The “Seabaugh effect” continues to work on Democrat First District Attorney James Stewart, a recent review of data reveals.

Stewart will face off against Republican state Sen. Alan Seabaugh this fall in a bid to win reelection. Demographics slightly favor Stewart, but Seabaugh has shown a terrific ability to campaign in his runs for the state Legislature.

In his challenge, Seabaugh, picking up on some disgruntlement within the parish, has emphasized an approach that will lead to more charges being filed and more cases going to trial. Stewart has come under criticism for being too much in the mold of a “progressive prosecutor,” meaning one who tends to dismiss lower-level charges or plead cases down too aggressively because supposedly prosecutorial resources should go to more serious crimes, while lower-level offenses allegedly are offshoots of disadvantaged backgrounds and are committed disproportionately by racial minorities.

Leftist special interests had high hopes for Stewart in this mode, backing him to the tune of nearly a million dollars in his initial run for office to fill an unexpired term. Yet during that term, he followed that model only marginally, at best, leaving those previous backers with no special enthusiasm for him during his first reelection attempt in 2020.

However, he changed his tune heading into that year. For most of his second term for most of it, even as crime rates shot up, his criminal charging rate went down, while the trial average remained about where it had been since 2008, well before his arrival. Further, over the previous two years, 70 percent of the 81 people arrested for murder already had arrest records. This pattern caught the attention of Seabaugh, who, months before his formal announcement last fall, had circulated the idea that he would challenge Stewart.

Stewart then began changing his ways, talking up his willingness to impose the death penalty. He also took about 50 percent more cases to trial last year than the historical average of just over 40, which would indicate pursuing more charges and showing less willingness to plead down. Recently, Stewart touted a conviction rate of above 90 percent, according to documentation not available publicly. But the total number of cases filed that year was about 20 percent lower than it had been a decade earlier, just before he took office, while the violent crime rate actually inched up about 3 percent from the last six months of 2016 to the last six months of 2025.

In short, Stewart understands that a skilled campaigner like Seabaugh can exploit that record and can raise enough money, with much less of it coming from the local legal community than in Stewart’s case, to get the word out that Stewart is too soft on crime. So, he must pull whatever statistics he can to try to counter that, adjust his practices on the margin to reflect a harder-on-crime approach, and benefit from the nationwide secular decline in criminal behavior.

But the facts and data continue to be out there that paint him as more kindred to progressive prosecution than being tough on crime, leaving him vulnerable.