All the politicians and politicos have, since Saturday night, been congratulating Helena Moreno for her big win in the New Orleans mayor’s race, and to be fair, it was certainly that. Moreno garnered 55 percent of the vote on Saturday amid a 12-candidate field (though the vast majority of candidates on the ballot were less than serious), and that’s a dominant performance.

So good for her.

We are not fans of Helena Moreno at The Hayride. We aren’t fooled by the feint to the center that she offered during the campaign. Moreno recognized after the abject failure of LaToya Cantrell and the destruction Cantrell’s tenure has wrought on the city that Hard Left communism isn’t particularly sellable at the moment, and she ran accordingly.

So she got more or less a monopoly on the white vote, but she also got a plurality of the black vote.

No, this doesn’t mean Helena Moreno offers a break from the Cantrell style of governance.

Frequent Hayride readers are aware of my theory of Weaponized Governmental Failure, which holds that urban Democrat politicians will intentionally refuse to satisfactorily perform the basic functions of governance in a city, because that failure leads to an exodus of middle class voters – and when they go, the accountability they demand goes with them.

Middle class voters usually vote Republican. They want smaller, economical government, low taxes, efficient basic services, law and order, quality schools.

They want the potholes filled promptly. Drainage. A working fire department. Obvious things.

A city with too many middle class voters will bounce local politicians out of office if they catch them stealing the pothole money.

So what you want to do is to get rid of as many of those people as you can. You want a city with a small skim of rich people, who can pay for city services a la carte (they’ll have private security in their neighborhoods and their kids will go to private schools, plus they’ll buy access to politicians with campaign donations and bribes so as to secure whatever other things from the city that they need), and a vast swath of easily duped poor people who can be bought off with stupid woke pieties and policy baubles like midnight basketball and cashless bail.

Weaponized governmental failure is why Democrat politicians want to defund the police or take the side of street criminals over lawful citizens they prey on. It’s about subjugating the people and making them easy to govern, because all the rebels will soon live in the suburbs.

And weaponized governmental failure has held sway in New Orleans for better than a half-century at this point.

Cantrell and Moreno are both practitioners of it. They just come from different sides of the equation.

Cantrell came from the poor side. She was a “community activist” before getting into elective politics, which is to say she was a rabble-rouser among New Orleans’ poor. Cantrell knew nothing but woke pieties and policy baubles. She had a fundamental ignorance of why and how a city works, and her time as mayor proved conclusively how necessary such an understanding is to any success in governance.

That isn’t Moreno’s problem.

Moreno is, by contrast, a limousine leftist who comes at the Weaponized Governmental Failure program from the standpoint of the rich. She’s less likely to be brazenly corrupt like Cantrell was – which is not to say her administration won’t steal the pothole money, but they’ll be more circumspect about it.

Will she offer economic policies which are pro-business? Will she act to produce effective law enforcement? Will she incentivize investment into things like the real estate market in New Orleans?

We’ll believe that when we see it.

What we know about Helena Moreno is that after a hurricane wiped out the transmission infrastructure which fed electric power into the city and put most of it into darkness until Entergy could rebuild the towers and re-string the lines, she went on a totally unproductive warpath against the company. Her claim to legitimacy for this was that she was on the city council and in Orleans Parish the city council regulates electric utilities instead of the Public Service Commission, which does so elsewhere in the state, but the city council had been playing stupid climate change games for years in keeping Entergy from building a natural gas power plant in New Orleans East that would have been quite valuable.

We doubt she’s learned anything since. Our expectation is that she’ll make love to every microphone she can find in attempting to use the job of mayor of New Orleans as a springboard to a Senate seat or the governor’s mansion, and whatever supposed progress she makes will be little more than a whitewash of unsolved problems.

So no, Helena Moreno winning that election doesn’t fill us with optimism at all.

What does make us happy about this is the shockingly terrible performance of state senator Royce Duplessis in what amounted to a three-way race once all the uncompetitive candidates are filtered out.

All Duplessis got was 22 percent of the vote. City councilman Oliver Thomas, a black populist like Duplessis whose stint in prison for public corruption following Hurricane Katrina, managed 19 percent.

The reason it’s encouraging to see Duplessis’ poor performance is that he’s a one-trick pony who plays the race card incessantly, and it flopped horribly on him in this race.

Duplessis led off his campaign with this ad…

Not all that subtle with the “one of us” stuff, is it?

And there was this train wreck during the campaign…

That was an utterly idiotic attack on Moreno, who had nothing to do with any of it – and it was a pretty thuggish way to repeat the accusation that Moreno is a white devil while also running from it publicly.

In other words, a dog whistle. And not a particularly sophisticated one.

Everybody could see that regardless of what color Royce Duplessis might be, what’s true about him is that he’s an asshole.

Black people in New Orleans knew that. They also knew that after eight years of Cantrell, who is an asshole on just as large a scale as Duplessis, the city and the region around it is suffering from asshole fatigue, and that soured them.

Christopher Tidmore, in a Facebook post over the weekend, described the position that put Duplessis in and his last-ditch efforts to salvage a racialist campaign…

Duplessis’ best hope would be to force a runoff by a narrow margin, and the chances of that are as narrow as electorally conceivable. Moreno commanded 49 percent in a University of New Orleans survey over a week ago, followed by Duplessis with 15 percent and Councilman Oliver Thomas with 13 percent.

However, 1 in 5 respondents remain undecided, with an large number of these being African-American voters; it’s upon this Black electorate Duplessis has gambled. The state senator runs on a strategy of African-American dissatisfaction with the fights between the city council and the mayor and anxiety of electing another Caucasian mayor of New Orleans in a majority Black city. Consequently, he seeks to drive up African-American turnout, with himself as the beneficiary. It is the only means for Duplessis’ gamble to pay off and earn a runoff slot – if Black voters respond to his message.

Duplessis responded to a question in a recent forum that underlines his strategy. He subsequently broadcast this question on every social media platform, almost minute by minute. As he explains his campaign thesis, “The one thing we’re not gonna do is ignore race. Because race-based issues cannot be solved by avoiding the conversation around race. Your question pointed out the stark racial disparities around economics in New Orleans. New Orleans is still a majority Black city, but we’re not just a majority Black city. We are one of the most culturally rich cities in the world where the contributions of Black people mean so much – not just a New Orleans culture – but to the entire world.”

Ugh. Enough already.

Maybe the big takeaway is that nobody is interested in a nonstop race card. In New Orleans, lots of voters got very tired of listening to Cantrell cry about racism every time she got caught in another scandal over her personal corruption and incompetence, and it’s not unreasonable to think they figured Duplessis would just be more of the same.

We aren’t naive enough to think this is going to mean the voters of New Orleans are going to demand, much less get, an end to weaponized governmental failure. But you have to start somewhere, and a rejection of the most unsophisticated, bare-knuckled race-baiting such as that offered by Duplessis is at least a block to build with.