Radio This Morning: The Red Blowout
I did a segment this morning with Dan Proft and Amy Jacobsen on 560 AM The Answer in Chicago. They actually wanted to know about the Louisiana elections on Saturday and whether those hold any currency for 2024.
I’m resisting the temptation to say Louisiana is some kind of bellwether for some giant red wave in 2024, for a couple of reasons. First, we’ve never been that. If you go back through the elections in this century for example – Kathleen Blanco in 2003, Bobby Jindal in 2007 and 2011, John Bel Edwards in 2015 and 2019 – the pattern is mostly that when Louisiana goes Democrat a Republican gets elected president the next year and vice versa. Of course, Edwards won re-election in 2019 and then Joe Biden won in 2020, so the pattern was broken in the last election.
Also, there are things present in Louisiana which aren’t present nationally – namely, that the people of this state are sick of Democrats the way the nation might be if, for example, Hillary Clinton had won in 2016 and was now in the last stages of her second term. Their machine nationally ought to be worn out but I’m not sure it quite is; at least, it’s definitely not as worn out as the Democrat machine in Louisiana is.
But mostly, as I said in the segment, Jeff Landry ran a more or less flawless campaign, and national Republicans don’t seem too capable of doing that.
The segment starts with something related; namely, that now-famous video clip of Canadian conservative candidate Pierre Poilievre eating an apple while smacking down an insulting leftist reporter who keeps basing questions in offensive premises…
How does this relate to Landry? Well, his campaign never accepted any of the premises of Louisiana’s legacy corporate media right down to refusing to engage in dog-and-pony show debates or participate in baseless hit-piece stories they’ve run. If there’s anything to take from the Louisiana race into 2024, it’s that GOP candidates must refuse to accept the leftist frame of…really anything, and run on a reality normal people understand and accept.
That’s what Landry did, and his campaign built support mostly unabated until it crested at 52 percent on Saturday.
Here’s the segment…
