With each passing election cycle in Louisiana, more and more candidates are winning office by not drawing a single challenger and Jeremy Alford says it’s a growing—and problematic—trend.
“In just a few short years, it’s difficult not to envision a landscape where half or more of our politicians across the state will be routinely elected with no opposition whatsoever,” Alford writes in his latest column. “In fact, if you crunch the numbers from the latest qualifying period from September, you’ll learn we’re practically there already.”
Out of the 1,150 elections on the Oct. 24 ballot, Alford says, roughly 44% have already been decided due to single-candidate races.
“Simply showing up is undoubtedly the best way to win, from a purely political perspective, yet I can’t help but feel we’re all losing out on something with this sobering electoral trend,” says Alford. “It’s especially notable this year, with one of the largest lists of unopposed officials in recent memory.”
The situation is even more telling in the Louisiana Legislature, he says, where 49% of the lawmakers in the House and Senate are already positioned to be sworn into office.
“That’s 71 lawmakers total—including slightly more than half of the Senate (20 of 39 unopposed) and 48 percent of the House (51 out of 105 unopposed)—who claimed victory without a vote of the people,” Alford writes. “To put it in another light, if all of the lawmakers who are returning to Baton Rouge next year unopposed decide to vote together without exception, they could block every single bill on the Senate side and make a two-thirds vote of the House, on issues they oppose, impossible. They would quite literally control the Louisiana Legislature. All with no mandate, or even a single vote cast, from the citizens they represent.”
Jeremy Alford publishes LaPolitics Weekly, a newsletter on Louisiana politics, at LaPolitics.com. Follow him on Twitter, or on Facebook. He can be reached at JJA@LaPolitics.com.
