Louisiana’s three-year long election cycle is finally coming to close on Dec. 10, and that day can’t come soon enough, says Jeremy Alford in his latest column.
Alford writes that Louisiana’s election bonanza began in early December 2013, when former U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu launched statewide TV ads distancing herself from President Barack Obama and his landmark health care law.
“Few fully realized it at the time,” he says, “but Landrieu’s pre-Christmas commercial marked the beginning of a marathon run of bitterly fought elections in Louisiana that have been characterized by unthinkable campaign spending and heavy-handed appeals to voters.”
The commercial, Alford writes, actually did very little to help the former senator, who lost her bid in the fall of 2014 to return to Washington.
It is, however, useful for tracking down the very moment the long cycle of statewide elections began, Alford says, adding that neither the electoral politics nor the campaigning stopped there.
“The 2014 Senate race gave way to 2015’s statewide cycle, which saw the election of Gov. John Bel Edwards, a new Legislature and several other officials. No one needs to be reminded how heated those cycles were—the individual races for the Senate and for governor were the most expensive of their kind ever waged in the Bayou State,” he says.
In 2016 voters saw Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton battling for the presidency, another U.S. Senate race in Louisiana and a slate of congressional contests, Alford writes. Trump sealed his fate with a historic win.
Meanwhile, the Senate election and two of the congressional matches are heading into a Dec. 10 runoff, Alford writes, adding that day “can’t come soon enough.”
“Here we are, three full years of commercials behind us and an endless list of campaign promises later, and our politicos are still going strong,” he says.
Nearly 68% of the state’s registered voters showed up for the Nov. 8 presidential and U.S. Senate elections, Alford says.
That’s both reassuring and somewhat confusing, he says.
“It’s fantastic that people care about elections, but it’s also amazing that those who do so here didn’t hit a wall of voter fatigue. Perhaps that will be one of the factors that drive down turnout on Dec. 10,” Alford says.
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.
