The 2012 election season wasn’t a good one for Cajun Industries founder and GOP activist Lane Grigsby. He spent considerable money—he won’t say how much—backing Mike Walker in the Baton Rouge mayor’s race, William Morvant in the primary for the 5th District seat on the Louisiana Supreme Court, and John Michael Guidry in Saturday’s Supreme Court runoff. All three lost.
While Grigsby says he is disappointed, he is not discouraged.
“I don’t anticipate winning every time,” he says. “I anticipate being on the right side.”
Grigsby believes a variety of factors were behind the losses of his three candidates. In the mayor’s race, voters perceived Walker to be “one of the old guys who’s been around forever. … He didn’t offer anything new,” Grigsby says.
In the Supreme Court primary, Morvant’s poor showing was due to the high number of sitting judges all vying for the same sliver of East Baton Rouge Parish voters. In the runoff, low voter turnout and Jeff Hughes’ strong base in Livingston and Ascension parishes enabled him to beat Guidry, an African American candidate whose supporters did not turn out in the same numbers that they did in the November primary.
Grigsby says he will continue to be involved in political contests and is particularly interested in the 2014 U.S. Senate race in Louisiana. He says the GOP has several strong candidates it could field against incumbent Democrat Sen. Mary Landrieu—particularly U.S. Rep. Bill Cassidy of Baton Rouge and U.S. Rep. John Fleming of Shreveport—though he adds, “There isn’t a consensus behind any particular one just yet.”
Grigsby says he will also continue to focus on developing a campaign to consolidate the East Baton Rouge Parish Sheriff’s Office and the Baton Rouge Police Department.
“It’s not going to happen without a campaign,” says Grigsby, who predicts it will take at least three years to change the city’s plan of government and merge the two agencies. “It won’t be done by the will of the politicians. They don’t do anything controversial.”
