We expected this all along, and there isn’t really any polling to speak of out there, but the buzz we keep hearing from the campaign-insider crowd is that Louisiana solicitor general Liz Murrill is beginning to pull away in the race for Attorney General.

That isn’t a big surprise if it’s true. Murrill, after all, has the endorsement of the Louisiana Sheriff’s Association, pretty much the entire state congressional delegation (at least, the ones who’ve made endorsements), Sen. John Kennedy, her current boss Jeff Landry, whose job she’s running for as he seeks to move up to the governor’s mansion, the Republican Attorney Generals Association, and most of the money which has made its way into the race. Murrill has raised better than $2.5 million, which is a staggering amount for a candidate for Attorney General, and it’s starting to hit the airwaves.

She has this ad running…

It’s interesting that the first ad she put up on the air is about fighting crime, when the real advantage Murrill has on her resume is that she’s been Joe Biden’s worst nightmare as solicitor general. Murrill has run point on almost 40 different lawsuits the state has filed against the Biden administration attacking its overreach, the most recent one being a case in which Louisiana went after the Biden administration for its walkback of offshore oil leases in the Gulf supposedly to save the endangered and newly-discovered Rice’s whale…

🔥BREAKING: MURRILL DEFEATS BIDEN, WINS FOR LOUISIANA, HELPING SAVE OIL AND GAS JOBS. Under Liz's leadership in the legal case, a U.S. District Court last night ruled Oil and Gas gulf lease sales must move forward and expand.#lalege #lagov pic.twitter.com/DYq64mtGXX

— Liz Murrill (@LizMurrillforLA) September 22, 2023

Without having any inside info we would guess the ad talking about her work taking on Team Biden in court is probably the closing message as we get nearer to the October 14 primary.

Murrill has some $1.5 million on hand, according to the last round of campaign finance disclosures, while fellow Republican John Stefanski, a state representative and self-described country lawyer from Crowley, has some $627,000. That’s enough to go up on TV, and Stefanski has…

So his message is that he’s a crimefighter, which is Murrill’s message as well.

And in case you weren’t aware that the AG’s race so far is focused on crime, this is the PAC ad which is trashing Stefanski…

It’s a pretty brutal ad, and the Louisiana Freedom Fund, which is Murrill’s PAC, is dumping some pretty serious money into it.

Is it fair? Well, the “Set ‘Em Free” business is a reference to Stefanski’s participation in the criminal justice reform legislation passed mostly during John Bel Edwards’ first term. The authors of those bills picked up, in some cases, the “set ’em free” moniker – though that was most notably something House Speaker Pro Tem Tanner Magee – “Set ‘Em Free Magee” – had attached to him. In Magee’s case it was quite possibly the deciding factor in his losing a judicial race and then ultimately deciding not to run for re-election.

That some of what Stefanski does in his professional life as a lawyer is criminal defense work just adds to the picture, though it isn’t altogether fair to declare him a bleeding heart, pro-criminal leftist just because he defends the occasional criminal case.

But it’s worth noting that Murrill’s camp, which is for most practical purposes Jeff Landry’s camp, has never been particularly favorable to that criminal justice reform package passed in Edwards’ first term. Though it’s a hotly debated issue, there is at least some correlation between the passage of the criminal justice reform bills and the release of a few thousand inmates from the state’s jails and a spike in crime in Louisiana’s cities. Does that equal causation? We don’t know, and it’s something we probably should have a debate about as the political class concocts some strategies for doing something about the crime explosion in Louisiana. There is, in fact, a task force meeting about that very question in advance of next year’s legislative session – with an eye toward rolling back some of those reforms.

Another Republican candidate, Marty Maley, is in the race. Maley, an attorney from Baton Rouge, has run for AG before; he’s got about $30,000 in the bank which isn’t enough for much of a media presence.

The expectation seems to be that Murrill will be in the runoff against a Democrat trial lawyer named Lindsey Cheek, or Lindsey Cheeks as some of her supporters apparently call her…

This campaign is bigger than just one person. It’s about building a Louisiana we all can be proud of.

That’s why I’m traveling across the state to speak to voters and hear what matters most to them. #LindseyCheekforAg #CheekforAG #AGforAllLouisianans #lagov #lalege pic.twitter.com/HYZ1SpkcI6

— Lindsey Cheek (@LindseyCheek4AG) September 12, 2023

Cheek has about $325,000 in cash on hand and the Democrat Attorneys General Association has backed her in the race over another Democrat lawyer, Perry Terrebonne. She worked as a prosecutor before hanging up a shingle as an attorney, so when this thing goes to a runoff, if it’s a Murrill-Cheek race, we can expect that the focus on crime will continue.

Or maybe not. If it’s down to Murrill and a Democrat, given how red Louisiana is it might well be that the runoff could be all about how best to defend the state’s interests against the Green New Tyranny of the Biden administration and its nonstop federal overreaches.

We’ll see if that debate materializes. So far, though, we don’t see a lot of reason to doubt Murrill is ultimately going to win this race by a significant margin, and most of the smart money seems to be heading in that direction.