As our Louisiana readers have surely heard by now, Saturday’s election results were a disaster for Gov. Jeff Landry and Louisiana’s Republican-majority legislature. All four of the constitutional amendments passed by the legislature in November and put before the voters over the weekend went down to resounding defeat, with each of them taking essentially a two-to-one drubbing by the voters.

This despite the general sentiment of Louisiana voters being in favor of the aims those amendments pursued.

It seems like a very strange result, and as a result there is no shortage of analysis for why Saturday’s vote was such a debacle for the governor and the rest of the state’s leadership.

In a press release Saturday night, Landry himself wasn’t particularly bashful in saying his piece after the results were in…

Amendment 2 was a chance to permanently lower the maximum state income tax rate, double the tax deductions for residents over the age of 65, create a government growth limit, provide a permanent pay raise for teachers and school staff, maintain the homestead exemption and protect religious organizations, keep more tax dollars in local communities, allow for the elimination of inventory tax, and protect against special interest tax breaks.

“The primary goal of Amendment 2 was to create a better opportunity for our citizens. To work towards inviting people into our State rather than have them leave. Unfortunately, Soros and far left liberals poured millions into Louisiana with propaganda and outright lies about Amendment 2,” said Governor Landry. “Although we are disappointed in tonight’s results, we do not see this as a failure. We realize how hard positive change can be to implement in a State that is conditioned for failure. We will continue working to give our citizens more opportunities to keep more of their hard-earned money and provide a better future for Louisianians. This is not the end for us, and we will continue to fight to make the generational changes for Louisiana to succeed.”

LABI president Will Green said something similar following the defeat…

“Making Louisiana’s business climate attractive and competitive has long been a top priority for the business community, echoed in LABI’s LA Driven strategic plan. To achieve that, we have made clear the need to overhaul Louisiana’s tax code to promote fairness, predictability and transparency.

“Saturday’s result on constitutional amendment 2 makes clear the need to return to the drawing board in order to build consensus on such a critical issue that impacts every Louisianan.

“While this outcome isn’t what we had hoped for, we remain deeply motivated to build on the achievements of the past year. Our commitment to ensuring that Louisiana’s citizens and job creators receive the fair, straightforward tax code they rightfully deserve remains
stronger than ever.”

So how does a statewide referendum in a place where Republicans usually win elections 60-40 if not 2-to-1 fail as badly as this does? Are we seeing a leftward shift of Louisiana’s electorate after a long GOP winning streak?

Not really, no. At least, we can’t say that yet.

On X, Louisiana pollster John Couvillon called this a “primal scream” election for the state’s Democrats, and there was abnormally high turnout for an off-cycle election among black voters and Hard Left types.

Total turnout was only 22 percent.

What accounts for this level of disaster?

Here are four observations/lessons…

4. Louisiana Low-Trust Voters

This is something of a regurgitation of Landry’s rather frustrated statement on Saturday night. He’s not wrong; Louisiana is not a state conditioned for success.

We’ve had this discussion in conservative circles in this state for years, of course.

My take on this is Louisiana’s problem has always been one of low trust. We’ve had systemic corruption in government at all levels in this state for so long that virtually all of our votes are defensive ones and our voters are very, very risk-averse.

This is why if you ask the voters of this state if they think Louisiana’s constitution is any good, they’ll rightly tell you it stinks. But when you suggest a constitutional convention to them you’ll get a similarly negative response. That sounds like the voters are stupid, but that’s not what’s going on.

They aren’t stupid. Their experience is that changing things with respect to government usually, if not always, leads to worse results. And they’re convinced, based on a long history, that any sophisticated governmental regime which is either newly-established or significantly changed will be rife with little Easter eggs of corruption so that the various grifters assembled in and around the state capitol will shortly be able to harvest vast sums of filthy lucre off the back of Joe Sixpack.

You can dismiss that as a tinfoil hat mentality if you want, but it’s how most average voters in Louisiana think.

There are lots of John Schroder, Sharon Hewitt, and Stephen Waguespack voters out there who thought Landry was a clown and couldn’t understand why their candidate couldn’t get anywhere. Landry pushed on a bunch of crime and cultural issues rather than things like taxes and economic development, they note, and none of that fixes Louisiana.

Well, Landry won because your typical Louisiana voter has absolutely no faith that the politicians of this state will ever fix its economic or systemic governmental issues, and so the least they expect it to do is to keep insane leftist mothers from sexually transitioning their children, or to arrest pedophiles and gangbangers and lock them up. Or to make sure LSU has a good football team.

So when you bring a six-part constitutional amendment with as many moving parts as Amendment 2 had, regardless of how obvious it is that in bulk it’s a net positive for the state, Louisiana voters will immediately, reflexively be guided by their suspicions about politicians.

And it doesn’t matter that a supermajority of both houses of the Legislature have been in office five years or less, or that the old bulls who created the reputation for corruption among state legislators and other politicians are pretty much all gone. The voters don’t care.

You’ll never convince the bulk of this state’s electorate that smart policies will make a difference in their lives until they see evidence that smart policies work. And in Louisiana that evidence is very, very hard to come by.

So trying to pass a very complicated constitutional amendment like Amendment 2 was always going to be a hard sell. And with 2 getting all the attention, the other amendments were going to struggle to get a lot of momentum as well.

3. The Snapback Effect From 2024

One lesson that should be internalized from what happened on Saturday is that when voters have just had a big, decisive election, particularly in your favor, you should make them go to the polls as infrequently as possible for as long as possible.

Why this lesson? Well, in Saturday’s case it was a low-profile, off-cycle affair – other than mayoral and city council elections in St. George and a mayoral election in Lake Charles, there was nothing of real interest on the ballot on Saturday – and the bulk of the state’s electorate stayed home.

The bulk of the state’s electorate votes Republican.

Republicans are very fat and happy right now, and fat-and-happy Republicans tend to have lots more important things to do than vote on some boring constitutional amendments.

Compare that to Democrats, whose entire world is collapsing and they’re so angry about Donald Trump’s reforms in Washington that they’re staging near-riots at town halls and accosting Tesla drivers on the highways, and you have a major imbalance going on.

There are little special elections all over the country where Democrat turnout is dwarfing GOP turnout. This is why you want to have as few elections as possible in times like these; the snapback effect is a real thing and you need to give the other side time to cool off.

Holding a referendum on these amendments now, less than six months after Trump’s win in November, was a mistake.

2. Useful Idiots And Left-Wing, Out-Of-State Money

There was a lot of money spent by out-of-state groups in order to beat those four amendments. I’ve heard the number actually climbs into the eight figures, which I find utterly insane.

But between digital advertising, direct mail, straight-up street money in the black community and other things, there was certainly a whole lot more put into defeating those four amendments than there was in supporting them.

And it was spent smartly.

Not only were there more votes turned out in Orleans Parish to beat these four amendments on Saturday than turned out for the gubernatorial election in the fall of 2023, some 91 percent of the black vote went against the amendments.

But worse than that, opponents of the amendments and particularly Amendment 2 leaned heavily into the conservative vote and played on fears that tax protections for churches would be removed if Amendment 2 passed. Some of the out-of-state leftwing money playing in Saturday’s election made conservative Baton Rouge pastor Tony Spell the poster boy for this concern. He effectively became, wittingly or unwittingly, their Useful Idiot for defeating all four amendments.

Almost none of the conservative voters defeating all four amendments realized that they were with left-wing Soros-y organizations in doing so, but that’s what this was.

And, harkening back to items 4 and 3 on this list, that’s what you get when you run a ballot test past a sleepy, off-cycle electorate when the voters are not engaged.

All of that said…

1. Landry Has Problems With His Base, And He Needs To Address Them Now

Yes, you can blame George Soros for this. And yes, putting constitutional amendments on the ballot with nothing else anyone cares about is asking for trouble even in good circumstances.

But the number one lesson coming out of Saturday is that it was the first real opportunity for his voters to send Jeff Landry a message, and the one they sent wasn’t very positive.

We’ve been warning for a while that giving too much ground to the other side without first taking care of your own people is a fast road to political perdition, and that warning hasn’t been heeded.

Giving away the 6th Congressional District to Cleo Fields might have been a good way to neuter Garret Graves, who had made an enemy not just of Landry but of most of the state’s congressional delegation. And redrawing the map to dump Graves was in compliance with the orders of insane Obama judge Shelly Dick, so there was a justification for doing so.

We know all that, and we’ve covered all of it. But it doesn’t change the fact that Republican voters in this state remain absolutely furious over it.

Louisiana’s Republican voters don’t care that Fields is among the most transactional of the black Democrat politicians in this state. They loathe Fields. They believe, and hardly unreasonably, that he’s duplicitous and corrupt and it sickens them that he’s in Congress. Fields has done nothing to assuage those concerns, by the way; he’s yet to make a legitimately good and courageous bipartisan vote since he returned to Washington after a three-decade absence.

And they blame Landry for that.

They also blame Landry for vetoing the key insurance reform bill, the one changing the collateral source rule, last year. Louisiana’s insurance rates remain sky high, and Landry’s veto looks like a key reason why. It doesn’t even matter whether this is truly the cause of those sticky, confiscatory rates – people think it is, and until those rates come down the perception is that Landry is owned by the trial lawyers who are making a killing at the judicial trough thanks to Landry selling out the public in their favor.

This was one reason why I made such a big deal about John Carmouche going on the LSU Board of Supervisors and Landry opting to keep Remy Starns on that board. He’s not doing anything to dispel a perception which is poisoning the waters against him.

And while Amendment 2 certainly had a lot of solid tax reform parts to it, what most casual voters in Louisiana perceive is that Landry’s tax reform session from last fall was billed as an effort to kill the state income tax but all they’ve seen out of it was a big increase in sales taxes that have blown up their bill for wi-fi, cable TV and Netflix.

Which is perceived as a bait-and-switch.

Is that an accurate perception? Probably not, at least over the long haul, but the problem is that you aren’t operating in the long haul. You’re operating in the “have a referendum in less than six months when there is no reality available to change the perception” haul. And that’s why Landry’s base is pissed off and unmotivated.

As Couvillon noted, it wasn’t just that Democrats came out of the woodwork to defeat those amendments on Saturday. They failed pretty much everywhere. Hard-core conservative areas voted them down, too. And Republicans who would have voted yes didn’t bother to show up on Saturday, which could be interpreted as a rejection of the governor.

There aren’t a lot of approval polls out there on Landry. The general perception seems to be that he’s lucky there aren’t, because his own base is finding lots of things to complain about.

And it doesn’t matter whether those are legitimate. What matters is that it’s happening.

Landry needs to hew to his base and get very aggressively conservative. He needs to spend the next year, or really the rest of this term as governor, doing everything he can to reward his friends and punish his enemies.

It’s clear that reaching across the aisle as he has to date has come at a heavy price.