It’s something to behold when candidates transform into symbols of movements and issues that are much larger in scope than themselves, Jeremy Alford says in his latest column.
“That may be the most important takeaway from Louisiana’s U.S. Senate runoff pitting Treasurer John Kennedy against Public Service Commissioner Foster Campbell,” he writes. “Their respective bids (at this juncture at least) are much more symbolic of dynamic national trends than Bayou State politics, which in comparison are intimate, aggressively independent and revealing if nothing else.”
Many voters refuse to view Kennedy as anything else but a Republican, Alford says, and they see Campbell as nothing more than a Democrat.
“Recent statewide races in Louisiana have become easy prey for these predatory and invasive narratives, so this really isn’t a bombshell revelation,” he writes. “What is interesting is the possibility that Louisiana’s statewide elections are becoming so nationalized that our electoral counts are mirroring presidential voting patterns to some extent.”
For example, Kennedy won 1,500 of the 2,500 or so Louisiana precincts that supported President-elect Donald Trump on the November primary ballot, even with two GOP congressmen running against him. More than 1,300 precincts fell to Hillary Clinton, with Campbell sharing the victory in nearly 1,000 of those precincts, Alford notes.
“It’s no wonder that Clinton and Trump became such a big factor in the TV wars almost as soon as the primary gave way to the runoff,” Alford writes. “As Campbell’s boosters sought to link Kennedy and his campaign apparatus to outgoing Sen. David Vitter, Republicans immediately began pushing another kind of message that labeled Campbell as being anti-Trump.”
For Kennedy’s campaign, the main objective appears to be keeping the fire burning in the bellies of Trump backers, Alford says. On the Democratic side, Alford says Campbell is benefiting from a growing coalition of out-of-state help—mostly from liberals who want one last chance to flip a senate seat after Trump’s historic victory in November.
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.
