I apologize for getting off to such a slow start at the site today, but it was a very late night, and then I had radio and the Spectacle Podcast to record, and then I had an American Spectator column I had to write.

And then on top of that, the phone hasn’t stopped ringing all day.

As such, things we’d normally have in the morning we’ll have in the afternoon today.

But I did want to pass along a quick note about Louisiana’s elections last night. I’ll get into the federal races in another post later, but the one race I’d highlighted here all along was the Baton Rouge mayoral race and what an opportunity that has been for Republicans.

Well, that’s been proven out…

Ted James spent some $1.1 million – or at least he raised that much, if he didn’t spend it all – to come in third place, and he was beaten by six points by a first-time political candidate with less than a tenth his money.

That’s humiliating, and it’s especially humiliating for politicians like Scott McKnight and Paula Davis who threw in with James and attempted to lecture their constituents into voting for a leftist Democrat who’d chaired Kamala Harris’ campaign in Louisiana.

You’d expect those people to get behind Edwards now, because if it was so important to get rid of Sharon Broome that they’d throw in with somebody like James, certainly they’d throw in behind a fellow Republican…right?

As for James, his only real play if he’s going to have any credibility for a political future beyond simply trundling off back to the state legislature in 2027 would be to endorse Edwards.

After all, he spent a ton of time preaching the gospel of bipartisanship in service to Baton Rouge’s future. That’s all fine and well and good when you’re trying to be the boss and the Republicans are supposed to kiss your ring, but it’s something different, and a lot truer test, when it’s you in the subservient role.

But if James refuses, then at the end of the day it wasn’t about the “wound” Broome had opened up in this city after all. It was about Ted James and his ambitions and his willingness to say anything to anybody.

Meanwhile, Sid Edwards needs your money.

Edwards can win. Broome is an incumbent who got only 31 percent of the vote. Donald Trump got 43 percent of the vote in East Baton Rouge Parish last night, and that’s Edwards’ base vote. He needs to find another 7-8 percent out of the non-Trump, non-Broome vote which is somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 percent. That’s mostly going to be black vote, but Sid Edwards has more personal relationships and connections to black voters in Baton Rouge than any Republican mayoral candidate in memory.

And the electorate is going to change – significantly – in December.

Four years ago, turnout went from 70.2 percent in East Baton Rouge in November, when the mayoral primary coincided with the presidential election, to 34.4 percent in the mayoral runoff. It’s likely to fall off similarly this time, and there is almost nothing else on the ballot that would drive turnout.

Almost nothing. Not nothing.

In St. George there’s a tax election which will move the sales tax revenue collected in the new city into the city’s coffers and out of the hands of city-parish government. Everyone in St. George is going to turn out for that.

And Sid Edwards is going to win St. George by a very large number.

So if turnout drops from 64 percent last night to something below 40 percent for the runoff, but what props it up from dropping further is the St. George vote turning out, then what would constitute a Trumpian share of the East Baton Rouge electorate for Edwards might translate into a winning margin in December.

With enough money and a fuller campaign, including a professional get-out-the-vote operation to insure that turnout, Edwards can be Baton Rouge’s next mayor.

This was a message McKnight and Davis intentional obfuscated, probably for their own purposes. But now we’ll see a real test of it.

The game is afoot.