For more than a year now, says Jeremy Alford, we’ve all been tuned in to an election cycle that was equal parts vaudevillian and Machiavellian.
“It was silly and ridiculous one moment, then downright political and cutting the next,” Alford writes in his latest column. “Quiet, boring, weird, uncomfortable and unhinged are all words that can also be used to describe this cycle—and you can pretty much plot them along the past year’s timeline in that order. But now that it’s coming to an end, only one word comes to mind: unpredictable.”
Alford notes that lawmakers capped off a tumultuous regular session by advancing somewhere in the neighborhood of $700 million in taxes, mostly temporary, and “all left the big pointy building in Baton Rouge this summer feeling paranoid.” If you believe the fundamentals of legislative politics, he says, voting to increase taxes in an election year makes for hard sledding. And yet only three incumbents were axed by voters in the primary and there were just 18 races that produced runoffs, Alford notes.
“Perhaps lawmakers were successful in explaining to voters that it was either more taxes or deeper cuts to higher education,” he writes. “Either way, tax-friendly senators and representatives weren’t buried underneath an avalanche of attacks from the business community, which shouldered the brunt of the taxes. If the taxes had been placed on individuals, then maybe there would have been an anti-incumbent wave move through the electorate. But there wasn’t, despite the predictions, and the majority of the Legislature is coming back.”
In the race for governor, the odds-on Democratic state Rep. John Bel Edwards being in true contention for the brass ring a year ago was “on par with the Saints winning the Super Bowl,” says Alford. And yet, Edwards turned the race into a classic Louisiana political war against Republican U.S. Sen. David Vitter, who appeared to be in a position in 2014 to phone this one in.
“In this case, the fundamentals of statewide politics, which are rough on Democrats, also gave way to a glimpse of something new,” Alford writes. “That’s the big-picture surprise, though along the way we were peppered with a number of other unpredictable events that served as benchmarks for this marquee race.”
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.
