…but it sure wasn’t because of anything the Republicans did well.

Sometimes you just get lucky.

Julia Letlow won a 51-49, 25,000-vote victory over Jamie Davis in a race which should have been 61-39. In this, Letlow was a small step up from Darline Graham, who lost a similarly-unlosable Senate seat in South Carolina after running a race that demonstrated she had zero business in senatorial politics.

Letlow is at least a member of Congress. She’s qualified to be a U.S. Senator at least from the perspective of having been on Capitol Hill for six years and being part of the legislative process. But Letlow hasn’t really convinced anybody she’s any good at this stuff. She inherited that seat from her husband Luke, who was one of the greats, and for six years she never had a tough race because who could run against Luke’s widow? And then she was parachuted in as a ringer to beat Bill Cassidy, when it turned out Cassidy was doomed in the GOP primary. Letlow then ran an utterly, completely spiritless race and barely eked out a victory against a police juror from a parish with 4,000 people in it.

Mitch Landrieu has to be kicking himself right now. Landrieu is doing a stupid podcast where he’s running around the South interviewing Democrat activists who spout communist rhetoric all day. Nobody’s watching. If Landrieu had any stones, he would have gotten into that Senate race and he would have beaten Letlow soundly last night. And then Mitch Landrieu could have started making real noises about running for president.

But then, nobody ever gave Mitch Landrieu credit for being smart.

At the end of the day, that’s what saved Louisiana’s Republicans last night: stupid Democrats. They ran the worst possible candidate for the Senate, a guy with zero accomplishments who can barely make complete sentences and whose only saving grace was that he enthusiastically went through the motions of campaigning for the job, and he almost won.

That Letlow was ahead by more than 100,000 votes and ended up winning by just 25,000 because early votes from East Baton Rouge and Orleans Parishes were counted last is something many Republicans are steamed about right now, and I would guess this is likely going to bring on a real challenge to Nancy Landry’s job as Secretary of State in next year’s elections.

But beyond that? It wasn’t a disaster. There wasn’t much damage.

Eric Skrmetta’s Public Service Commission seat stayed in Republican hands, though Stephanie Hilferty is more Democrat than Republican if you want to be honest about it. John Atkins is the real replacement for Skrmetta; Atkins is the guy who actually understands what the PSC does and he’s likely going to assume the leadership on that body. Having him replace Foster Campbell is far and away the biggest win this cycle produced for the state.

There wasn’t any damage on BESE, though the GOP lost a House seat in a special election to a Democrat. It was Joe Stagni’s seat in Kenner, though – in truth, a Democrat in that seat is going to function pretty much the same way.

All of the incumbent members of Congress won; Clay Higgins, Mike Johnson and Steve Scalise were safe and they stayed that way. In the 5th and 6th Districts, conservatives got exactly the runoff matchups they wanted – Gabe Firment and Pat Moore in the 5th and Blake Miguez and Chauna Banks in the 6th. Firment and Miguez have both been great conservatives in the Louisiana legislature and they’ll both be outstanding congressmen. If Davis can get 49 percent statewide it’s not assured Moore and Banks will lose, but assuming Republicans will be terrified enough of what just got elected across the country that they’ll be motivated to get out and vote next month, those should be wins. The 6th District race almost ended up with two Republicans in the runoff, as Rick Edmonds was just 1,000 votes behind Miguez and 2,000 behind Banks; more about that race tomorrow.

So we survived.

And interestingly enough, the carnage elsewhere might end up giving Louisiana the greatest opportunity it’s ever had.

Georgia has picked Louisiana’s economy clean for decades as Atlanta fed off our state for economic development wins. Delta Airlines is the classic example, but there are tons of others. Well, with Keisha Bottoms winning that governor’s race it’s the equivalent – the literal equivalent – of LaToya Cantrell getting elected governor of Louisiana. Bottoms is a proven loser as the disgraced former mayor of Atlanta and now she gets to ruin that entire state, which she will. If Jeff Landry and Susan Bourgeois, who heads Louisiana Economic Development, are smart, they will aggressively poach as many jobs and companies out of Georgia as they can.

Ditto for Texas, which just cleared out the Republicans from the top tier of its state government and installed stupid communists in those positions. For the next four years they will declare war on their own economy and almost certainly install a state income tax higher than Louisiana’s.

Landry has a lot of work to do, though, with re-election coming up in a year. His involvement in dropping Letlow in as the Senate candidate was a near-disaster and there are a whole lot of people who are not going to give him a pass for it without getting reasons to do so. And while Landry can say, presumably in a month, that the way the new congressional map played out the state now has a 5-1 congressional delegation, the fact is Firment and Miguez were not his candidates. He’s going to have to break bread with them, probably raise them some money and get aligned with them.

There is a bit less than a year, and a legislative session coming up in the spring, which will serve as a crucible for stitching the Louisiana Republican Party back together. Great opportunities exist for putting Louisiana in a commanding position vis-a-vis its neighbors for the first time in modern memory. But Davis’ 49 percent should serve as a major warning that the cataclysm may not have missed Louisiana after all; it might just be coming late.

It’s time to count our blessings and get to work.