A look at some pivotal La. political stories in 2019
30th December 2019 · 0 Comments
By Christopher Tidmore
Contributing Writer
Each year, The Louisiana Weekly compiles ten incidents of the previous year which could influence the political landscape in the Pelican State and throughout the U.S. in the coming months. The stories constitute warnings and indications of “News that Matters to Us.”
1. A Tale of Two Elections
An incumbent national leader – with wild “orange” hair, a horrible personal history with women, allegations of Russian collusion, and a questionable relationship with the truth – won reelection nearly three weeks ago. Could Boris Johnson’s alter ego Donald Trump be next? Perhaps, if U.S. Democrats do not learn the lesson of the Louisiana Governor’s race.
Eleven months ago the Conservative Party of the United Kingdom looked dangerously close to defeat. Johnson was supposed to have permanently alienated the suburban moderates on whom the Conservatives had historically depended for votes thanks to his combativeness, anti-immigrant stands, and inflammatory tweets. Instead, his party emerged from the December 12, 2019 elections with a huge majority in the House of Commons. He was blessed in his opponent Jeremy Corbyn, whose policies (exit polling revealed) tended to scare the middle class back into embracing the detested Conservatives. Labour’s loss in the United Kingdom should prove a warning to U.S. Democrats not to consider the election already won, eleven months from today, just because the Republicans are led by Donald Trump.
Some claimed that Brexit was the sole reason for the Tory victory, but the decision to put a left-wing socialist as the leader of the opposition party is instructive for those who beat the hammer for Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren. Saying “anyone can beat Trump” regardless of the ideology may be equivalent to the Labour Party’s championing of its far-left leader Jeremy Corbyn. His hundreds of billions in spending pledges for infrastructure and health care – and likely middle class tax increases resulting from them – were argued to be positives in the struggle to throw Boris Johnson from the top job.
These arguments failed spectacularly. The 10-point swing in the vote against Labour-held seats (that every pundit thought were eternally safe) came much earlier in the evening than anyone ever expected. It was like the Great Lakes states in the U.S. flipping for Trump all over again as historic northern mining and industrial towns in England switched their ballots to the Conservatives. That the party currently in power won these seats proved that the “Rust Belt’s” turn to the Right was no one-time, protest-vote aberration. Exit polls revealed that a center-left opposition leader, sensitive to their issues, might have stopped the Conservatives from winning these northern regions, but a socialist standard-bearer could not when Brexit-issues like immigration dominated the conversation.
The pro-Tory trend was noticed shortly after the polls closed when the mining constituency of Blyth Valley, one the loyalist Labour seats in Britain, was narrowly claimed by Conservative Ian Levy. A constituency where unions held sway, and Arthur Scargill was once considered a hero for battling Margaret Thatcher, should have been a natural place to rally to the message of a socialist like Corbyn. Instead, the Tories won it for the first time since 1950, forming the early basis of the Conservatives 365 seat win. It also provides a guide to a GOP victory in the U.S. in eleven months. Substitute Minnesota for Northumbria and the similar appearance of the two regions becomes frighteningly clear. As does the truism of how Trump can duplicate Johnson’s victorious political campaign if the opponent stands as equally far to the Left of the ideological spectrum as Corbyn proved for “White Working Class” voters across the pond. (That Trump is nearly tied in Minnesota with Joe Biden, amidst impeachment hearings, and easily beats Sanders and Warren emphasizes the comparison.)
By the early hours of the morning on Friday, December 13, Labour supporters looked on in horror as the party’s so-called “red wall’ of northern seats crumbled before their eyes, as leave-voting former mining communities embraced a Conservative party previously blamed for laying waste to them in the 1980s. Casualties included the shadow employment secretary, Laura Pidcock, much vaunted in recent times as a future Labour Party leader. In a moment of symbolism as the clock ticked past 5 a.m. UK time, the Conservatives passed the 326 seat mark for a majority when the party captured the Derbyshire constituency of Bolsover, represented by former miner Dennis Skinner for the last five decades.
A UK think tank coined the phrase “Workington Man” to describe the key target voter who would determine the outcome of last week’s election, the kind of blue collar swing voter for whom it would be inconceivable to vote for the Conservatives a decade ago – sort of like a Pittsburgh Democrat. Despite this, Tory Mark Jenkinson beat shadow environment secretary Sue Hayman by 4,176 votes. Workington, a one-time center of the steel industry, had elected Labour MPs at every UK general election since the seat was created in 1918.
Even Tony Blair’s former constituency of Sedgefield fell to the Right. The last person whom Johnson’s party should have defeated was the famed Labour leader’s former aide and protege Phil Wilson, but he was yet another Labour MP ousted by the Conservative wave which swept across the north of England last week. Although the pattern reflects other Labour defeats across the United Kingdom, the loss of the former prime minister’s County Durham constituency is a symbolic blow to the party in a seat they have held since 1935. It’s also a cautionary tale when when the moderate former Labour leader used to enjoy huge landslides in Sedgefield even as the unpopular Iraq War saw him regularly protested in his home constituency.
Of course, a swing in the “suburbs” was supposed to make up for a loss in the “Rust Belt.” Here Democrats should pay close attention to what happened to their Labour Party cousins. Opinion polls said that suburban voters were repulsed by his “Trumpian” qualities, yet Johnson’s Conservatives held many of the affluent metropolitan “Remain” suburbs everyone thought the Tories were on track to lose. His impeachment-like “loss of confidence” in parliament, anti-immigrant stands, and allegations of Russian collusion were supposed to end Johnson’s chances with these voters. They didn’t.
Labour Activists, for example, had poured into the remain-voting Chingford and Woodford Green constituency during the campaign in the hope of unseating the former Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith – an area where Johnson was supposed to be deeply unpopular. Nevertheless, the Conservative Party still held the seat, though with a reduced majority of 1,062. The Conservatives even won back the marginal constituency of Kensington by 150 votes which they lost in 2017. This affluent suburb was exactly the type that pundits declared was “permanently lost” to Conservatives as Rightwing populism came to predominate in their Party. In fact, Johnson won his own inner suburban London constituency of Uxbridge which some thought he might lose for similar reasons even if the Prime Minister’s party won a majority nationally.
It turns out that the suburban moderates were more afraid of the potential middle class tax hikes of a Jeremy Corbyn Administration (no matter how many times the Labour leader pledged to only “tax the rich”) than they were afraid of leaving the European Union – or the uncouth attitudes of Britain’s “Trump” Boris Johnson. Surveys reveal that they likely would have turned out to vote for a moderate Joe Biden-like Labour leader but Britain’s equivalent of Bernie Sanders was a step too far.
Even more interestingly, Afro-British voters, upon whom the Labour Party depends to win the cities, also stayed home, allowing the Conservatives to slip back into power in their endangered urban and inner-suburban constituencies. Data suggests that Black voters in the UK wanted more a more centrist opposition as well. The minority electorate in general could not cast a ballot for Johnson and his party, due to each’s perceived racism, but they could opt to stay home—and did according to post-election surveys. Might their African-American cousins in U.S. cities equally dodge the polling booths if the Democrats veer too far into socialism for their tastes, throwing the election to American conservatives?
U.S. Democrats have another choice, of course. Look to Louisiana. Governor John Bel Edwards, a moderate able to convince Republican swing voters to cast a ballot for a Democrat, defeated Trump disciple Eddie Rispone at a time that the president had employed all of his campaign influence in a highly red-state. Of course, national Democrats are not going to nominate a pro-life, pro-gun standard-bearer, but choosing one of the more moderate candidates in the field, like Biden, Buttigieg, Bloomberg, or Klobuchar might allow the “British Example” not to repeat itself across the pond.
After all, Bernie Sanders currently ranks a strong second place in Iowa. In the wee hours of Friday morning, December 13, President Trump tweeted his support for Mr. Johnson, saying: “Looking like a big win for Boris in the UK!” Later that day, he added that what happens in the UK usually predicts the US elections. “That’s what happened last time, at least,” with Brexit and his election, the President concluded.
2. Is Jefferson Parish Turning Democrat?
The first bastion of the Republican Party of Louisiana, Jefferson Parish produced Dave Treen, David Vitter, Steve Scalise, and the Nation’s longest serving GOP Chairman Roger Villere. Yet in the runoff, Gov. John Bel Edwards earned 57 percent of the vote in Jefferson. Arguably, had he not won the parish so decisively, Eddie Rispone might be Governor-elect today. Republicans call it a fluke, but substantial evidence suggests that the changing demographics and the inner suburban swing against the GOP (along with a possible turn against President Donald Trump) may be transforming the politics of Louisiana’s second largest parish – and therefore possibly the state over time – at least when the right Democrat stands.
In point of fact, Edwards came within 100 votes of winning the East Bank of Jefferson Parish, an area so Republican that Democrats rarely compete in legislative races. Edwards did manage to best David Vitter in his home parish 51-49 four years ago, but only after a terrible runoff in 2015 where it was generally assumed that the U.S. Senator was going to lose in the wake of the prostitute allegations. In the 2019 runoff, the polls were neck-and-neck, and the one percent or 40,212 victory fell easily in their margin of error. That’s less than eight votes per precinct spread across Louisiana, yet Edwards still won Jefferson by an even greater degree than four years ago – even as he eked out a victory statewide. Nearly half of his Edwards’ win came from the 17,656 margin of victory in Jefferson. Part of this was a surge in the African-American vote on the West Bank, yet a large portion of the victory came from suburban Caucasians in Metairie and Kenner who have not voted Democrat in the past.
Indeed, Edwards performed well with some Caucasians for a Democrat, grabbing about 30 percent of the white vote statewide. As a result, in the Monroe suburbs of the Fifth Congressional District, Ralph Abraham’s seat, Rispone’s vote declined nearly 35 percent compared to what his GOP rival won in the primary. Orleans Parish paints the picture best. Edwards won 90 percent to 10 percent. Rispone collected only 13,000 votes to Edwards’ 114,000. Put another way, Trump’s candidate Rispone did worse in Orleans Parish than neo-Nazi David Duke did in 1991. The former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard received 13 percent of the vote compared to Rispone’s 10 percent. Moreover, the percentage of Black residents in New Orleans in 1991 was 62 percent, compared to 60 percent today. In contrast, in his gubernatorial try, Republican Bob Livingston earned 22.5 percent in Orleans in the primary, and Bobby Jindal managed to win over 30 percent.
However, in Jefferson Parish, “Gwen” Collins-Greenup earned 43 percent of the vote, nearly the same as Eddie Rispone, outperforming her results statewide. An African-American progressive Democrat, with no money or campaign infrastructure, managed to win over 52,000 votes in Jefferson, at the same time that Democrat Marion Edwards managed to claim a long-time Republican Council seat. A competitive election in Jefferson’s only Black majority Council seat also played a role, admittedly, with Byron Lee winning over Derek Shepherd by 146 votes, driving turnout. Nevertheless, the Democratic-swing in Jefferson Parish also was the reason that Louisiana Republicans failed in their dream for a legislative supermajority.
The favorite in the 105th State Rep. seat, Republican Chris Leopold lost to Democrat Mack Cormier in Jefferson, 36 percent to 64 percent. The margin in Jefferson made up Cormier’s margin of victory in the entire multi-parish district. His 54 percent win over Leopold and 1,100 vote margin came exclusively mostly from his 1,269 margin of victory in Jefferson, killing the Republican Party of Louisiana’s hope for a supermajority in the House to counter John Bel Edwards. Therefore, Republicans will not be able to overrule Edwards in redistricting after the 2020 Census, solely because of Jefferson Parish swing voters.
The days when Bobby Jindal claimed 63 percent of the vote in Jefferson Parish are gone. Trump only earned 55 percent there in 2016, after all. Long-term, the rising African-American vote, nearly a third of the parish, matched with an influx of Hispanic and Vietnamese-American voters, can join with upscale silk-stocking suburban precincts – like those in historically Republican Old Metairie who opted for Edwards – to turn the parish Democratic. That’s the lesson for Republicans who might count on Jefferson Parish in the future as the key to winning statewide.
3. Lane Grigsby
In another Louisiana warning to President Trump, the appearance of political corruption does have an impact on GOP turnout. A serious subtext of the Gubernatorial contest were the machinations of Baton Rouge Contractor and Mega-Donor Lane Grigsby. The man who has funded LABI and BESE board elections was described by Eddie Rispone as “mentor.” This backfired when it appeared that Grigsby tried to “push” several GOP candidates out of closely fought legislative races. After a failed attempt to get a State Senate candidate to drop out in favor of financing a bid for Judge, Grigsby told Baton Rouge Business Report editor Stephanie Riegel, “I’m the Kingmaker. I talk from the throne.”
Gov. Edwards immediately branded Rispone’s biggest supporter as “the puppet-master,” but the real impact was made when conservative stalwart and former U.S. Senate candidate Rob Maness complained about Grigsby’s machinations. Suddenly, a strong minority of the conservative reform electorate grew very hesitant to turn out to the polls for Rispone. As political commentator Hy McEnery put it to The Louisiana Weekly, “Grigsby likely cost the election for Rispone, at least among the conservatives he most needed to vote.”
4. Surplus in Baton Rouge
Louisiana’s General Fund took in just over $500 million more last year in tax revenues than the legislature budgeted to spend, but for political and practical reasons, the State Revenue Estimating Conference cannot decide if this money is an on-going surplus or just a one-time windfall. This ruling will be key to fund Gov. John Bel Edwards’ number one legislative priority for 2020, raising teacher pay to the Southern Average.
Four votes comprise the REC, the Commissioner of Administration, the Senate president, the Speaker of the House, and a designated LSU economist. Created in the 1980s to guarantee that one-time money would not be spent for on-going responsibilities, thus creating a deficit in future years, unanimity was required to signify new revenues. Most expected that it would be the LSU economist who would object as the politicians stood together hungry for new revenues. In the end, it was Cameron Henry.
Speaker Taylor Barras sent the House Appropriations Committee Chairman as his representative to the REC meetings, and Rep. Henry objected to allowance of the funds for any purpose other than the rainy day fund, capital projects, or other one-time expenditures. While the Republican leader had the motivation of frustrating the Democratic Governor, Henry did make a valid economic point. The surplus came almost exclusively from the .45 percent temporary sales tax which was scheduled to expire in less than five years (mostly due to Cameron Henry’s opposition to the tax in the House, admittedly.)
At the same time, a report from Moody’s Analytics noted that Louisiana was the state with the greatest shortfall in reserves necessary to survive a moderate recession. The Pelican State had tapped into its budget reserves several years ago to cover financial problems in the wake of the post-Jindal Administration deficits and has gradually replenished the “Rainy Day Fund.” It plans to transfer nearly $134 million to the rainy day fund next year from an estimated $535 million surplus. That would bring the balance above where it was when Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards took office four years ago. But that’s still not far enough if the economy collapses, Henry warned citing the report.
A permanent boost in pay for teachers was a laudable goal, he said, yet without a permanent way to pay for it (hopefully not a regressive sales tax which will disappear just after the current governor leaves office), the Appropriations Committee Chair refused to authorize the monies. Now Henry has won election to the State Senate, and the next year will determines if he wields the same influence in the Upper House to continue to filibuster the Revenue Estimating Conference. If he and his allies fail, Gov. Edwards likely will get the money, and therefore the votes, he needs to boost teacher pay.
5. Jefferson Inspector General Nearly Emasculated
A disturbing trend has emerged to block the movement for government transparency across the nation (and arguably the world). It nearly succeeded in Jefferson Parish one month ago. A proposed ordinance would have removed Inspector General David McClintock’s most investigatory prerogatives, including the right to view emails on public servers and access many public records.
A public backlash against Councilmembers who sought to drastically limit the IG’s powers ended up in watering down the ordinance to a two-term limit for the Jeff Inspector General and more coordination with the parish attorney’s office – relatively reasonable changes. Still, the battle is not over in Jefferson – or across the country. FICA changes target journalists. Public records become more disguised. Tax information of leaders remains hidden. The march to government transparency of recent decades has stalled.
6. S&WB Drainage Service Fee
Orleans Parish seems like it is under a “boil water advisory” almost weekly. Drains are blocked. Infrastructure crumbles. Pump Electrical Stations explode.
However, raising property taxes enough to provide the billions of dollars in bonds to rebuild the sewerage and water system could drive homeowners out of the City of New Orleans. Property millages have already been rolled forward after reassessments have doubled or tripled the value of homes – and families’ subsequent tax bills. Long-time homeowners already cannot afford to stay in their houses. Increase taxes by forty mills, and there will be an exodus from the parish that resembles the 1980s; though, this time it will be the beleaguered Black middle class leading the outflux.
Several members of the Sewerage and Water Board have proposed another answer to find the money – a drainage fee. It is a property-based funding mechanism which also avoids some of the problems with property taxes. The fee treats the drainage network like a public utility. There is a flat fee estimated by the size of the property. No one is exempt. While this means that it would be charged outside of the Homestead Exemption, non-profits and even the Federal Government would be required to pay the fee. That could mean a windfall in revenue, since a large percentage of properties in the city are university, non-profit, or federal or state government owned. Constitutionally, they would have to pay this fee, as its not a tax, but similar in legal standing to an electric bill.
Privately, there are 169,729 total parcels in the city, of which 15,728, or 9.3 percent, are completely tax-exempt and 8,567 parcels pay very little because of the homestead exemption. This unfairly shifts the tax burden to maintain the City’s sewers to other property owners. BGR has estimated that a staggering two-thirds of New Orleans’ property value is off the tax roll because of exemptions, including those for government entities.
For example, Austin, Texas’ similar “transportation user fee” generates about $70 million a year. The fee for a single-family home is $11.52 a month, or $138.24 per year. That’s less than most home owners are paying in S&WB property taxes for a similar amount of money. In order to get a fee passed, members of the Board have suggested to The Louisiana Weekly that the fee also could replace many of the existing taxes, as well as raising new infrastructure funds. Due to the fact that it would be ubiquitous for all properties in the city, the S&WB could still take in far more revenues than are currently earned.
These Board members fear public reaction if they just suggest a higher tax, and their political caution by the Board may be warranted. Mayor LaToya Cantrell’s recent attempt to raise 3 mills in taxes went down to overwhelming defeat.
7. City Hall Cyber-Attack and how it could affect our elections
We hear about Russian Hackers, yet when City Hall was shut down for days because of the machinations of a few cyber-viruses, the academic conversation became very real. What if the hacking proved merely a test run?
Louisiana elections are fully automated, but the computerized voting machines are years behind in electronic countermeasures. Currently, the only way that we know for which candidate a precinct voted is due to the final count readout on the machine. What if a virus or hack changed that vote, though? There is no backup paper trail; no way to double check. Legislators have already begun to explore an answer. First proposed by Woody Jenkins after the 1996 U.S. Senate race, the Baton Rouge Representative suggested that each electronic voting machine should be able to print an individual paper ballot for each voter. That voter could then confirm his or her choices and put the ballot in a box. In other words, there would be a paper backup for the voting system, one that the Russians could not engager. The Louisiana Weekly has learned that such a proposal will come again before the legislature next year.
8. Senator Kennedy’s National Profile
Some say he’s made us a laughingstock. Others argue that Louisiana has never been more consequential in the national political discussion simply due to the U.S. Senator’s “Foghorn Leghorn” act. John Kennedy’s homespun clichés have become fodder for late night comics, but they are amongst the most quoted moments on Capitol Hill.
The irony is that the “country wisdom” colloquialisms ARE just an act. John Kennedy is anything but a “rube.” Valedictorian of his Zachary High School class, he was educated at Oxford University’s Magdalen College in Civil Law after completing Vanderbilt and UVA with honors. He just switches from elevated statesman to country lawyer depending on whether the cameras are running. Argue with the words, but the drawl has drawn high profile results.
Of course, Kennedy has always been something of a chameleon. He was a liberal Democrat running for the U.S. Senate in 2004 criticizing the Bush administration’s strategies on Social Security partial privatization and the Iraq War. Kennedy even endorsed John Kerry that year. Upon his loss to David Vitter, he transformed himself into one of the GOP Senator’s best friends. Soon after, Kennedy became a newly-minted Republican and took on Mary Landrieu as a conservative. Then he lost, but grew into a deficit hawk, and succeeded Vitter. Then, he became Trump’s leading advocate for higher deficits.
9. Abortion and Obamacare, Louisiana Pushing to the Supreme Court
What do the fetal heartbeat bill, the doctor’s admitting legislation, and the Obamacare lawsuit have in common?
They are all lawsuits headed to the Supreme Court, thanks either to the Louisiana Legislature or Attorney General Jeff Landry. Louisiana certainly is not the only state that passed a bill to effectively ban abortion after the first six weeks or to require doctors in abortion clinics to have admitting privileges at local hospitals (thereby economically forcing the closure of most abortion clinics). Nor is Jeff Landry the only AG taking part in the lawsuit that ruled the Individual Mandate unconstitutional (as it no longer taxes any money), and therefore the entire bill may be struck down. Nevertheless, it seems that Louisiana’s initiatives on these fronts have proven the most fruitful, and are the reason that all three measures will likely find themselves before the Nine Justices in D.C. within the next year.
10. Football Makes Us More Politically & Economically Hopeful
It took an Ohio boy to get it for us, but LSU brought back the Heisman Trophy, and the purple and gold seem headed for even greater glories – as do the Saints. Yet, these are not idle sports honors. Qualitative economic studies conducted by the New Orleans Chamber of Commerce have shown that the Louisiana economy and outlook improve drastically when either the Saints or the Tigers win nationally. Such victories usually harken positive gains in the local economy – as well as the ability of our politicians to undertake difficult policy reforms. When the Saints or LSU win (preferably both), in the afterglow, Louisianans have the confidence to make difficult choices. Even the greatest skeptic agrees that region’s post-Katrina malaise only began to lift when Drew Brees made that on-side kick, and defeated Indianapolis.
This article originally published in the December 30, 2019 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
