(Note: these learning modules encompass the
actual class lectures, and are designed for those students who have to miss
class through no fault of their own, and also as a refresher for all students.
Bold print in the notes are what the professor writes on the board.)
Louisiana is a unique Deep South state as the historic racism
and discrimination wasn’t as great as in the other Deep South states, since the
state has a significant Catholic population, due to the Cajuns living in south
Louisiana (French Canadians who had fled there during a French-British war).
Indeed, Louisiana had a very progressive governor and senator Democrat Huey
P. Long during the Great Depression. His rise to power started on the state
utility regulation board, where he compelled the electric and telephone
companies to reduce their rates and protected small oil companies from the
large ones. Elected governor in 1928, he raised taxes on virtually all of the
large businesses in the state in order to provide free textbooks to school
children, build highways and bridges, and create charity hospitals for the
poor. Long was accused of corruption (granting oil and gambling concessions to
political allies, and assessing the salaries of government workers), but he
argued that he needed the money to counteract the campaign spending of the big
businesses. He was impeached by the state house of representatives, acquitted
by the state senate, and the people then elected him to the U.S. Senate.
Condemning the concentration of 65% of the nation’s wealth into the hands of
only 2% of Americans, Long promised to “share the wealth” and was seen as a
more left-wing alternative to Franklin D. Roosevelt. He continued to wield
great power over Louisiana’s government when he was a Senator, with opponents
viewing him as a dictator. Finally, in 1935 he was assassinated on the steps of
the state capital by a man whose friends and relatives had been hurt by Long,
and Long’s bodyguards pumped 61 bullets into the assassin.
For the next 35 years, Democratic party politics was split
between pro and anti-Long factions with pro-Long governors being more
progressive and anti-Long factions being more “reformist” (good government) and
conservative. One governor in the 1950s, Earl Long, opposed legislative
disenfranchisement efforts as they would hurt his political supporters.
Another, Jimmie Davis, in the late 1950s and early 1960s called five special
sessions of the legislature seeking to oppose school desegregation. We now turn
to a more modern, New South Democrat, Edwin Edwards, who served four terms as
governor. His life and career are so informative for electoral strategies for
today’s Democrats that it likely will be on the test.
Edwin Edwards was
the first Cajun governor in the century, a French-speaking Catholic from
south Louisiana. He had a common man background, being the son of a
tenant farmer. Edwards idolized FDR since economically liberal
government programs provided his family with the basic necessities of life-
electricity, free school lunches, textbooks, and other free food. Edwards was a
fast talking, fancy dressing, witty and charismatic campaigner. Once
asked about the chances of his keeping his New Year’s resolution of stopping
his gambling, he quipped “The odds are eight to five.” Responding to
stories about his womanizing, Edwards in one campaign joked that he would only
lose if he were “caught in bed with a dead girl or a live boy” (info and
quotes in these class notes are from The Transformation of Southern Politics,
Bass and DeVries 1977, p. 175; and The Rise of David Duke, by Bridges 1994, p.
200).
Edwards had a moderate
conservative voting record in the U.S. House in the late 1960s. He was elected
governor in 1971 by beating a north Louisiana state senator (Bennett
Johnston) in the Democratic primary and then beating a conservative Republican.
Edwards narrowly won the runoff Democratic primary by assembling a coalition
of Cajuns and African Americans. In the general election, Edwards faced conservative
Republican Dave Treen who opposed Medicare, so Edwards was viewed as a moderate
liberal in comparison. Though Edwards won, the suburbanite Treen’s 43% of the
vote (and a slight majority of whites) was a signal that the GOP was becoming
more of a political force in Louisiana. Angered over having to campaign in
three tough contests (first primary, runoff, and general election), Edwards and
the Democratic legislature enacted a unique nonpartisan blanket primary
law whereby all candidates regardless of party would run on the same primary
ballot, and if nobody got 50% of the vote there would be a runoff between the
top two candidates (regardless of party).
Edwards was such a
popular governor that he won re-election in 1975 without Republican
opposition, and he easily polished off five Democratic opponents. In his
first term, Edwards had been an economically progressive governor. He raised
the oil and gas severance tax and eliminated the regressive sales tax on
food and medicine. He increased support for vocational-technical
education and for the education of the handicapped, and raised
teacher and state employee salaries. A racial liberal for whom race
meant nothing as long as a worker was doing his or her job, Edwards appointed
African Americans to state government jobs, including the first black
press secretary. Hints of corruption regarding the sale of government
appointments and his holding stock in a company benefitting from government
work did not prevent his landslide 62% re-election vote.
Louisiana elected their first
Republican governor in 1979, when Edwards was
constitutionally-barred from seeking a third term. Dave Treen finally won after
bitter divisions among the Democrats. Indeed, Treen received the
endorsements of the four Democrats who had trailed Treen and the runner-up, liberal
Democratic Public Service Commissioner Louis Lambert. One bitter Democrat
blasted Lambert as “lying Louie,” and another accused him of stealing the
election due to vote shifts between the unofficial and official results. But
then, the deep 1982 national economic recession hit, and Louisiana was
especially impacted, so Treen’s popularity took a dive. Winning a third term in
1983, Edwards blasted Treen as a failed leader and an inept,
do-nothing governor. Mocking Treen as dumb, Edwards said that he
lacked anything between his ears and that it took him an hour and a half to
watch 60 Minutes (an evening news program). Edwards won his third term with
his biracial coalition of African Americans and whites of modest incomes (Lamis
1990, The Two-Party South, 2nd expanded edition, p. 118). However, the
corruption charges now really began to hurt, as Edwards became the target of 13
federal investigations for allegedly selling hospital and nursing home permits.
Edwards’ popularity also took a nosedive after another economic recession in
Louisiana, plus a big tax hike that it required. Edwards sought re-election in 1987
but trailed in the first primary; personally disappointed, Edwards graciously
withdrew so Congressman Buddy Roemer became governor (elected as a
Democrat, he then switched to the GOP).
Well, Edwards was back
running for a fourth term in 1991, since Governor Roemer had a declining
popularity and didn’t even make the runoff. Instead, we had the infamous race
from hell, between the bigot and the crook! (I grew up in New Orleans so I
wasn’t too surprised at this mess.) How can I explain this? Well, one of the
candidates was a guy named David Duke, who used to be in the Ku Klux
Klan, but he tried to improve his image by creating a group called the National
Association for the Advancement of White People! After two unsuccessful state
legislative campaigns as a Democrat, he finally barely got elected in 1989 to
the state house as a Republican from the overwhelmingly white Metairie suburb
of New Orleans. Duke then ran in 1990 as a Republican against Democratic
incumbent U.S. Senator Bennett Johnston (Johnston had a moderate voting
record), and horrified GOP state party leaders kept other Republicans out of
the contest so that Duke would lose. Nevertheless, everyone was shocked that
Duke still got 44% of the vote in this Senate race, which included 59% of the
white vote. Duke convinced many whites that he wasn’t a racist, but that he was
just a conservative. He called affirmative action discrimination against
whites, and said that welfare recipients should be tested for drugs and should
work for their checks.
In the first election for
governor in 1991, the incumbent Roemer came in third, so Edwards was the
leader with 34%, but David Duke came in a strong second with 32%. Thus, we had
the famous runoff election between the crook and the bigot. Business and
community leaders were horrified, as they envisioned businesses and conventions
avoiding Louisiana like the plague if Duke won. People started putting bumper
stickers on their cars that read: “Vote for the Crook. It’s Important!”
The hilarious and sarcastic Edwards in a televised debate highlighted the
choice for voters: “While David Duke was burning crosses and scaring
people, I was building hospitals to heal them. When he was parading
around in a Nazi uniform to intimidate our citizens, I was in a National
Guard uniform bringing relief to flood and hurricane victims.” (Bridges
book, 1994, The Rise of David Duke, p. 229). Thankfully, Edwards won his fourth
term with a sizable 61% vote.
The saga of Edwin Edwards
ended with his serving 10 years in federal prison for receiving bribes
of over one million dollars relating to the prison system and casino licenses.
While in jail in 2011 the 84-year-old ladies’ man Edwards married a
33-year-old, and two years later their son was born. Released from jail, he
tried a political comeback but lost a 2014 congressional runoff to a
Republican. (I saw a campaign picture of he and his
wife; he looked like her grandfather.) He died in 2021 at the age of 93.
Republicans made important gains after
the politically adept Edwards left the scene, and currently hold both of the state’s
U.S. Senate seats. One of the seats that Democrats lost was the three term (18
years) Senator Mary Landrieu, who was even endorsed by Dave Treen
because she worked across the aisle with Republicans to get things done for
Louisiana. She delivered a farm relief bill, a preschool education proposal,
federal revenue sharing with the state for mineral exploration in offshore
waters, and funding for a defense contractor in Louisiana. Landrieu kept
beating GOP candidates who were too conservative and too partisan. So how did
Landrieu finally lose in 2014 to a Republican? She led in the first election by
1% over conservative Republican congressman Bill Cassidy. She was hurt
by President Obama’s 59% disapproval rating in Louisiana, and Cassidy focused
on his opposition to illegal immigration. But the kiss of death was how her own
national party wrote her off. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee
pulled its ads after the first election, and when the Senator was pleading with
her fellow Democratic Senators to support the Keystone oil pipeline project
that helped Louisiana’s oil and gas industry, they spurned her. So Republican
Bill Cassidy got elected Senator with 56% of the vote in the runoff election.
Cassidy won a 59% re-election victory in 2020 with a vote margin mirroring the
GOP party identification advantage among exit poll voters, as he used his
massive war chest to beat Shreveport mayor and African American Adrian Perkins
(a West Point and Harvard Law graduate with three combat tours). The other
Senate seat (that used to be held by moderate Democrat John Breaux) was won by
conservative Republican David Vitter in 2004, a Rhodes Scholar and graduate of
Harvard and Oxford, who then survived an “escort” scandal to win re-election.
After retiring, he was replaced in 2016 by Republican John Kennedy, a
former Democrat elected state treasurer five times, who blasted his Democratic
opponent for supporting Obamacare. Once again, the contrast in the two national
parties’ support for their state party candidates was striking. Both Trump and
Pence visited Louisiana to campaign for Kennedy. The Democratic Senatorial
Campaign Committee didn’t fund any advertising for their party’s candidate.
Kennedy won a 61% landslide. Kennedy easily won reelection in 2022 with 62% of
the vote, knocking off 12 little-known challengers. Kennedy stressed his
support for the police in one controversial ad where in his sleepy southern
drawl he argued that, "Violent crime is surging in Louisiana. Woke leaders
blame the police. I blame the criminals... Look, if you hate cops just because
they're cops, the next time you're in trouble, call a crackhead" (Duhe web
article on October 3, 2022, on wbtv.com).
The governorship since Edwards has
been more competitive, held by three Republicans and two Democrats. Democrat
Kathleen Blanco decided to serve only one term, since she was viewed as a
miserable failure in handling Hurricane Katrina (New Orleans was completely
flooded!). Republican Bobby Jindal, the son of immigrants from India
with darker colored skin won in 2007. He had lost to Blanco four years earlier,
as she had blasted him as too conservative. Jindal spent the next four years
traveling across the state and giving speeches, especially in north Louisiana
where he was weak. A bizarre state Democratic attack ad blasted him for writing
in a Catholic journal about his soul-searching as a young man as he changed
from his parents’ Hindu faith to a strong Catholic faith. The ad backfired, as
Protestant leaders just responded that they appreciated that he had a strong
faith, even if it wasn’t theirs. Jindal then won re-election in 2011 with a 66%
landslide. Well, the state fell into hard economic times, so in 2015 Democrats
regained the governorship with John Bel Edwards (no relation to the
famous Edwin Edwards). Edwards was a notable success story for southern Democrats,
so here’s how he did it. Edwards, a Democrat, graduated from West Point
military academy, was an Army Ranger, and chaired the state House Veterans
Affairs Committee. Though he was also the state house Democratic caucus chair,
it was hard to paint him as a liberal. The dominant Republican Party had cut
each other up in the first election with
two losers refusing to endorse the Republican in the runoff election. And that
Republican was Senator David Vitter, the guy with the “escort” problem. Edwards
put the nail in the coffin with a devastating ad that accused Vitter of
skipping a floor vote honoring our troops killed in a missile strike but being
on the phone 39 minutes later with the escort service. The ad ended with:
“David Vitter chose prostitutes over patriots.” One of Edwards’ first acts was
to expand Medicaid to the working poor under Obamacare, much in the vein of an
Edwin Edwards economic populist act. As governor, Edwards kept a high job
approval rating (56%) by working with the Republican-controlled legislature to
balance the budget by raising the sales tax, to sign anti-abortion and pro-guns
legislation, and to sign a criminal justice reform act that reduced the prison
population (thereby beating to the punch the federal government’s First Step
Act). Edwards was narrowly reelected in 2019 after Republicans were split (some
backing the losing Republican now supported Edwards). Edwards won about
one-third of the white vote, and liberal organizations finally helped a
Democrat get elected, as the state Democratic Party, Urban League backers, and
historically black private college supporters funded aggressive
get-out-the-vote drives in the black community. Republicans won back the
governorship in 2023 with two-term state attorney general Jeff Landry,
who was endorsed by former President Trump and House GOP Leader and fellow
Louisianian Steve Scalise. Landry's $9 million spent on advertisements was
compounded by the $4.7 million that the Republican Governors Association spent
on blasting the Democratic candidate, while Democrats faced low turnout among
African Americans and Orleans Parish residents, dismal pre-election poll
numbers, dissatisfaction with their state party leadership, and disappointment
over the state party's perceived lack of support for reproductive freedom (Zach
Montellaro article on Politico.com, October 14, 2023; also, Molly Ryan article
on www.npr.org, November 11, 2023). Republicans may also have benefitted by
avoiding right-wing extremes, with Landry promising to not reverse the Democratic
governor's expansion of Medicaid, prompting the defeated Democrat to admit that
he believed that Landry "wants to try to do the right thing, and it's our
job as Louisianians to make that happen" (Louisiana Illuminator, October
14, 2023).