Our guess is that very few people watched the gubernatorial debate put on by WBRZ-TV, WWL-TV, The Advocate and a few other media outlets along with the Urban League and the Public Affairs Research Council last night.

Gubernatorial debates tend not to matter much, and in Louisiana they’re usually pretty much unwatchable. Most debates in general are unwatchable – you give a candidate 60 seconds to respond to a giant policy question, and the best you can expect is a canned response which maybe contains something mildly interesting.

We’ve never had even much of that in our debates. Instead what we typically get is stupid bickering.

And what we always get in these debates, particularly every four years when the local legacy media drags the candidates in for these high-profile quiz shows, is a host of left-leaning questions designed to trip up conservatives and encourage everyone to promise more and “better” government.

Which is one reason why the overwhelming favorite to win this year’s gubernatorial election, Attorney General Jeff Landry, took the advice of the state GOP and rebuffed the invite from the left-leaning consortium putting on last night’s debate. Landry was the winner for having done so.

As was Richard Nelson for having not been invited.

Because Landry and Nelson got to skip an hour-long snooze-fest filled with questions based on false premise after false premise that the contestants were given 60 seconds to spout answers to.

What can you do to assure residents of “Cancer Alley” that you as governor will keep them from dying of cancer?

Will you give public school teachers (who work for local school districts and not the state) a permanent pay raise out of the state treasury?

How will you fight crime when locking up criminals didn’t stop it in the past?

The moderators, Eric Paulsen and Charisse Gibson of WWL-TV, even brought up the idiotic stunt the NAACP pulled when it issued a “travel advisory” against people coming to Louisiana because the state is supposedly “hostile” to LGBTQ Alphabet people – having to do with Louisiana’s legislature passing a ban on the genital mutilation of children – and asked what the candidates had to say about that.

It was a mess, and a boring mess at that. Between Sharon Hewitt shilling for the great positive economic effects of carbon capture wells, which produce useful economic benefits other than drawing down government subsidy dollars, Hunter Lundy babbling about the necessity of the government injecting three-year-olds into public schools, Shawn Wilson calling it “investing in Louisiana” when he shilled for keeping John Bel Edwards’ rapacious 0.45-cent sales tax increase and Stephen Waguespack calling for an injection of social workers and “support” personnel to bloat the budgets of public schools even more, all you heard was more government, more government and more government.

It wasn’t their fault, though Lundy and Wilson are certainly big-government leftists who get off on the idea that we aren’t redistributing enough money from the private sector to bureaucrats and politicians. The questions were designed to turn the debate into a contest of who could promise the largest expansion of the public sector.

The only way to win that game is not to play.

Landry didn’t play and he won, and Nelson wasn’t invited to play and he won.

Of those who did take part, it was probably Waguespack’s night. He had the cleanest and most detailed answers, and he was the best communicator of the five. Most of what he said was indistinguishable from the rhetoric Bobby Jindal offered in 2003, 2007 and 2011, but that’s not a particular complaint – a lot of that was correct when Jindal said it and it still is, and where Jindal fell short was properly implementing it. Wags did manage to score a little when he disputed the Cancer Alley premise by noting that those awful chemical plants produce a whole lot of jobs and wealth for the people in that area of the state who are supposedly victims, and that most of the Cancer Alley narrative is cooked-up by out-of-state leftist advocacy groups (which is true). That earned him a scolding from Paulsen, who retorted that, why, WWL has done STORIES on Cancer Alley and therefore it couldn’t possibly be overblown.

Waguespack had the opportunity to say that just because a leftist TV station doing the bidding of a well-heeled leftist advocacy group puts something on its air, it doesn’t mean that something is gospel. He didn’t go there, which was too bad; that could have been a moment which separated him from the others.

Schroder spent his closing argument seething that Landry wasn’t at the debate, which was a wasted moment, and that built upon several answers he gave which showed a real disinterest in in the question. It’s hard to blame him for that, but the overall picture came off as someone who didn’t want to be there and resented the fact that he couldn’t join Landry in skipping.

And Hewitt came off as a corporate suit without much of anything meaningful to say, which (1) explains why she’s mired at the bottom of the pack in the polls and (2) is unfortunate, because she has more to offer than that. She lacked fire and individuality; her responses sounded like something ChatGPT would spit out other than when she cheerled the carbon capture epidemic in the state. Another lowlight was Hewitt’s claim that law enforcement had solved widespread heroin use, something which is most certainly not in evidence.

And anyone who was tempted to buy into the narrative of Hunter Lundy The Christian Conservative Independent was disabused of that notion in no small way last night. Lundy might as well be Ralph Nader for all the old-school trial lawyer cant coming out of his mouth. He could rattle off every toxic tort lawsuit in Louisiana by rote, but when it came to actual economic development all he could do was babble about solar panels and “green” hydrogen, as though the Green New Deal is somehow the way Louisiana will catch up to the prosperity of Texas, Tennessee and Florida. Any uncommitted Republican voters watching last night would have had to cross Lundy off their list as he vigorously disqualified himself.

Which left Wilson, who did everything he could not to disqualify himself and therefore was barely noticeable. He’s obviously a big-government socialist and he’s bought into the Critical Race Theory narrative, but he wanted to make sure nobody actually held that against him. So instead he said nothing, babbling incessantly about the successes, such as they were, of the Edwards administration and offering “me too” responses everywhere he could. In the end it was difficult to see any reason why a voter of any political persuasion would want to vote for him.

But you get that when all they’ve got is 60 seconds to answer those questions.

Why bother attending?

Landry will be debating next week, at a forum televised by the Nexstar TV stations around the state. It might be overly optimistic to hope the format or the questions will be any better. Here’s hoping that if they aren’t, he or some of the others will call out the moderators for their false premises and dumb questions.