The headline is a question, and it probably shouldn’t be. This text message that went out as soon as Blake Miguez qualified in the newly-redrawn 6th Congressional District late last week is one of the dumbest things I’ve seen in a while.

In case you didn’t get this thing, here it is…

Why is this stupid? Multiple reasons.

First, this has already been put out. Bill Cassidy’s camp was flogging this old story back when Miguez was running against Cassidy in the Senate race. It didn’t get a lot of traction then, for some pretty good reasons.

Among them that when this accusation resurfaced, the woman’s family jumped all over it – and not in the way you’d think. They actually defended Miguez. They said he was the best thing that had ever happened to her. Her father, mother and brother ALL joined in on defending Miguez.

The woman didn’t come forward one way or the other. She didn’t defend her accusations. It was posited the reason for that was that she’s had a lot of trouble with mental instability and  substance abuse, and it’s not a major surprise that somebody dealing with problems like that would want to call attention to themselves and their situation.

So all they’ve got is an almost 20-year-old police report with nothing corroborating it or establishing a pattern. Black Miguez has been around in Louisiana politics for quite a while now; if he was the kind of person this police report would make him out to be, there would likely have been other incidents and it doesn’t appear there are any.

But the reason this is political malpractice, and the reason I call it one of the dumbest things I’ve ever seen, is that whoever is responsible has now dragged this smelly carcass out in front of the public at the beginning of the race rather than the end.

This is an October surprise. You uncork this a couple of days before the election so it poisons Miguez among undecided voters and they can’t price it into his stock. Dragging it out now means it gets processed and discounted, and most of all debunked, by Election Day.

And it ends up saying more about the people who put it out there than the guy at which it’s aimed.

The word on the street is the guy behind this thing – not the political operatives who put it together, but the actual mover who greenlighted it – was Cameron Henry, the senate president. Henry, we’re told, is in Rick Edmonds’ camp. He and Miguez are not on friendly terms.

If Cameron Henry had wanted to help Rick Edmonds get to Congress, it might have been a good idea not to have gutted the school-choice bill Edmonds authored in 2025 by refusing to fund the LA GATOR scholarships. That made the bill all but worthless and denied Edmonds a signature legislative accomplishment. But now he wants to back the guy he kneecapped last year.

Smooth.

We’ve not seen a lot of polling on the race, but what we have seen indicates Rick Edmonds would have a real uphill climb in trying to beat Miguez. Edmonds doesn’t have any money, while Miguez has more than enough to flood the district. There is a jungle primary and the prospect of the Democrat vote being split between Baton Rouge Metro Council corruptocrat Chauna Banks, DSA communist Lindsay Garcia, and John Bel Edwards endorsee Pat Forbes, so it’s not impossible that Miguez and Edmonds might be in a runoff.

But if this is your big weapon against Miguez and you’ve already fired it, you just get annihilated by a rich opponent.

Not to mention that while Miguez hasn’t regained the Trump endorsement he had before the emergency congressional redistricting the legislature did, everyone expects he will.

The point being that if you’re Cameron Henry, and you have ambitions – either running for the Senate in 2028 if John Kennedy doesn’t run for re-election (we expect Kennedy will), or for governor in 2031 when Jeff Landry is termed out, you probably don’t want to make enemies of U.S. congressmen. Attaching yourself to  something like this smells a little like the old “If you strike at the king, you must kill him” kind of thing, and Rick Edmonds hasn’t really demonstrated so far that he’s a sure bet.

We notice that Cameron Henry tends to get involved in lots of things that don’t make sense. If the story is true that he’s behind this, it would be one more data point supporting the proposition that he’s less a smart political operator and more of a guy who doesn’t know what he’s doing.

Meanwhile, it’s Wednesday, four or five days after this text came out, and it generated zero buzz on social media or among the newsies in the state. So this was a flop. The most salacious accusation they could make, and nobody cares.

If this is the worst Miguez will face in this campaign, it’s tempting to think he has the race locked up.