I don’t think I’m alone in noticing that the Senate GOP primary runoff between Julia Letlow and John Fleming which is already into early voting has been… uninspiring. Over the past few days it’s actually been a little worse than that.

The two candidates have done a pretty good job of tearing the Louisiana Republican Party apart, and they’re doing it over some really weird things. For example, Fleming has made carbon capture the centerpiece of his campaign, and it’s strange that he’s doing that – yes, there is a small cadre of people who are very exercised about carbon capture and sequestration, and yes, that entire subject arises out of a dumb Green New Deal initiative born from the mistaken idea that carbon dioxide is poison rather than plant food.

But if you rank carbon capture on a list of issues most Louisianans care about, it’s going to be exceedingly low. People want car insurance rates down. They want gas prices down. They want economic development. They want to save the culture so we don’t turn into the mess that Europe has become. They want criminals off the streets. They want potholes gone from the roads. They’d like us not to be at war.

Issues like those are the ones voters care about.

What we’re seeing instead in this race is John Fleming and Jeff Landry at each other’s throats, because Team Fleming is accusing Letlow of being Landry’s puppet. Fleming is bashing Letlow over that horrendous job-interview video from a few years ago where  she was paying obeisance to DEI in an attempt to get the job as president of the University of Louisiana at Monroe – and it’s hard to begrudge him that; it’s perfectly legitimate to question her ideological makeup based on that video. A Letlow-affiliated PAC has been hammering Fleming for supposedly lying about his job as a deputy chief of staff at the White House, when we’re really talking about semantics – and who cares about a job title when we know he worked in the White House, served in Congress and is currently state treasurer? The man doesn’t lack qualifications for the job.

But then there are the outside people.

Some group somewhere put out an AI video with a bad likeness of Letlow confessing to all the reasons she shouldn’t be elected, and the race has just gotten so nasty that just about everybody you talk to is disgusted.

The online group Save My Louisiana, which as we understood it was formed to stop carbon capture projects but is now a Fleming camp surrogate, put out a defense of the video after Landry, Congressman Clay Higgins and Letlow herself threw a fit over a clip in the video where AI Julia says she was going to be the president at UL-Monroe until her husband Luke died and she was appointed to his congressional seat…

The thing is, Fleming and his campaign didn’t create the video. But he committed a grievous political error by sharing it and babbling about the issues it raised.

It isn’t that raising those issues is off limits. It’s that the ad should have been radioactive for Fleming, for a number of reasons.

First, if you’re going to lampoon your political opponent, or someone you don’t like politically, what you don’t want to do is to use AI to depict them exactly, or in a serious way. Take Spencer Pratt’s campaign and its allies as something of a gold standard – those pro-Pratt videos depicted Karen Bass as the Joker of Batman fame, so it was clear she wasn’t being presented as actually Karen Pratt. This video was clearly trying to present Letlow as she is – though from a technical standpoint the likeness isn’t all that good; there’s a great deal of facial drift in the video clips they’re stringing together. So they’re putting words in her mouth in a serious way, which comes off as mean-spirited.

Second, it isn’t just that the ad mentions Luke Letlow – at the end there’s the sound of a car crash, and given that Julia Letlow lost a sibling to a car crash it’s absolutely a cheap shot to throw that in. But in the Luke Letlow reference, the ad says she was appoint to his seat and that’s a lie; there was a special election and she won. Now – there was little question that she would win, but she was nonetheless elected.

It isn’t illegitimate to ask whether Letlow has ever had a real test, or whether she’s proven herself to be heavyweight enough to be given one of the 100 or so most powerful political jobs in the world. But asking that question this way is politically idiotic. You’ve created so much controversy around the delivery of the message that nobody has time to consider the message itself.

Team Fleming shouldn’t be attacking Letlow for carbon capture or her connections to “industrial energy.” They shouldn’t be getting into pissing matches with Jeff Landry and Clay Higgins. They shouldn’t be attacking her for the fact that her fiance is a lobbyist – not when a lobbying firm is paying Fleming a retainer. They should be focused on the fact that she has a voting record slightly to the left of Bill Cassidy, and that her DEI job interview at ULM marks her as an opportunist more than a principled conservative. They should be saying that the Left in this country has literally gone mad, and Julia Letlow has not demonstrated the fortitude to fight back against the  insanity of the Liz Warrens and AOCs of the world – once she gets to the Senate cloakroom, she shows all the signs of giving in to the little compromises which break our society bit by bit. By contrast, John Fleming has been fighting the fight for a long time and will keep fighting it no matter how much the Democrats hate him.

That’s the race Fleming can win.

If he were laser-focused on that narrative he’d have a compelling case for winning. But he’s coming off a 45-28 whipping at Letlow’s hands in the primary which was nonetheless enough to put him in the runoff, and he’s still talking about things which won’t move the needle.

And he’s touting a poll which has him ahead of Letlow, except it’s a poll from late April, before the primary verdict that put him 17 points down.

I’m saying this because I actually voted for Fleming in the primary. I did it as a strategic vote because I wanted to get rid of Bill Cassidy and I figured a vote for Fleming would have the most weight in doing that because Letlow was certain to make the runoff and Fleming was not. And I’m considering voting for him again at the end of the month.

But what worries me is that mistakes like sharing that nasty, amateurish web ad, and taking on this “us against the world” persona in the middle of a political campaign – us against the world is a good mentality for a basketball team; it’s a really bad idea when you’re trying to build a large enough coalition to get a majority of voters to vote for you – will not only make a vote for Fleming a wasted vote, but should he get elected he’ll turn into a lightning rod for political controversy and a pariah in the Senate who can’t get anything done for Louisiana while he’s there.

As for Letlow, I’ve yet to see her address the concerns about her voting record. She has a viable defense, which is that if you represent the 5th congressional district in Louisiana, it doesn’t matter how conservative you are – your voting record will come off as moderate, because what matters in LA-5 is the farm bill and how much swag you can bring home from DC. You’re an appropriator, because your district is dirt poor and you need federal money flowing in because private investment in northeast and central Louisiana is hard as hell to come by. So yeah – she’s made deals to support stuff she wasn’t a fan of, because that’s what it took to get the money flowing.

Is that 100 percent true? Nothing in this campaign has been. It’s pretty true, though – it’s been true for all of her predecessors, including Ralph Abraham who’s a very solid conservative.

But she hasn’t even addressed it. Or the DEI stuff. Not really. And because of that, Fleming still has a chance two weeks out from the finish line.

In a race just about everybody is sick and tired of.