available then.
They will be now. And if Landry could stump for some potential key allies in legislative runoff races, he might be able to claim an even larger mandate than Jindal.
One wonders whether Nelson saw that when he decided to drop out and endorse Landry.