With the fall elections around the corner, some of the discussion—especially in the Capital Region’s races—will surround the death of Alton Sterling and the attack that left two Baton Rouge police officers and one East Baton Rouge Parish Sheriff’s deputy dead. As political columnist Jeremy Alford writes, the shootings touched every fabric of Louisiana and the political fallout is just beginning.
“Questions will be asked,” Alford writes. “Candidates, particularly those running in the Capital Region, won’t be able to avoid them. Policymakers on every level are also being charged with finding solutions, and a variety of bills and proposals are coming together.”
Alford notes the immediate fallout came in the 2nd Congressional District, which includes New Orleans, home to incumbent Rep. Cedric Richmond, and north Baton Rouge, where his biggest challenger—Baton Rouge Mayor Kip Holden—resides.
Holden faces a steep climb to unseat Richmond, Alford writes, and the two have already begun taking swipes at each other.
“You would have thought East Baton Rouge, and not Orleans, had become the 2nd District’s swing parish the way Richmond and Holden accused each other of not properly looking out for Red Stick last week during the qualifying period,” Alford writes. “Richmond slammed the mayor for his response to the recent shootings and told him to resign. Holden, meanwhile, said Richmond had ignored the Capital Region as a congressman and put Baton Rouge in the ‘lost and found.’”
At the local level, the race to replace Holden as mayor will not center around how the candidates responded to the shootings, but more about where the city goes from here, Alford says. There are a dozen candidates—five black candidates and seven white candidates—and almost every possible level of interpretation of the shootings will be represented by the contrasting personalities.
“We may not get all of the answers we’re looking for when it comes to this overheated summer in Baton Rouge—even from our government and politicians,” Alford writes. “But figuring out how to lead the city and state through the next elected terms, coming up with ways to avoid the same thing happening in the future, and talking about it in forums on the community level are all viable paths towards healing. That is probably what the state needs right now more than anything else.”
Read the full column.
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.
