Saturday night, something surprising – at least, it seemed, to everyone but us here at The Hayride – happened in Baton Rouge.
I knew Sid Edwards was going to win by the middle of last week, and I said so publicly on Friday…
Based on all the data I’ve seen, I’m making this prediction: Sid Edwards is going to beat Sharon Broome 53-47 tomorrow night and flip the mayoral seat in Baton Rouge red for the first time in 20 years.
I could be wrong, but this is not a wild-assed guess.
— Scott McKay (@TheHayride) December 6, 2024
Edwards actually ended up winning 54-46. I was a point too conservative.
Interestingly, the coach didn’t get an Election Day bump. He won early voting 54-46, and that was his final margin. Typically you’d expect a two or three point Election Day bump for a Republican candidate, and with Southern playing on the road Saturday in Jackson for the SWAC championship, you really would have expected it.
Didn’t happen.
Overall voting was pretty soft. There were only about 106,000 votes in Saturday’s runoff, down from just under 117,000 votes in the runoff four years ago. But that was good for 35.7 percent turnout, a number slightly up from four years ago. Yes, East Baton Rouge Parish’s electorate has shrunk in the past four years, a pretty good indication of what direction the city has taken with Sharon Broome in charge.
Keep that in mind. It’s the reason a high school football coach who had never run for anything before managed a near-landslide victory on Saturday.
Edwards was the head coach and athletic director at Central High School for 17 years before they let him go – to the great lament of most of the folks there – two years ago. He won big in Central, but perhaps more importantly, there was 49 percent turnout there.
And in St. George, where there was a tax election pushing out the vote, turnout was a respectable 44 percent. That tax election, which forces the two percent local sales tax revenue collected in St. George into the coffers of the new city of St. George and out of the hands of the city-parish government, was a 79-21 blowout for the “yes” position.
Inside the city of Baton Rouge, turnout was a dismal 27 percent.
I’ve said this, but most blowout elections aren’t the result of some candidate capturing the imagination of the public and getting people to come out of the woodwork to vote for him. That happens every once in a blue moon, but it’s not how you get a blowout. You usually get a blowout victory in an election because the other guy’s voters give up.
And Broome’s voters gave up. They didn’t come out to vote.
There were lots of precincts in North Baton Rouge which were simply ghost towns. Almost nobody showed up on Saturday. And Broome’s people knew they were sunk long before any results came in.
So it’s a monumental victory, and there is a lot of validation to be had for the notion that if you abjectly fail over and over again, eventually those sins will find you out. Broome has been quite possibly the worst mayor Baton Rouge has ever had, and her own voters knew it. So she’s done.
Edwards was exceedingly magnanimous in victory Saturday night, repeating his earlier statement at the mayoral debate thanking her for her eight years of service in the job and her 36 years in the public sector. That was classy and appropriate. Election Night is not the time for division and rancor.
The Monday after the election, however, is a different story.
The concern with a newbie politician now running a city-parish government with a $1.2 billion budget is less that he won’t be competent to handle the job. It’s that now Edwards is going to have lots of people trying to get in his ear and tell him what’s what.
And that’s especially a concern in Baton Rouge.
I have a couple of historical data points to offer by way of pointing out the pitfalls Edwards needs to avoid in the early days of his tenure.
The first one is Dave Treen, as noted in the headline.
Treen was another Republican who won an election he wasn’t supposed to. He’d spent much of the 1970’s as the lone GOP congressman in the Louisiana delegation, representing what’s currently Steve Scalise’s suburban New Orleans district. But in 1979, Edwin Edwards was termed out as Louisiana’s governor and the seat came open, and Treen ran in a crowded field as an extreme dark horse and the only Republican in a jungle primary. That got him into the runoff with Louis Lambert, who was more or less Edwards’ candidate.
And when third-place finisher Jimmy Fitzmorris threw in with Treen, he pulled off a massive upset and became the state’s first Republican governor since Reconstruction.
I remember Treen’s election really well. I was nine years old and learning politics from my grandfather, who knew Treen pretty well because he lived in the neighborhood. And when he won, which made my grandfather happy, I remember him saying “he has no idea how they’re going to get him.”
And he was right.
Dave Treen had zero support in the legislature, which was monolithically Democrat and pretty loyal to Edwin Edwards. He had absolutely zero support in the state bureaucracy, which was totally loyal to Edwin. And the former governor set up in his house in Walden Estates and proceeded to de-facto run the state right under Treen’s nose. When the 1983 gubernatorial election came around, Treen was absolutely cooked. That was the cycle where Edwin’s famous quote about how the only way he could lose was to get caught in bed with a dead girl or a live boy came from.
The British would say that Dave Treen got “stitched up” after he won in 1979. Sid Edwards can’t let himself be that guy.
There are lots of people – they’re the “in” crowd in downtown – who have established the Baton Rouge way of doing business over the past generation or more. And the Baton Rouge way absolutely sucks.
You saw it with all the white Republican business money which flowed to Ted James because, as the narrative went, a white Republican can’t win parishwide in East Baton Rouge. This was absolutely false, and Edwards proved it, but it had been demonstrably false for a long time before Saturday.
White Republicans already held parishwide elected positions as coroner, assessor, clerk of court and sheriff. And yet these people put their money and support behind Ted James, one of the most boorish and ridiculous leftist Democrats in the state legislature, in the primary. And most of them never came around to Edwards in the runoff – some even gave to Broome.
They also voted for, and donated to, Donald Trump. Make that make sense.
It isn’t that they don’t think a white Republican can win this race, it’s that they know they can grease a black Democrat like Broome or James or Kip Holden before them to continue doing things the way they’re currently being done. And a white Republican mayor-president will want to re-examine the Baton Rouge way, which is very much not good for business.
All of a sudden, the millions of dollars for useless studies of boondoggle projects might go away, and that’ll strip some of the fat away from architects and consulting firms which have lived high on the hog for 20 years and more.
Lots of contracts could get scrutiny. Audits might be done. Sweetheart deals on zoning, easements and heaven knows what else could undergo a re-examination.
Edwards can’t allow himself to be romanced by the “in” crowd. They didn’t support him when he ran, and they aren’t going to have his best interest in mind now.
And no matter how friendly he might want to be toward them, those people cannot be counted on to support him four years from now when the next black Democrat willing to be bought by the downtown crowd and fuel up the gravy train comes along.
Not if Edwards wants to be successful.
Which brings me to my next data point, which isn’t about politics but it’s relevant nonetheless.
If you’re getting old like I am, you’ll probably remember that in the 1990’s LSU’s athletic program was one of the worst underperformers around. Other than Skip Bertman’s perennial winners in baseball, what was known about LSU was that it hired cheap coaches and got cheap results. Joe Dean, who was the ultimate personification of old-school Baton Rouge thinking, was the athletic director and he was famous for pinching pennies on large items. Finally, after Dean’s bargain-basement hire of Gerry DiNardo collapsed into a dreadful 1999 season and DiNardo had to be let go as the football coach, new chancellor Mark Emmert committed to hiring a nationally prominent replacement who would put the program back on the map.
Dean began the hiring process, and the names popping out of his coaching search were exceedingly underwhelming. Meanwhile, famed sports agent Jimmy Sexton made call after call with no response.
Sexton had a client, then-Michigan State coach Nick Saban, who was interested in the job. But Dean wouldn’t take his call. Finally, Sexton had his friend Sean Tuohy, whom Dean knew from his days of doing color commentary of SEC basketball games in the 1980’s – Tuohy had been a star player at Ole Miss before settling in Memphis and ultimately gaining fame as the surrogate father of Michael Oher of The Blind Side fame – pay a call to Dean.
Tuohy told Dean to call Sexton back because he had the coach Dean was looking for. And somehow that also got back to Emmert, who told Dean to make the call.
Shortly thereafter, Emmert and Dean met with Saban at Sexton’s house in Memphis, and from that meeting Emmert told Dean to make the hire.
But Dean didn’t want to pay Saban the $1.2 million Sexton was asking. Until Emmert demanded that he did.
And Dean groused about the money wasted with that contract, which is comical now given the vast increase in value Saban brought to LSU’s athletic program based on the success he had here.
That’s the old Baton Rouge way. Penny-wise, dollar-foolish, small-time thinking and utterly missing the boat.
These same people want to take junkets to all of these cities which are outperforming Baton Rouge to find out why, and they glean all the wrong lessons. They’ll go to Phoenix and come back saying Baton Rouge needs a first-class bus system, not understanding what really makes Phoenix a successful city is the open business climate there and the skilled workforce. They’ll go to Austin and come back demanding a great library system, and now Baton Rouge has empty libraries run by woke communists and a library system with $90 million in reserves they’ll never productively use and a giant surplus every year.
And they do none of the things which actually need to be done to improve the quality of life in this town.
Edwards can’t let himself get sucked into the Baton Rouge way. He can’t be coopted by the “in” crowd. His administration needs to insist on best practices from around the country and the world, so that it does what Emmert and Saban did in putting LSU back into the big-time of college athletics.
We need a new Baton Rouge way. That’s going to require tough, principled, savvy leadership.
The good news is that Edwards has taken over losing programs and made them winners several times before. He understands the art of the turnaround. He just needs to apply those lessons and not let the “in” crowd turn him into Dave Treen.