We predicted this was going to happen, and it’s absolutely likely to become reality early next year. Davante Lewis, who suckered the people of New Orleans and parts elsewhere into electing him to the Louisiana Public Service Commission last year, now seeks to build on his political brand by staging a takeover of the Louisiana Democrat Party.
I’m exploring a run for Chair of the Louisiana Democratic Party.
We need a leader who will brings us together and advance a platform that centers Louisianans. We need a visionary, a work horse, a committed Democrat, and someone who will stand up to Jeff Landry.
— Commish. Davante Lewis (@davantelewis) December 2, 2023
Lewis is one of three candidates whose names we’ve heard. The current holder of that office, Katie Bernhardt, says she’s going to run for another term, though it seems difficult to believe Bernhardt has even a faint prayer of hanging on given the utter disaster that this recently-concluded election cycle has been for Democrats in Louisiana. She couldn’t recruit any candidates with the slightest chance of winning competitive races in non-majority black districts, she raised very little money either inside or outside the state, what messaging the Democrat Party offered in Louisiana was completely stale and unpersuasive and her people are utterly demoralized.
Bernhardt’s chief problem is that nothing the Louisiana Democrat Party offers is attractive to white voters in the state. Democrats are now the party of hard-core socialism, cultural Marxism, climate change nuttery and coddling criminals, and in each case those things are absolutely offensive to practically every white voter in Louisiana who isn’t on the faculty at one of our colleges or who lives in Uptown New Orleans.
So the party is utterly dependent on black voters, and Katie Bernhardt spends her time trying to recruit white Democrats to run for office.
And when it does happen, they get zero support. For example, the Democrats did absolutely nothing for Steve Myers, a conservative running in a House race against Republican Barbara Freiberg in Baton Rouge, despite the fact Myers was willing to put a “D” next to his name. Myers was told unless he came out for abortion on demand he could get nothing from the state party.
So yes, Bernhardt is going to be changed out as party chair. She should be after the debacle that was this year’s elections.
State representative Randal Gaines, who has been termed out of his LaPlace-centered seat, is apparently also going to run. Gaines spent some time as the chair of the Legislative Black Caucus, but he’s otherwise about as nondescript a politician as it’s possible to be and most of what came out of him the last eight years was a series of statements shilling for John Bel Edwards even in the face of the Ronald Greene controversy. It’s hard to see how Gaines will excite anybody.
So as of now, our guess is that Lewis could well end up as the next chair of the state Democrat Party and that, together with his PSC seat, would make him the single most consequential Democrat in Louisiana.
And if that happens, it won’t be long before a whole lot of Democrats start missing Katie Bernhardt.
We call Davante Lewis “crypto-gay,” which drives him crazy and which has resulted in his tweeting often about how “hateful” and “homophobic” this site is. That’s a classic Obamunist response – it doesn’t touch the substance of the conversation but merely offers crybullying and name-calling and attempts at cancelation.
Shame on @SpeakerJohnson for highlighting and forwarding the book of the racist and homophobic @TheHayride
Anyone who endorses or supports Scott’s hateful and stupid writing has no place in elected office. https://t.co/aQs4lbOWuy
— Commish. Davante Lewis (@davantelewis) December 1, 2023
Tweets like that have The Revivalist Manifesto sitting at #1 right now on Amazon’s Comparative Politics chart, so while Davante thinks we hate him he couldn’t be more wrong. We think he’s a treasure and we can’t encourage him enough to do exactly what he’s doing.
And if he couldn’t stand that one, he’ll really lose his mind over Racism, Revenge and Ruin: It’s All Obama, the new book which outlines how the Obama brand of Democrat, which Davante Lewis represents in full, is actively destroying America.
“Crypto-gay” refers to the fact that Davante Lewis never said a single word about his sexuality when he was capitalizing on the seven figures’ worth of out-of-state Soros money spent on his behalf as he ran against Lambert Boissiere, but as soon as the election returns came in and he was declared the winner, every gay-rights group in America was blasting out press releases touting the massive triumph of Louisiana’s first “openly-gay” statewide elected official (a PSC seat, like a BESE seat, counts by some estimations as a statewide elected position).
Which was a significant surprise to many in that district.
Would an open discussion of Lewis’ sexuality have mattered in that race? It’s impossible to say. Boissiere ran a lazy campaign and let Lewis blame him for spiking electric rates in the aftermath of Hurricane Ida and the extensive, expensive damage it did to power infrastructure in Southeast Louisiana, so Lewis was able to be crypto-gay and get away with it. Who knows whether that would have hurt him if it had been litigated among the voters of the district, many of whom are pretty socially conservative?
The point is, the emphasis here is on the crypto part and not the gay part.
Because Davante Lewis isn’t a crypto communist. He’s a full-on Marxist-Leninist wannabe tyrant.
And he’s a card-carrying member of Democratic Socialists of America, which is the same crew that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and The Squad belong to. Lewis hasn’t repudiated any of the pro-Hamas marches the DSA has sponsored, including here in Louisiana, so he really doesn’t get to call anybody else “hateful” or “bigoted.”
The point is that while you might think the Louisiana Democrat Party is at rock bottom under Katie Bernhardt, this is by no means the worst things can get for them. What Davante Lewis would do to that party in enforcing a hard-core communist/social degenerate agenda on it, and messaging that every day would turn it into a complete non-entity in state politics.
That sounds like a good thing for conservatives, but it isn’t; not really. Democrats won’t win anything ever again, but the people streaming out of the Louisiana Democrat Party will put “R’s” next to their names and begin polluting the GOP brand. We just saw an example of that in Lafayette, where Monique Blanco Boulet, the daughter of former Democrat governor Kathleen Blanco (to date the most disastrous governor Louisiana has had in the modern age), just knocked out an incumbent Republican by slapping an “R” next to her name and pretending to be a conservative.
This is one reason we’re for closed party primaries in Louisiana. Republicans are going to have to be able to police their brand and keep the people who destroyed the Democrat Party from doing the same to the GOP. And Democrats who think the Davante Lewises of the world are the future of their party should have the ability to make that choice and bear the consequences.
Gaines is the best option of the ones presented as a prospective Democrat chair. Our guess is it’ll be Lewis. They couldn’t make a more disastrous choice.