We held off on posting this one so we could include more of the fallout from Saturday’s electoral blowout for conservatives in Louisiana. And we’ve certainly seen a payoff from that.

In Part 1 and Part 2 of this election review series we’ve talked about the size and scope of the victory – for Jeff Landry, for the other statewide candidates who look to be in easy runoffs, for the conservative legislative candidates who won big.

In this part, though, we’re talking about the losers. There were some big ones. But the biggest of all was the Louisiana Democrat Party, which has been banished more deeply into the political wilderness than it even was during Reconstruction.

The tears and the screeching couldn’t have been any better illustrated than with the tweets of one Robert Mann, Democrat media flack and soon-to-be-ex professor of journalism at LSU…

I'll add that I've suspected for the past two years it would come to this, so I've been making plans for some time. The minute that I knew Landry wanted me fired and was willing to call the president to demand it, I knew there would be dark days for LSU if he won.

— Robert Mann (@RTMannJr) October 15, 2023

Mann, of course, commenced the proceedings with Landry by publicly calling an attorney from the Attorney General’s office a “flunky” when she addressed LSU’s faculty senate and informed them on the laws governing masks and vaccines. That was, at least arguably, a violation of the university’s faculty code of conduct and when Landry defended his employee by writing a letter to LSU President Bill Tate suggesting Mann be disciplined, he went ballistic.

Landry never suggested Mann had to be fired, though given Mann’s record of inflammatory, irresponsible and divisive public statements while an employee of Louisiana’s flagship public university he wouldn’t have been out of line to do so.

And yes, now that Landry is governor, getting rid of Bob Mann is an entirely likely consequence. In this case it appears the trash is taking itself out.

But the plight of Louisiana’s most prominent academic leftist bomb-thrower is a mere sideshow when it comes to the political effect of Saturday’s blowout, because the heat is now unbearable in the kitchen of Katie Bernhardt, the chair of the Louisiana Democrat Party. Bernhardt couldn’t find a single Democrat of note to run in the vast majority of the major races this year. The Democrats put former Secretary of Transportation and Development Shawn Wilson into the governor’s race, but Wilson had never won an election before. They had no candidate of note in the Lt. Governor’s race; someone named Willie Jones managed 20 percent of the vote while incumbent Billy Nungesser pulled 66 percent. Democrats didn’t even challenge for Insurance Commissioner or Agriculture Commissioner, and their candidates for Secretary of State, Attorney General and Treasurer have won a grand total of zero elections.

And Republicans had majorities of both houses of the Louisiana legislature locked in at qualifying, because Democrats didn’t even field candidates in most races.

That kind of performance ought to cost Bernhardt her job. The truth is, she’s been an unmitigated disaster as Louisiana Democrat Party chair, and it’s a special sort of disaster because Bernhardt has particularly alienated the demographic group making up better than 60 percent of the registered Democrats in the state.

So you get this…

Analysts describe an abysmal performance by the state Democratic Party in last Saturday’s primary election as a pivotal moment in modern Louisiana politics.

Voter turnout statewide was around 36 percent, while in the Democratic stronghold of Orleans Parish it tanked to around 27 percent. That’s nearly 30 percent lower than in the previous gubernatorial election in 2019.

“The failure in this past election cycle is pretty catastrophic,” said Robert Collins, a political analyst with Dillard University. “The Louisiana Democratic Party is no longer a legitimate opposition party to the majority Republican Party in the State of Louisiana.”

Republican Attorney General Jeff Landry won the governor’s race outright on Oct. 14, taking 52 percent of the vote to avert a predicted runoff against Democratic rival Shawn Wilson, the state’s former transportation secretary endorsed by two-term incumbent John Bel Edwards.

Collins said a Democrat not making it into a runoff is unprecedented in modern Louisiana politics.

“All of the pollsters, all of the analysts — including myself — basically were expecting (a runoff), because the polling said that Jeff Landry probably should not have gotten over 50 percent on election night,” Collins said. “It’s pretty staggering and pretty shocking that they were not able to do so this time.”

He’s actually very wrong about that, because it happened in both 2007 and 2011 when the Democrats couldn’t field a Democrat capable of taking Bobby Jindal to a runoff.

But then you get the detractors screaming about Bernhardt, and they’re all from the Left. For example, there’s the state rep she briefly drove out of the Democrat Party and then tried to take out with a couple of intraparty challengers…

One incumbent who fended off a challenge from within her own party was Uptown New Orleans state representative and Democrat Mandie Landry.

Landry knocked out political newcomer and Edwards-endorsed Democratic rival Madison O’Malley, winning 66 percent of the vote.

Landry said her triumph should be seen as an indictment of the Democratic establishment in Louisiana.

“It’s one thing for them to get involved in my race uselessly,” she said. “But for them to not pay any attention to the gubernatorial race is political malpractice.

“They all were either asleep or purposefully negligent. Not at least forcing a runoff at the top of the ticket really makes a lot of us question, ‘What are they doing?’”

Landry said she feels this is a critical juncture for the state Democratic party, and that it should be razed and rebuilt with new leadership.

“The first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem,” Landry said. “I’ve been getting in trouble for that. A few of us have been. And now, after what happened Saturday, everyone saw it very clearly.”

Landry said the key is getting fresh faces, particularly young people, to run for committee positions within the state Democratic party. She placed the blame for Wilson’s loss at the feet of the Louisiana Democratic leadership.

But Mandie Landry isn’t going to be the next chair of the Democrat Party in Louisiana. Somebody else is likely to be, and that campaign seems to have begun…

“I think it’s just problematic to constantly blame the voters who are struggling, who are not making a living wage, who are struggling to pay their utility bills and their mortgages and blame them for elections when we have too many well-off people who didn’t do the work themselves to ensure we had that infrastructure,” said Public Service Commissioner Davante Lewis, District 3.

Some Democrats said this election felt different from others because there was not nearly as much community involvement and motivation as in past elections. Lewis said that over a year prior to past elections, campaign staff traveled the state to educate people on the candidate and get them involved in knocking on doors and making calls.

…

“The work is long-term. I mean, if we look at Gov. Edwards’ successful election, he had announced almost a year before Election Day and had to put in some groundwork. If we do not have the money and the infrastructure to run a three-month campaign, then we need to run a one-year, one half-year, two-year campaign,” Lewis said.

Davante Lewis seems to be doing everything he can to launch a campaign for Bernhardt’s job, or at least set himself up as the kingmaker for it. For example…

Last night was rough. We have a lot to reflect on, a lot of things to blame, and bad choices to fix.

But, I’m not just going to point the finger- I’m also about work. I promise you all I’m going to do everything I can to build a Democratic Party in Louisiana. The work begins…

— Commish. Davante Lewis (@davantelewis) October 15, 2023

I’ll take advice from media figures about Louisiana when they actually show up on the ground to canvass, organize, mobilize, phone bank, and push policy at the local and state level.

Until then they can just tweet and talk on their YouTube channel.

— Commish. Davante Lewis (@davantelewis) October 16, 2023

Too many elected officials & well off people want the poor and suffering to save them from themselves by voting.

But how many of them are willing to give up their privileges, campaign checks, and precived power to fight for those in close proximity to the suffering?

— Commish. Davante Lewis (@davantelewis) October 16, 2023

My great grandmother taught me to “tell the truth and shame the devil”. For us to rebuild we got to have some real honest conversation about who we are and whose we are https://t.co/2JXGY9Up52

— Commish. Davante Lewis (@davantelewis) October 18, 2023

Saturday was more or less a perfect storm for the Democrats.

The national Democrat Party invested nothing in Louisiana because they could read polls and they knew there was no chance of victory here this year.

There was already a schism inside the party between the John Bel Edwards status quo mob, mostly made up of rich white liberals, and the Critical Race socialist gang, of whom Lewis and Gary Chambers are probably the best avatars. That schism became readily apparent after Edwards and Bernhardt tried to run a white airline pilot named Luke Mixon for the Senate against John Kennedy and Chambers, infuriated that no black politician was recruited to run, jumped into the race and outpolled Mixon 18-13 in a major embarrassment. But that schism is even larger now, because Edwards’ clique ran Wilson, who is black but nonetheless more of a center-left liberal than a whacked out neocommunist, and yet black turnout was abysmal.

So now the Bernhardt/Edwards gang is howling at black voters for not turning out, and you see Lewis’ response above. It won’t be long before someone from the Lewis/Chambers camp is in charge of that party and they’ll have to reach out to white voters, and best of luck there.

But what Saturday really exposed was something we’ve all known but it isn’t talked about all that much, which is that amid all the caterwauling over Orleans Parish turnout being just 27 percent while statewide turnout was 36 percent, and over the fact that blacks are 32 percent of the registered voters but made up only 24 percent of the electorate on Saturday, what we saw was without “street money” to turn out the vote, very many of the Democrats’ voters simply won’t show up.

Republicans don’t pay people to vote. Republicans can turn the vote out, or at least can do enough to generate needed results in state races, with messaging and typical Election Day tactics like phone calls and texts. There is no such thing as “street money” for Republicans.

Take it away from Democrats and they can’t even get a third of the statewide vote.

That’s a brutal reality that firing Katie Bernhardt, which by all means is warranted given Saturday’s failure, isn’t going to fix.

After eight years of John Bel Edwards, you’d have expected to see a whole lot more competitive Democrat Party. But that’s the price of failure. The old saying which is reflected in the acronym “FAFO” applies – there are consequences of incompetence and dishonesty, and those consequences involve not many people voting for you.

And so there are sad and angry Democrats from Grand Isle to Oil City, and for the rest of us that’s a relief.