Something interesting happened a couple of weeks ago which is now official. The Republican Party of Louisiana announced it earlier this morning…

The Republican Party of Louisiana (LAGOP) today proudly announced that Republicans have officially surpassed Democrats in total registered voters for the first time in the state’s modern history.

In a new video message, LAGOP Chairman Derek Babcock celebrated the milestone and thanked the thousands of grassroots volunteers whose hard work made it possible.

“Louisiana, we have done it! For the first time in our state’s history, Republicans have officially surpassed Democrats in voter registration,” said Chairman Babcock. “To every grassroots volunteer, door knockers, phone bankers, all the Republicans who stepped up to help register new voters, this victory belongs to you!”

The shift comes as Louisiana prepares to celebrate America’s 250th birthday, marking a new chapter of conservative momentum in the Pelican State. Under the leadership of Governor Jeff Landry and the conservative Legislature, Republicans are delivering results that are attracting more voters to the Party of freedom and opportunity.

The LAGOP emphasizes that the work is not finished and urges supporters to continue registering new Republicans ahead of the midterm elections.

“This is a historic day for Louisiana. Decades of Democratic dominance on the voter rolls have ended,” Babcock concluded. “Thank you to every patriot who helped make this possible.”

This was really the last stage in Republicans gaining control of the state. There are still cities throughout Louisiana which are run by Democrats, though even Baton Rouge and Shreveport have Republican mayors (as does Lafayette; a nominal independent who’s really a Republican runs Monroe), but the state has a bicameral super-majority GOP legislature, a soon-to-be 5-1 split of its congressional delegation, two GOP senators and that isn’t changing anytime soon, nothing but Republican statewide officials and when the smoke clears this fall it’ll be pretty close to a Republican sweep of the elected spots on things like the BESE and Public Service Commission.

The only Democrats in state or federal offices at this point are the ones representing majority-black districts. Which essentially means that they’re in office at the sufferance of Republicans who don’t want to have to represent concentrations of black voters.

It’s more or less total domination, and now the voter registration has caught up to the political performance. Registration was always going to be a lagging indicator, at least until Louisiana goes to a full party primary system in all of our elections – something which seems to be opposed by a certain class of GOP politicians who can’t quite understand what time it is. But even without the motivation of a party primary system, in which it all of a sudden starts to matter what party you’re a member of, the move to Republican plurality status was well underway.

Now it’s likely to begin consolidating.

All of that said, the challenge now is to make this actually mean something.

Louisiana is generally making some very good policy now. The state is at the forefront of rolling back the social rot the Left insists on imposing in all the places they control, and there have been big wins on issues like abortion, re-inserting traditional moral foundations in public spaces, putting a stop to the transgender insanity, returning to actual education instead of stupid-communist indoctrination in the schools, and other things. Economic policy is getting a little better, though we’d like to see this state go further in making itself the most attractive place possible to start and grow a new business. The structure of government still needs a great deal of work.

But all of these new Republicans may or may not actually be bought in to the kinds of values and policy preferences the Republican Party is supposed to champion.

Some of them are registering as Republicans so they can vote in the party primaries for Congress. And they aren’t conservative at all.

We’ve seen a pretty good representation of this within the political class. We’re already seeing grifters who are anything but conservative getting elected to offices far beyond the appeal they ought to have. A perfect example happened over the weekend when Stephanie Hilferty, arguably the biggest RINO in the Louisiana legislature and whose mother Dwan has been an officer of the Democrat Parish Executive Committee in Jefferson Parish off and on for well more than a decade, won the GOP nomination for Eric Skrmetta’s Public Service Commission seat.

It takes a good bit of the shine off the current achievement to know that with these larger numbers comes a pretty sizable dilution of the ideological superiority that produced the numbers in the first place.

And what that means is the people who led the party to its dominant status are going to have to make sure to hold it to the same standard it had during the period of growth which got us here. A Louisiana GOP dominated by people run out of the Democrat Party by the Davante Lewises and Gary Chamberses of the world isn’t very different from the Louisiana Democrat Party which withered and died.

And this state will go nowhere if the LAGOP can’t do better than that.

So today is worth celebrating – but not without the recognition that this ain’t over. Not by a long shot.