It took three election cycles for the Louisiana Republican Party to do what should have been done in 2015, namely to elect a GOP governor to follow Bobby Jindal, but when the dam finally broke last night it broke big. Jeff Landry dominated a huge jungle-primary field of 14 candidates and captured 52 percent of the vote in avoiding a runoff, and in doing so Landry appears to have triggered an entirely new era in Louisiana politics.

For going on 100 years now, this state has governed itself according to the paradigm laid forth by Huey Long – namely, that Louisiana would provide the largest possible nanny-state government paid for by confiscatory business taxes, derived mostly from the exploitation of our substantial mineral wealth, and the swag to be provided to the poor would distribute chiefly from the state capitol in Baton Rouge.

The state flag, which preceded Long’s arrival by about 15 years (it was adopted in 1912), nevertheless personifies his enduring style of governance, It’s a mother pelican bleeding herself at the breast to sustain baby pelicans – who never grow up, leave the nest or become self-sufficient.

We can’t say that the state flag will go by the boards in Jeff Landry’s Louisiana, but we can say that it would be a powerful signal of a new paradigm if it did.

Because Landry has an opportunity and a mandate to remake Louisiana.

The thing to understand is that Republicans garnered some 64 percent of the vote in Saturday’s gubernatorial primary, and that was despite some fairly listless campaigns outside of Landry who were nevertheless carrying very similar messages to his – variations on the theme that the basic assumptions of how the state is to be governed are wrong and generate doleful effects on our populace.

This was hardly a surprise. It has showed up in polls for years. Better than two-thirds of Louisiana’s people have said consistently that the state has been headed in the wrong direction, and a WPA Intelligence poll the Louisiana Freedom Caucus PAC commissioned back in the spring found that 68 percent of likely-voter respondents said Louisiana’s state government doesn’t provide good value for their state tax dollar.

That poll also found that, by a 64-25 margin, Louisiana’s likely voters want the state income tax abolished EVEN IF it means that the state budget has to be cut to “pay for” the abolition of that tax.

Numbers like that signal that it’s time for the state’s centralized tax-and-spend philosophy which puts an eye of Sauron atop the Capitol building and turns it into a locus of political and economic power, to go away. That hasn’t generated a functional state economy. It certainly hasn’t led to prosperity or an increasing population. What it has led to is crippling corruption, a business community which is sclerotic and a population which doesn’t believe in the state’s future.

Long’s legacy in Louisiana, which was only slightly modified by successors like his brother Earl, Edwin Edwards and John Bel Edwards, has made this state a northern outpost of Latin America – with a similar problem of outmigration and a similar dead private sector.

Everybody has known for a long time that Louisiana couldn’t continue governing itself that way. Not when Texas, Tennessee, Florida and other neighboring states have taken turns vaulting past us with burgeoning private sectors and healthy, optimistic and growing middle class populations. You can only go so long getting your ass kicked by Texas and Florida before the pain is enough to do something about it.

Is that where we are?

The interesting thing here was that the turnout on Saturday was just under 36 percent. You’d look at that and say it belies the idea there’s a groundswell for change.

But what’s more true is to say that the opposition to changing the Longite socialist mindset has mostly melted away. It wasn’t conservatives and Republicans who failed to turn out. It was Democrat voters. And specifically, it was black voters, who made up only 24 percent of the electorate despite being just under a third of the registered voters in the state.

If I look at white/black turnout from EDay and add in the early vote, I get an estimated racial breakdown like this:

EARLY: 71-26% white/black
EDAY: 72-23% white/black
TOTAL: 72-24% white/black

IOW, Shawn got weak black turnout/did not dominate among black voters.

— John Couvillon (@WinWithJMC) October 15, 2023

Essentially, they just gave up. It was a tacit admission that Bel Edwards, the latest iteration of the Longite socialist approach to government, was a failure.

Shawn Wilson, the Democrat sacrificial lamb put forward by Edwards to carry his standard into the slaughter, carried just 70 percent of the majority-black precincts in the state. Landry only managed 12 percent of the vote in those precincts; the other 18 was split among all the minor candidates, but the important bit was that Wilson neither consolidated the black vote nor turned it out.

We’ll have a lot more about that in a later post in this series.

The point being that Landry essentially made the enemy quit.

He made them quit because he ran the best gubernatorial campaign Louisiana has seen probably since Edwin Edwards’ 1983 clobbering of Dave Treen. Landry did four things no other Republican has effectively done, and most would refuse to do; all four of them point to him as the most skilled politician operating in this state since Edwin Edwards.

The first was that Landry committed to the race well in advance and asked for the sale.

A lot was made of the fact Landry secured the endorsement of the Louisiana GOP at the very beginning of the race. There was caterwauling from several other unannounced candidates, most notably Billy Nungesser, John Schroder and Sharon Hewitt, but Nungesser ultimately never bothered to run and Schroder and Hewitt took the indefensible position that it was too early to begin the campaign in October and November of last year.

That was an idiotic approach from the beginning. The race begins when the runners begin running, and Landry was already long out of sight by the time the others reached the starting line. He jumped into the race early and immediately began calling members of the Republican State Central Committee, who are the elected representatives of GOP voters in the state, asking for their support for governor. This after he’d spent seven years fighting high-profile battles as Attorney General on things like Biden administration and Big Tech censorship, COVID mandates and lockdowns, the federal government’s attacks on the oil industry and other harmful government overreaches.

In other words, he had built up credibility with the activists within the party, and he was bold about cashing that credibility in and turning it into support before anybody else could challenge him.

Second, Landry managed not to make enemies of the people who destroyed previous GOP gubernatorial hopefuls in 2015 and 2019.

Specifically, he carefully managed his approach to trial lawyers, knowing that when they unite against a gubernatorial candidate who pokes them with a stick they can be deadly – and when they strike, it’s never about their issues; it’s about something else. For example, David Vitter had tort reform atop his legislative agenda and made a significant show of that fact, and for his trouble he was the target of more than $10 million in Gumbo PAC ads about hookers which ultimately dragged him down. And four years later, Eddie Rispone antagonized trial lawyers in several different ways, only to have Gumbo PAC ads calling him a criminal and accusing him of all kinds of phantom nefarious deeds.

The trial lawyers didn’t lay a glove on Landry. Why?

Because he didn’t give them a reason to.

Landry essentially took no position on the coastal lawsuits a cabal of rich trial lawyers are attempting to prosecute against the oil and gas industry, knowing that any settlements entered into in those lawsuits would have to involve a state legislature which will never vote for them. So he didn’t block a key settlement Freeport McMoRan entered into with a couple of coastal parishes over wetlands loss, and in doing so without making any substantial policy at all he robbed the big-money trial lawyers of a compelling reason to oppose him.

But he also hasn’t lined up with the trial lawyers. Landry has a plan, says his team, for an substantial tort reform package. He just didn’t focus on that during the election. And while he collected some $700,000 in trial lawyer money, that’s a drop in the bucket of the $12 million he raised during the campaign.

Now that the election is over and he stands as a colossus over state politics, he’s free to pursue whatever relationship with them that pleases him, in the knowledge that their ability to take him out is very limited and doesn’t exist at all until 2027, by which time he might well have consolidated political control over the state.

It’s a lesson his team learned from Bobby Jindal, whose political acumen was fairly limited but absolutely wrote the book on how to handle the trial bar in an electoral sense.

The third thing Landry navigated better than previous GOP candidates of the past two cycles was building a network of local allies who could help him to turn out the vote.

For the past six months it was a pretty rare occurrence to see a local Republican official – a DA, a sheriff, a parish president – who wasn’t lined up with Landry. That was largely something which came from his status as the state’s top law enforcement officer the last two terms; the sheriffs and DA’s are used to following his lead. But Landry traversed the state like few before, and he has a network which rivals anybody in state politics over the past 50 years. Those local pols absolutely love Jeff Landry, and he’s gotten them in the habit of asking, receiving and supplying favors from and to him. Vitter had more detractors than allies among the locals; Rispone didn’t know any of them at all.

As so many of Louisiana’s parishes still operate on a machine principle when it comes to voter turnout, getting the little courthouse mobs on line is a huge requirement of a successful statewide campaign. Landry had that, and he used it.

Part of what that points to is the fact Jeff Landry is the best retail politician Louisiana has had since Edwin Edwards. Until last night not enough people recognized that. They figured that since his policies and his desire for aggressive reform are reminiscent of Vitter, he must be a caustic politician like Vitter, and that is something he proved dead wrong on Saturday.

The final thing about Landry which proved out was that he’s one of the most disciplined politicians to come along in Louisiana in a very long time. People might not recognize this about him, but they ought to.

Think about it – Jeff Landry has been a major political figure on the scene in Louisiana since he ran and won a Congressional seat back in 2010. In that time, has he had a real political scandal?

The opponents and detractors won’t shut up about how “shady” Landry is. OK, fair enough. Let’s see some specifics.

But when we get some, what we find out is that he and his brother have a staffing company which Landry has used to service his political campaigns, which is hardly scandalous and just seems like a smart thing to do – it’s akin to a guy who has a company that makes yard signs using his company to make them for his campaign when he runs for the state senate – and also one time that company did work as a subcontractor on the construction of an LNG plant, and the main contractor hired illegal Mexicans and went to jail for it.

So 13 years running for Congress and statewide office and this is the worst of the dirt on Jeff Landry? He must be the cleanest politician Louisiana has ever seen. Either that or he has his corruption buttoned up a whole lot tighter than anybody could ever expect. Given what we’re used to around here he’s pretty impressive on that front.

But more than that, Landry just won 52 percent of the vote against more than a dozen candidates, five of them supposedly “major” candidates, and he hasn’t made any public promises at all other than to do something about the fact our cities are shooting galleries.

That has been assailed as shallow. But it isn’t. Not when you consider that Jeff Landry has a pretty extensive policy record both in Congress and as Attorney General. He’s the most conservative, by far, political figure ever to get elected governor of Louisiana.

A very reasonable expectation is that you’re going to see a pretty systematic approximation in Louisiana of what, say, Ron DeSantis has done in Florida of late, plus a reasonably hard stab made at some fundamental reform of the tax code, education funding, regulatory reform and a bunch of other things. There’s lots of meat on the bones, but it’s been covered by skin – because winning elections in Louisiana, as Vitter proved, is not an exercise in laying out a detailed policy platform and having that be debated in an intellectually honest forum. It’s never been that way, and if it ever was, the abysmal quality of the state’s legacy corporate media would have rendered such an approach null and void some time ago.

Message discipline – and Landry possesses a whole lot of it – indicates that you talk about relatively few things, you talk about them effectively, and you make very sure the things you’re talking about are things that will win you a race.

He talked about crime, he talked about the fact that he’d been a pretty good economic development officer back in St. Martin Parish when he was younger, he talked about making the schools better and scrubbing the woke bullshit out of them, and he talked about how in tune he was with traditional Louisiana values. And that was it. He didn’t get sidetracked or sucked into other things that would give his opponents an opening, and he didn’t put himself in a position to get trapped.

Landry ran the most mistake-free campaign we’ve ever seen in Louisiana. At no point could anyone credibly say that he was in danger of losing votes. And as a result his support built and built until it was enough to win a monster victory in the primary.

This is the stuff that a dominant political figure is made of. And Jeff Landry has put himself in that position. What’s left to learn is just how significant that is in making him a historical figure in this state.