We’ve been thinking you’ll start to see this, particularly in the wake of last fall’s elections when it became very obvious that there is nothing much good happening in the Louisiana Democrat Party. Frankly, we thought there would be a good-sized trickle of black politicians switching to Republican by now.

But a trickle has to start somewhere, and now it has. Austin Badon, a former state representative from New Orleans and, later, a Clerk of Court in the city (he lost a re-election fight in 2022), is now joining the GOP after falling out of love with the Democrats.

Former New Orleans Representative Austin Badon, who’s been appointed by Governor Jeff Landry to serve as Assistant to the Commissioner of the Office of Motor Vehicles, switched political parties and said he’s one the state’s newest Black Republicans. When asked if Landry asked him to join the GOP…

“I’m a big boy, I can make my own decisions and I don’t need any influence from anybody else and he had no influence on me at all,” said Bandon.

But Badon said he did text Landry and let me know that he’d changed parties last week.

The driving factor to why he chose to leave the Democratic Party, Badon said, was the immigration issue at the Texas border.

“This whole migrant situation was basically driving me and it’s something that has been on my mind for many years,” said Badon.

Badon said when he lived in Houston and applied for jobs, he found himself at a loss because so many jobs required employees to be bilingual.

He said the Republican Party has welcomed him with open arms and he even received a call from Congressman Steve Scalise. Badon said when he served in the legislature, he was a conservative Democrat but has chosen to change parties to one he feels better represents his views.

Badon wasn’t all that bad when he was a legislator – particularly not by the standard of black Democrats that he was serving with at the time. There was the issue of his working at SUNO on a near-six figure salary while he was in the Legislature fighting attempts by then-governor Bobby Jindal to merge it with the University of New Orleans, but as questionable ethics practices go, this is hardly a big fire.

Badon, since then, has occasionally expressed some consternation with the overwrought idiocy of woke Democrats. It was clear he was a bit out of step with the political class in the city, especially when he backed Jeff Landry for governor last year. And when Landry grabbed him up and added him to his transition team, it was an indication something was up.

Is this an indication Landry is out recruiting in the black community? First, we hope he is doing that. There are enough blacks in Louisiana – whether they’re in the Creole business community in New Orleans and aren’t on board with the Soros Marxism of that city’s dominant political class, or whether they’re rural church-goers who see the increasing cultural rot of homonormativity, transgenderism and promotion of sex as entertainment as a threat to their way of life, or even if they’re suburban middle-class folks who simply want competent management of roads, schools and the boring things government is supposed to do – who ought to be gettable that this unanimous black-Democrat thing ought to be on the way out in this state.

But it’s hard being the only one.

Elbert Guillory has been the only one ever since he switched parties over a decade ago. Guillory has been known as a political gadfly for a long time, and he’s always running for things, so there are reasons why, as talented a messenger as he is, he hasn’t generated more light and heat as a black Republican in Louisiana.

And there isn’t a ton of evidence that Badon is going to run for anything as a Republican. The fact is, he’s got a job in the Landry administration which is a better political gig than most of what he could run for. Could he run against Troy Carter for Congress and win? Maybe not; it would be interesting to see it. The guess is if he was going to do that he’d have already announced.

A run in 2028 against Davante Lewis for the Public Service Commission would be truly fascinating, though. By then it’s not a bad bet that Lewis will have (1) consolidated himself as a powerhouse in the Louisiana Democrat Party and (2) irritated so many people with his Democratic Socialists of America moonbattery that the first well-funded opponent he draws would be a real threat to wax him at the polls.

Whether Badon runs for anything and wins, though, that isn’t the project. The project is to build an entire cadre of black Republican politicians who can win majority-minority districts, not just majority-white ones (though we’re more than happy to see the latter happen as well). What’s needed is for a conservative – perhaps more appropriately, a revivalist – perspective to make inroads with the black community and for it to begin to reject the corrosive Marxism, both economic and cultural, which has held it back.

That isn’t something white Republicans can fix, which isn’t to say that white Republicans shouldn’t help out where possible. If this is ever going to happen it’s going to have to be organic.

So the question is, does Austin Badon want to be a trailblazer? Is he willing to get out and recruit like-minded pols from around the state who don’t like the Hard Left turn toward the Lewises and Gary Chamberses the Democrats are clearly making?

We’ll see. We hope so. A Louisiana where Republicans pull a quarter to a third of the black vote and can elect a quarter to a third of the black politicians to office is a totally different place than we currently reside in.