In our first segment of this week’s series covering Saturday’s primary elections in Louisiana, we talked about Jeff Landry’s runaway victory in the governor’s race – and indeed, that victory looks like it could be a transformational event in Louisiana’s history.

But if you want to fully understand what has happened in Louisiana, look a little deeper. Because Saturday’s results indicate a massive wave election which was felt all the way to the bottom of the ballot.

It’s not that Republicans did well. Obviously Republicans did well. Republicans have been doing well in Louisiana elections for a couple of decades now.

But the Republican brand in Louisiana has increasingly meant little, because so many of the politicians in this state sporting an “R” next to their names were and are simply yellow-dog Democrats who ran away from their party when the Obama leftists (and the pointy-headed Mike Dukakis/John Kerry liberals before them) took the thing over and started pushing for more and more radical change.

It’s nice to be the party of the center, sure, but that depends where the center is. And when your political tradition is that of big, overweening government that crowds out and enervates the public sector, chases the creative and productive out to Texas and Florida, and feeds a Third World corruption which horrifies men and women of honor and goodwill, that isn’t really the center you want.

So the wave didn’t just sweep out the Democrats, or what little was left of them. It did a number on the Republicans-of-convenience crowd as well.

Lt. Governor Billy Nungesser made his brand as a moderate and an accommodator of John Bel Edwards, and that infuriated a lot of conservatives. Nungesser managed to win a big victory Saturday with 66 percent of the vote in a six-candidate race, but if we’re being honest he didn’t get any real opposition.

In the other statewide races the depth of the red wave could really be seen and felt.

For example, Liz Murrill dominated the Attorney General’s race with 45 percent in a five-person field, and she faces Democrat Lindsey Cheek (23 percent) in a runoff. The three Republicans combined for 70 percent of the vote in the race, making Murrill a sure bet to win in November. But Murrill had a credible Republican challenger in John Stefanski, a state representative from Crowley who’d had a reasonably effective first term. Stefanski, however, positioned himself as a moderate, having been an ally of House Speaker Clay Schexnayder over the past four years.

Our guess is Stefanski would have done things differently if he had that legislative term to do over again. He seemed to have some conservative instincts which he allowed to be tempered as part of Schexnayder’s “in-crowd.” And the voters clearly weren’t interested in a moderate Attorney General when they had the opportunity to hire a passionate conservative warrior in Murrill. She’ll win easily in November and will almost certainly emerge as one of the nation’s most influential and aggressive advocates for the 10th Amendment and individual liberties.

And then there’s the Treasurer’s race, in which another freshman state legislator with some real political talent ran in the moderate lane with less-than-stellar results. Scott McKnight probably faced an uphill battle from the start, in that he was up against former Congressman and Trump White House deputy chief of staff John Fleming, whose resume was a bit more impressive and whose conservative credentials couldn’t be beaten. McKnight’s voting record places him firmly on the right, but temperamentally he isn’t a warrior – he’s much more soft-spoken and affable, and stylistically that would make him a moderate where ideologically he isn’t.

The results indicated the mood of the voters. Fleming posted 44 percent of the vote in a three-way race, with leftist Democrat Dustin Granger pulling 32 percent. McKnight brought up the rear with 24 percent. We expect he’ll resurface somewhere; this simply wasn’t McKnight’s race, but he’s now an interesting political free agent who can plug into a number of places. If anything, the lesson for McKnight was not to be afraid to be vocal, because people aren’t interested in moderation when they see that Rashida Tlaib and Davante Lewis are the political opposition now.

But in the Secretary of State race you could also see the red wave.

Clay Schexnayder was the most prominent name of the Republican candidates running in that crowded, eight-way field. There were five Republicans, two Democrats and a hapless independent. Schexnayder had well over a million dollars to spend, and he was the Speaker of the Louisiana House.

But Clay Schexnayder had built a reputation as John Bel Edwards’ pet poodle in the Legislature, and Schexnayder couldn’t shake that even with messaging about how in his term veto overrides went from almost never happening to being an annual occurrence. Nobody bought that as a function of his leadership and he was clobbered – 58 percent of the vote in the race went to Republicans, but only 15 of that 58 went to Schexnayder and he was beaten by both Nancy Landry (19 percent) and Mike Francis (18 percent). Landry will face Democrat Gwen Collins-Greenup in the runoff, and the race won’t likely be close.

The upshot being that in Jeff Landry, Billy Nungesser, Liz Murrill, Nancy Landry, John Fleming, Insurance Commissioner Tim Temple and Agriculture Commissioner Mike Strain, Louisiana will have the most conservative Republican set of statewide elected officials in its history.

And then there were the legislative races.

I can speak to this quite a bit; as our readers know I’m serving as the director of the Louisiana Freedom Caucus PAC. And while I’m by no means going to claim any grand measure of credit for the outcome on Saturday, the numbers indicate the depth of the red wave crashing through the state on Saturday.

Of the 39 endorsees of the Freedom Caucus PAC, 22 won outright on Saturday. There were 10 who lost. Seven more are in runoffs, and as of right now we think all seven are winnable and five of them are likely victories.

We may have played a decisive role in a few of those races; that’s for others to determine. But a few things are true without question.

In Senate races, there were three in particular where a clear contrast between moderate/RINO candidates and Freedom Caucus-aligned conservatives existed. In those races a great amount of money was spent attempting to prop up the RINO candidate against a conservative.

For example, trial lawyers and others blew through some $700,000 attacking Alan Seabaugh as he ran for the Senate District 31 seat, including some of the most dishonest messaging we’ve seen. Seabaugh managed 54 percent of the vote anyway.

Better than a half-million dollars was spent in Senate District 22 trying to take out Blake Miguez. Miguez pulled 61 percent of the vote.

In Senate District 36, incumbent Robert Mills, who ran as a conservative four years ago but didn’t vote that way, went down in a 62-38 whitewashing at the hands of insurance broker Adam Bass, who made a name for himself as the head of the Bossier Parish School Board which was the first in the state to defy Edwards’ COVID lockdowns and reopen their schools.

And in Senate District 13, conservative state representative Valarie Hodges annihilated her RINO moderate colleague Buddy Mincey in a 65-35 blowout that two months prior wouldn’t have been seen as remotely possible.

One race where a RINO moderate survived a challenge from the right was in Senate District 8, where Pat Connick managed to hold off Lafitte mayor Tim Kerner, Jr. by a 52-48 margin. But in Senate District 6, Rick Edmonds crushed Barry Ivey, whose schizophrenic voting record had been the source of constant consternation on the part of conservatives, 62-38 in a battle of state representatives trying to move up.

Similar results were evident in House races, especially in a pair of Northwest Louisiana contests where moderates supported by left-leaning moneyed interests challenged Freedom Caucus conservatives Danny McCormick (who won with 66 percent of the vote) and Dodie Horton (who won with 60 percent). In virtually every race where a serious conservative candidate faced a middle-of-the-road opponent the conservative either won or there is a runoff.

And as of now it looks like there will be either 71 or 72 Republicans in the 105-member House, with very nearly the magic number of 53 solid conservatives among that number, and 28 Republicans out of 39 in the Senate, though just how many of them are reliable conservatives is a debatable figure.

On the other hand, it’s widely understood that yesterday’s RINO legislators under John Bel Edwards’ gubernatorial term will be rock-ribbed, fire-breathing conservatives now that Landry will occupy the Fourth Floor.

As Milton Friedman said, it isn’t so much that you elect the right people to make positive change, it’s that you make it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing. On Saturday, Louisiana voters did a little of both.

And we’ll be better for it, though tomorrow we’ll have a look at the people who are quite sad over that fact.