We’ve focused mostly on the governor’s race among the statewide ballot contests in this fall’s election which comes to a head with Saturday’s primary, but there are three other contested races for statewide offices worth noting.

We think Liz Murrill is poised to win the Attorney General race, either with an outright victory Saturday night (we don’t expect that but it’s possible) or in a runoff with one of the Democrats, likely Lindsey Cheek. We don’t know what’s going to happen in the Secretary of State race, though if we had to bet we expect it’ll be a runoff between Democrat Gwen Collins-Greenup and one of three Republicans – current assistant secretary of state Nancy Landry, public service commissioner Mike Francis or outgoing Speaker of the House Clay Schexnayder. That race is more than a little frightening, and terribly hard to predict.

But the race for Treasurer is the third of the bunch, and there has been little smoke coming out of it.

It’s a three-way race with two capable Republican candidates – former congressman and White House deputy chief of staff John Fleming, and state representative Scott McKnight – and a Democrat, Dustin Granger, who ran quite unsuccessfully for state senate a few years ago in Lake Charles.

Granger will make the runoff. The only public poll of the race thus far had him leading the field with 30 percent of the vote, with Fleming at 21 percent and McKnight with only seven percent, and more than 40 percent undecided.

That would point to a Granger-Fleming runoff. Is there any reason to believe McKnight will catch Fleming?

Other than that McKnight picked up the New Orleans Times-Picayune’s endorsement a couple of weeks ago, and more recently he was endorsed by current state treasurer John Schroder, who’s currently running for governor.

We aren’t sure those endorsements will make much of a difference, but then again this race has been completely under the radar.

What we do know is that Granger’s high point will come Saturday night. He’s going to really struggle to connect with the Louisiana electorate in a head to head matchup with a Republican.

Here’s what Granger told the Lake Charles American Press…

“Our state is a classic trickle-down economics state,” he said. “The trend has been going that way for 50-60 years and it accelerated with (former Gov. Bobby) Jindal. You can’t come out of poverty and improve education until we start investing in people more and stop the giveaways at the very top. It’s a constant ratchet down; it starts with the giveaways at the top — including ITEP (the Industrial Tax Exemption Program), cutting the income tax, getting rid of the estate tax — and it’s designed, in my opinion, to create budget crunches. In a budget crunch, they cut public investment in health, education access and infrastructure. When they can’t cut anymore, they end up raising taxes on working people through sales taxes because they never even consider raising taxes at the personal income tax rate at the top. It happens over and over again.”

Granger said it’s a never-ending downward spiral that leads to poverty and cuts in education.

“You can’t really come out of it until you reverse it,” he said. “We basically rob the poor.”

In the 27 years since the federal government overhauled America’s welfare system, Louisiana has steadily diverted its share of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families received through the Welfare Reform Act of 1996 to plug holes in the state budget.

“Welfare was designed for three things — cash assistance to needy families, worker preparation and assistance, and child care,” he said. “As of a year or two ago, only 4 percent of needy families in Louisiana get cash assistance from welfare. Only 11 percent of needy families get those three things. We’ve raided the TANF funds to fund TOPS (Taylor Opportunity Program for Students) and to fill budget holes. The money is there, but our Legislature pilfers it from the needy.”

Nobody who’s openly that far left can win statewide. And it’s pretty hard to make the case that this is a “trickle-down economics” state when we’re an island of income taxes in a rising sea of economic freedom, given that Texas, Tennessee and Florida don’t have income taxes and Mississippi and Arkansas are phasing theirs out.

Why didn’t Edwards produce a great state economy? He got all of the tax increases he was asking for.

Nobody is going to care about Granger’s answers to those questions. Not with a Republican electorate poised to deliver a hard right turn this fall.

We can see that hard right turn reflected in early voting. A Twitter (or X) thread from Louisiana pollster John Couvillon notes the alarming decline in turnout on the “D” side…

Voter turnout under 40 percent doesn’t reflect so well on Louisiana’s electorate, but it seems to have held up a lot better for Republican voters than with Democrats. Eight years of failure under John Bel Edwards has really sapped Democrat ardor at the ballot box, and particularly among black voters.

Granger would have to turn out lots and lots of black voters to win in the runoff. We don’t think white Democrats can do that anymore. We think Edwards was the last white Democrat who’ll ever do it in Louisiana. Perhaps we’re wrong; we’ll know in November.

Fleming has the endorsement of the LAGOP and of U.S. Rep. Clay Higgins, with whom he shares an interesting designation. As a member of Congress Fleming was a founding member of the House Freedom Caucus; Higgins is a current member. Fleming also has the endorsement of U.S. Rep. Mike Johnson, who succeeded him in Congress.

Here’s a debate between the three candidates put on by the Public Affairs Research Council last month…