There’s a stupid article at the Soros-funded Louisiana Illuminator (we like to call it the Illumigroomer, seeing as though its contributors seem to have a fetish for all things which promote the indoctrination of children into “alternative” sexual lifestyles at an early age) which contains much caterwauling and grief over the meager turnout of the state’s voters in the October and November election cycles.

No, we’re not going to link to the piece. We’ve never seen the Illumigroomer link to any of our offerings, so returning the favor would seem overly generous. And generosity to people who insist on being relevant when the people of this state have insisted on denying them that is hard to justify.

And as is common where stupid articles on Louisiana politics are concerned, this one contains lots of quotes from one Joshua Stockley, professor of political science at the University of Louisiana at Monroe. Stockley, a through-and-through socialist who has achieved some sense of relevance in academic circles by becoming a go-to source for left-leaning legacy media in the state, doesn’t disappoint when asked about the turnout numbers from this year’s primary and runoff elections…

“This is the most apathy and least-interested electorate I’ve ever seen,” said Joshua Stockley, a political science professor at the University of Louisiana-Monroe.

The thing is, while turnout was generally soft statewide, that wasn’t Republicans’ fault.

For the October 14 primaries, GOP voters turned out at a 46.9 percent clip. White Republicans turned out at a 48.3 percent clip. That’s not overwhelming, but it’s pretty healthy – especially given the fact that at the top of the ballot there was never much question about which way the election was going to go. Everybody knew by the time early voting had begun that either Jeff Landry was going to win outright or he would be in a runoff with Shawn Wilson that he’d win easily. Everybody also knew, with a slight possibility otherwise in the Secretary of State race, that a Republican was going to win the other statewide races.

It was Democrats and independents who didn’t show up.

The official turnout figure the Secretary of State’s office has on its website now is 36.3 percent for the October 14 primaries. With Republicans turning out at 46.9 and setting the standard, we see some pretty terrible underperformance on the Democrat side. Democrats as a whole turned out at a 36.3 clip, which is right at the state average. But within that number, turnout was 43.1 percent among white Democrats, many of whom vote Republican in Louisiana (with a jungle primary, there’s no particular reason to change your registration), but only 33.5 percent among black Democrats.

And among independents the turnout was only 23.3 percent. Independents always turn out in smaller numbers; you’re an independent when you hate both political parties and it’s well-known that the people who win are going to be one party or the other, so really…what’s the point?

The November figures haven’t been released yet, but we know that turnout overall was 22.5 percent or so for the Nov. 18 runoffs. We can expect that they’re going to reflect the same trends.

The point is, you don’t have a major problem with engagement on the GOP side. Republican voters still do their civic duty at a reasonable rate. Democrat voters? Less so.

So obviously you’re going to have Democrat media organs losing their minds over how apathetic Louisiana’s electorate is without recognizing the real source of the problem.

To the extent there is a problem. As we’ve said here multiple times, a smaller electorate is almost always a better-informed and smarter electorate that will produce better results. And an electorate in which Democrats don’t turn out is, by definition, a more civic-minded and wise electorate which isn’t showing up to vote itself money from the public till.

But it’s a disaster, says Josh Stockley, lending academic heft to the partisan wailings of the Illumigroomer.

Why?

Well, the Illumigroomer has this to say…

State Democratic Party chair Katie Bernhardt said getting Democrats to vote was a challenge for her party because many of the legislative races in majority-Black districts were uncontested, giving voters fewer incentives to go to the polls in the primary. Statewide candidates also struggled to raise money, she said.

“If you don’t have money in the bank, it’s not going to work,” she said.

Democrats also failed to field a full slate of candidates in the statewide races, leaving the agriculture commissioner or insurance commissioner elections to the Republicans entirely.

“Turnout is encouraged when you have intense two-party competition,” Stockley said. “When one party, across the board, is perceived not to be competitive, that can influence both parties not to turn out the vote.”

And quotes another Democrat operative ensconced in an academic sinecure…

Voter interest was tempered, however, by the “complete collapse of the Democratic Party,” said Pearson Cross, a political scientist who runs the School of Behavioral and Social Sciences at the University of Louisiana-Monroe.

Two things are pretty clear. First, this is an attack on Katie Bernhardt, because the word has gone out that she’s to be made the scapegoat for the failure of the Democrats to field any competitive candidates in, well, any race that wasn’t in a majority-black district.

That’s known, it’s not a surprise, everybody knows that Bernhardt is going to be run off as the chair of that party at its next meeting – interestingly enough, party rules dictate that the Louisiana Democrat Party state central committee meet at least three times per year and they’ve only met twice this year, so you now have party insiders complaining that Bernhardt is breaking the rules and delaying the next meeting because she knows the motion to vacate the chair is coming.

So you’re going to have a pressure campaign mounted chiefly by the black majority in that party to get rid of Bernhardt – but the white Hard Left wants her gone, too. And this Illumigroomer piece is fuel for that.

But it’s something else as well.

Because now that the Democrats are flat on their backs and can’t compete anywhere that isn’t a district specifically drawn for them, they’re powerless to stop whatever major reforms or changes that Jeff Landry and his legislative allies decide to bring forth in January. By all indications Landry intends to be very, very aggressive in pushing those reforms, with a bit of emphasis on structural changes to state government which will make things even more difficult for Democrats.

Which is what the voters want, by the way, and it’s also arguably what Democrat voters want. After all, Jeff Landry should have been enough to scare those Democrats to the polls – given the multiplicity of hit pieces dropped on him by The Advocate and other legacy media propaganda shops, they should have been terrified enough to turn out in presidential-election numbers. And yet that didn’t happen, because for a whole lot of Democrat voters Landry simply can’t be any worse than was John Bel Edwards, given the economic stagnation, malaise and outmigration his eight years brought.

Like Bernhardt said, you can’t turn out Democrat voters unless you have a lot of money. Because a whole lot of Democrat voters now expect to get paid to vote. If big money from out of state doesn’t show up to fulfill that expectation, nothing happens. Civic spirit certainly isn’t going to turn them out – you don’t get much civic spirit when you run everything into the ground like they’ve done in all of the cities they control.

But what’s really happening, bottom line, is that this is about downgrading Landry. Because the election he won had a low turnout, you see. The article complains that Landry only won with about half a million votes or so, and that’s less than Dave Treen got in 1983 when Edwin Edwards beat him 62-38.

As if we’re not talking about apples and oranges here.

Watch out for this, because you’re going to see it again and again over the next four years. Jeff Landry, who polled just about double the next best vote-getter on the way to an outright primary win, is somehow illegitimate as governor because nobody showed up to vote in the election he won.

And next will come the demonization of Landry based on any reforms he pushes.

The good news is nobody cares what these people say anymore, and nobody should. But that won’t stop them from saying it. Josh Stockley will go on trashing the Louisiana electorate, when it’s people who think like him who are responsible for the poor turnout numbers, and the Democrat operatives at the Usual Suspect media organizations will do their best to amplify the narrative.

And four years from now the Democrats will run somebody solely on the message that Landry usurped and abused power he gained through a rump election and it’s time for the masses to rise up and take their government back.

Will that work? Very unlikely. But for people who make their living espousing the Democrat talking points our voters have rejected, there’s always a song for supper, and this is it.