“Republicans now control all seven of the statewide offices in the state of Louisiana,” WWL Louisiana political analyst Clancy DuBos explained. “This is not a surprise. This has been coming for decades. It’s a culmination of highly organized efforts by the Republican Party, and quite frankly, the Democratic Party in Louisiana is pretty much on life support.”

“Nobody can say it’s dead, but it is definitely on life support,” DuBos continued. “In the next few months, a lot of people expect to see a shake-up in the leadership of the Democratic Party in Louisiana.”

DuBos is correct about that last part, but not really anything else. Given his track record pontificating about Louisiana politics, that’s a fairly laudable score.

Yes, it isn’t a surprise that Nancy Landry, Liz Murrill and John Fleming won election with 65 percent or more. Most Republicans in the know will tell you that DuBos doesn’t have a clue what he’s talking about when he says the election cycle reflects “highly organized efforts” by the state GOP.

Certainly, the party did a very good job this year, and state chairman Louis Gurvich and his executive committee and leadership team are to be congratulated for engineering the best election cycle in LAGOP history. They’ve done excellent work, the party’s candidates this year are of the highest quality in its history, and the results reflected that fact.

But “highly organized” means the GOP slate was carefully curated and the players moved in lockstep. That’s hardly what happened this year.

For all the talk about the state party’s “highly organized” endorsement of Jeff Landry in the gubernatorial primary, there were still four other major Republican candidates in that race. Yes, Landry soaked up most of the money and endorsements and voter support, leaving Stephen Waguespack, John Schroder, Sharon Hewitt and Richard Nelson in the dust, and yes, he did so with the imprimatur of the Republican State Central Committee. But that reflects a “fairly organized” effort rather than a “highly organized” one.

Murrill and Fleming had significant Republican challengers in the jungle primary, who had some real money behind them. John Stefanski and Scott McKnight ran campaigns which suffered from a failure to launch, and neither were able to overcome the LAGOP’s endorsement of the favorites in the Attorney General and State Treasurer races, respectively, but the fact that they mounted the campaigns they did gives the lie to this characterization that Republicans have built some impregnable political machine in Louisiana.

And the Secretary of State race reflected anything but a “highly organized effort.” There were no less than five Republicans running in that race, and the initial endorsee was Mike Francis, who came in third place in the primary. Landry managed to slide into the runoff against a relatively hapless Democrat in Gwen Collins-Greenup, who runs for Secretary of State every time the job opens up, always makes the runoff and has gotten a declining share of the vote every time.

What are we saying here? DuBos is all wet when he talks about how the red wave washing over Louisiana on Oct. 14 and Nov. 18 was the result of some masterful, evil-genius machine politics on the part of Louis Gurvich and his minions. That’s not what happened at all.

No. What happened was something Clancy DuBos and the rest of the obsolete Democrat pundits the legacy media continues attempting to foist on the public as “experts” don’t want to admit.

Which is that the Louisiana Democrat Party is a dead entity because Louisiana voters are sick and tired of its constant failure.

We’ve just endured – we’re still enduring it, but only for another six or seven weeks – eight years of utter incompetence, corruption and, in some cases, tyranny courtesy of a Democrat governor. John Bel Edwards lied his way into office claiming he was a “conservative” Democrat and that he wouldn’t raise taxes, and then the first thing he did in office was demand the largest tax increase in the history of the state to fund a colossal increase in the size and scope of state government. Edwards threatened so many catastrophic consequences if he didn’t get those tax increases that they ranged from the mildly plausible to the absurd, and a nominally Republican legislature buckled under the pressure.

The result? Louisiana’s state government is morbidly obese, no more competent than it was before Edwards took office, shot through with woke stupidity of a national Democrat stripe and has accomplished almost nothing for the people of Louisiana over the course of those eight years. Edwards put half the state on Medicaid thanks to the dumbest possible construct of the Obamacare Medicaid expansion, and at the end of his term infant mortality in the state is no better than before he took office.

And the private sector in this state is almost completely moribund. Almost a quarter of a million people have left Louisiana in net outmigration since he took office, with that number accelerating at a time when Louisiana’s southern neighbors are absorbing massive increases in population as people flee high-tax jurisdictions in the North, East and West Coast. This should be a boom period in Louisiana; instead it’s a bust.

Democrats run virtually all of the state’s big cities, with a small number of exceptions, and New Orleans, Baton Rouge and Shreveport (there has been a GOP mayor in Shreveport for less than a year) are among the worst shooting galleries in America. What has John Bel Edwards, who bragged about how he came from a law enforcement family and rode that into the governor’s mansion, done about that? A year ago in an interview with WDSU-TV in New Orleans, Edwards was asked about sending the Louisiana State Police into the city to supplement the beleaguered NOPD’s efforts at law enforcement, He demurred, explaining that LSP was some 300 officers down from its funded strength and he didn’t have any troopers to spare for the city.

This is emblematic of the kind of failure voters notice and reject. And they’ve noticed and rejected the failure of Democrat governance in Louisiana.

Turnout statewide for Nov. 18 was 22.5 percent, which was not a particularly strong number. In Orleans Parish it was only 15.1 percent. Voters in the most Democrat-heavy jurisdiction in the state have largely given up on the political process in the understanding that none of the problems afflicting them can be solved by tax-and-spend, virtue-signaling Democrat politics. They’re disgusted with LaToya Cantrell as the city’s mayor, but not motivated enough to recall her and certainly not willing to embrace a different brand of politics. So they’re just staying home, and Democrats can’t turn them out without dropping millions of dollars in street money.

They have to pay their voters to vote, because they can’t and don’t govern effectively in a way which makes those voters believe in their leadership.

So yes, the Louisiana Democrat Party has collapsed. And this is where DuBos is actually right for once, because Katie Bernhardt is absolutely a dead woman walking as that party’s chair.

Bernhardt, as Nathan Koenig observed here at The Hayride on Monday, came completely unhinged on Saturday night as her party was annihilated in the runoffs. At the next meeting of the state’s Democrats she’s going to be turned out of her job and left by the roadside.

The result of that will not be some renaissance of a muscular, vibrant Louisiana Democrat Party. It will be that the far-left fringe takes the party over.

The thing about a red wave election is that it wipes out all the Democrats who have even a tenuous connection to the center. Who remains untouched are the hard-core leftists in safe districts.

That’s why the two loudest voices you hear at present, particularly where it comes to the demands for Bernhardt’s job, are Mandie Landry and Davante Lewis. Landry, a state representative targeted by Bernhardt and Edwards who nevertheless won re-election in a landslide in her tony Uptown white-leftist district, now seeks her revenge. And Lewis, elected to the Public Service Commission last year on the strength of a seven-figure PAC bankroll with out-of-state Hard Left money, is a jabbering crypto-gay far-left Green New Deal revolutionary whose public persona is likely to grow larger than anyone else’s in that party.

The days of the rich white trial lawyers dominating that party are over. The rich white trial lawyer money mostly played on the Republican side this year, in an effort to stop conservatives from winning legislative seats over RINO moderates.

And in almost every case that money chased losers.

As an example, on Saturday, the Louisiana Freedom Caucus PAC (of which I’m the director) had 11 endorsees competing in runoffs. Ten of the 11 won. That brought LAFCPAC’s record for the cycle to 32-11 in endorsing the most conservative Republican candidates running. We didn’t have a million dollars to spend on races; we barely spent one tenth of that amount. Our victories were the reflection of a voting base in Louisiana which has had it with big government wasting tax dollars and bullying citizens as it ignores its core responsibilities.

Voters want no part of that tradition – which DuBos and his old-school pals still espouse. They’re looking for the most iconoclastic, committed conservatives they can find. They’re looking to reject Clancy DuBos, and on Saturday, just like on Oct. 14, they did.

It will be interesting to see if the state’s legacy corporate media – rather than serving as attack dogs nipping at Jeff Landry and the other new conservatives’ heels – changes to reflect the new political reality. We aren’t going to hold our breath on that one.