The Monroe News-Star’s Greg Hilburn had a somewhat interesting article late last week on the Louisiana governor’s race, outlining complaints some of the Republican candidates have about the frontrunner in the race, Jeff Landry…

The Republicans trailing Landry are criticizing him as an intimidator and insider orchestrating backroom deals for endorsements and donor support, a theme that continued Thursday.

Waguespack accused Landry’s campaign of threatening his donors with “consequences” if they continue to support him and called the tactics “trash.”

“That campaign has absolutely deployed those tactics,” said Waguespack, who was also chief of staff for former Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal. “They don’t deserve that. So I would encourage (Landry) if that’s not what you want from the campaign tell them to stop. It made me want to dig my heels in.”

Nelson declined to engage, saying he never mentions other candidates while campaigning. “I’m really running against Huey Long,” said Nelson, saying Louisiana’s problems harken back a century to when the all-powerful Long molded the state’s political landscape by concentrating power in Baton Rouge.

But earlier this week, Schroder called Landry “an antagonistic bully,” while Hewitt said Landry secured his early lead by “gathering … insider endorsements.”

For his part, Landry shrugged off the political attacks, saying, “That’s probably why they’re in single digits.”

Meanwhile, Waguespack was getting hit with a rather nasty mail piece that went out to selected mailboxes across the state…

This isn’t really a Landry thing. The outfit who put it out is something called Watchdog PAC, which we’re told is fronted by Republican political consultant Scott Wilfong. But so far, there is no current filing for Watchdog PAC; it filed for dissolution with the state board of ethics in 2018. When it was a going concern, it was funded by trial lawyers, and among them was Hunter Lundy.

So this could be a Lundy attack on Waguespack, and it would make sense if it was, seeing as though the piece sounds like a Democrat hit on him and Lundy is an old Democrat running as an independent.

But Waguespack is bashing Landry and not Lundy. Why?

Well, the obvious answer is that now that the field is set and there are no other Democrats with any hope of drawing significant votes off Shawn Wilson, Wilson is almost assuredly going to make the runoff. That means it’s practically a waste of time for Waguespack, John Schroder, Sharon Hewitt and Richard Nelson even to be in the race if they can’t peel conservative votes off Landry.

And that’s a problem, because Landry’s base is pretty enthusiastic.

On Wednesday night at the Texas Club in Baton Rouge Landry had a huge crowd to celebrate his qualifying for the race with country stars John Rich, Craig Morgan, and Tracy Lawrence entertaining the crowd. It looked very much like a winning campaign. None of the other campaigns are showing that kind of enthusiastic support.

Is Landry a bully? Well, while he’s running a relatively non-specific public campaign which is based on very broad themes of a Louisiana revival, heavy on social issues and repetitive on crime, under the surface Landry’s camp has made noises about some pretty radical changes to come. A massive overhaul of the state’s tax system, for example. Big changes in education policy. A re-do of public health in Louisiana, which is utterly broken, thoroughly wasteful and scandalously corrupt. Broad dissolutions of the mind-numbing numbers of boards and commissions regulating every form of economic activity under the sun in this state. Aggressive actions to enforce societal norms along the lines of what Ron DeSantis has done in Florida.

Those things would absolutely make Jeff Landry a bully of a governor.

Most people, particularly on the Right, have been begging for a conservative bully for all of our lives, because that’s what it’s going to take to rip out the legacy of Huey Long, who established Louisiana politics as it currently stands, and put us in a posture to compete with our neighboring states and in particular Texas, Tennessee and Florida who have so badly kicked our collective ass over the past few decades.

Many of those broad reforms will find some purchase in a Republican-majority legislature. But some of them are only going to happen courtesy of a governor willing to lean in and intimidate people.

And though Waguespack is certainly not guilty of this, he has a pretty decent number of donors who are not strangers to having the leading gubernatorial candidate in a given race putting the arm on them with threats and other forms of intimidation – and responding to it by folding precipitously. Because that is precisely what John Bel Edwards did during the 2015 cycle as soon as polls started showing him with a significant lead on David Vitter.

Eight years on, a lot of those Waguespack donors have a pretty big tally of contributions to Edwards’ cause.

So if you’re Jeff Landry and you’ve been the number one political foil for Edwards over at least the last four years if not the last seven, and you turn around and see these same Republicans who backed Edwards twice for whatever reason and they’re still going against you, even when Edwards is no longer around, why wouldn’t you lean on them?

Louisiana gubernatorial politics is bully politics. It has been since Huey Long, and arguably it’s been bully politics even longer than that.

And Schroder, who echoed Waguespack’s complaints, is absolutely no different than Landry in this regard.

Which is not an attack on Schroder.

Do voters care about people in Landry’s camp leaning on Waguespack’s donors? A few might. Most couldn’t care less. Edwards’ bully tactics didn’t bother the voters in 2015 or 2019, and he was a Democrat in a red state.

What this comes down to is that now that the field is set and Election Day has appeared on the horizon, time is becoming short for the other campaigns to find some issue or line of attack that would soften up Landry’s support and offer a lane in which they might be able to shoot past him into the runoff.

Landry-as-bully is really unlikely to serve that purpose, though. It’s a bit on the weak-sauce side. They’re going to need something better than that.

UPDATE: Jason Redmond, who was the director of Watchdog PAC until its dissolution in 2018, sends this along…

Just a quick note to clarify some things.  I used to run a PAC called “Watchdog PAC, Inc.” which I shut down in 2018.  It was a real Super PAC, which is why you are able to still access donor disclosure reports on it.

The “Watchdog PAC” that you reported on today is actually called “Watchdog PAC LLC” which is solely run by Scott Wilfong, as far as I know.  The thing is, adding the LLC to the name makes it an entirely different entity, and my understanding is that it was formed as a 501c(4) “dark money” organization, so no donor disclosure reports are required of it or available for public review.

But, as you see, the fact that the legal name happens to have the letters “PAC” in it leads people to believe its a real PAC and that it is my old entity, which it is not.

So looking at the donor lists of the old “Watchdog PAC Inc.” and pegging any of its former donors, like Mr. Lundy, to this new NON-PAC organization would be wholly incorrect.  I have zero involvement or affiliation with “Watchdog PAC LLC.”

To get ahead on another issue, I also had a PAC called “Raise The Bar PAC Inc.” which I also shut down in 2018 after I retired from campaign politics.  Mr. Wilfong has also appropriated that name as “Raise The Bar PAC LLC” and is running it as a 501c(4) just like “Watchdog PAC LLC”.  I also have zero affiliation with that new entity.

So assuming none of the dark-money donors to the new Watchdog PAC are the same as the old Watchdog PAC, then Hunter Lundy would be off the hook for the mail-piece attack on Waguespack.

We’re told the new iteration is a trial-lawyer-funded operation, which was largely the case with the former Watchdog PAC, and that’s consistent with Wilfong’s other work. If that’s true, the guess here would be it’s not even affiliated with another campaign but rather it’s revenge against Waguespack for the wars he fought against trial lawyers as LABI president over things like tort reform and oil and gas legacy and coastal lawsuits; there’s more than enough bad blood there to fuel a dark-money expenditure against him.

Which doesn’t make him wrong for his stances on those issues, by the way.