Set LA gov field pushes Landry, Wilson to front

Blog: Between The Lines

Abstract

Qualifying
for this fall's Louisiana governor's race went off as expected – predictably
since to make a serious effort once must start campaigning months in advance of
the due date. So, where do things stand?

Among the 16 candidates were a retread here and
there among the several significant ones, the latter being Republicans state
Sen. Sharon Hewitt, Atty. Gen. Jeff Landry, state Rep. Richard Nelson, Treasurer John Schroder, and past top gubernatorial
appointee Stephen Waguespack; Democrat and
recent cabinet member Shawn Wilson,
and independent lawyer Hunter Lundy.
They gained this distinction by having large enough campaign war chests – in
Lundy's case, mostly self-financed – with at least occasional media references
to their candidacies.

Although clearly Landry by this metric is in a
class of his own. Having spent millions already and with over $9 million available,
that banked figure means Hewitt has in her account 3.8 percent of that
total, Nelson has 3
percent, Schroder has 24 percent,
Waguespack has 24.2
percent, Wilson has 6.5
percent, and Lundy has 23 percent.
That is, all together the significant candidates have 84.5 percent of Landry's
total.

This means, as long as it isn't frivolous and stupid,
that the Landry campaign holds all the cards to make an inevitable general
election runoff, along with Wilson for whose campaign money doesn't matter as
much because of the pathological loyalty many black voters have for, especially
a black, Democrats. To be sure, Wilson
is a weak candidate, but he won't draw less than a quarter of the vote and perhaps
could go as high as a third.

That creates a problem for all other candidates
not named Landry. Currently, according
to every recent poll unconnected to a campaign or interest group and just of
all of these but one backing Waguespack, no other candidate but Landry and
Wilson draw even higher single digits. And given that Landry polls in the same quarter
to third range as Wilson, anyone other that them must either hack votes from
Landry or cannibalize practically all support from others save Wilson in order
to ace out Landry from the inevitable runoff.

To do that, they will have to spend some resources
boosting themselves, but most of it attacking Landry and each other. Their problem
is Landry has the resources to fend off attacks against him and to go negative on
them, if not drown them out completely. It's almost an impossible task.

Perhaps the Republicans other than Landry –
discounting the novelty candidacy of Lundy who seems to be attracting
old-school white Democrats, but really applicable to the two much more monied
candidacies of Schroder and Waguespack while the resource-poor Hewitt and
Nelson candidacies have become the longest of shots – can hold out hope that
something like 2015 can occur where frontrunner Republican former Sen. David
Vitter had a money and polling advantage but went down to current Democrat Gov.
John Bel Edwards.

Back
then, as with Landry and Wilson now, Edwards and Vitter basically ran even
in polls. But those numbers and finance figures were very different than today.
Vitter at that point eight years ago had about $5 million banked,
but his two major Republican opponents former Lt. Gov. Scott Angelle and then
Lt. Gov. Jay Dardenne,
had, respectively, just over a
million and just
under $2 million, so they were in a somewhat-better position to try to
overtake Vitter. More importantly, they didn't have nearly as much ground to
make up; both were polling into double digits, with Angelle close to Vitter in
a race to the runoff where eventually he would lose to him by just four points.

In short, Landry is in a better position than
Vitter was in 2015, and has the money and a slew of endorsements and backers
that would make going negative on him much less effective than when Angelle and
Dardenne teamed up on Vitter as a response to try to make the runoff against
Edwards. Even the entry of retread black Democrat Omar Dantzler, who in his many campaigns
has
run to the far left and will take a small chunk out of Wilson's vote, won't
be enough to push Wilson down enough to allow Schroder or Waguespack to leap
over him.

Unlike the frontrunner in 2015, Landry has created
enough separation from his main rivals and has enough resources to fend them
off while negating the negative campaigning that will come to try to close the
gap that will fail to injure his chances against Democrat Wilson in a runoff. That
pairing remains overwhelmingly likely, and an eventual Landry triumph that
probable as well.