Saturday, March 15, 2025

Last Month of the Year

For good or ill, the holidays are in full swing. 2019 has been an eventful year for the Gret Stet of Louisiana, Bayou Brief, and little old me. We’ve re-elected our Democratic Governor, the LSU Tigers are poised to win their fourth national championship, the Saints are Super Bowl contenders, and Senator John Neely Kennedy hasn’t said anything crazy for a whole week. I guess he wasn’t pleased about becoming a national laughingstock; more about the man I call Neely later.

After waxing nostalgic in my last column, the snark is back as is the segmented format. It’s not unlike an orange only without the peel. I can, however, promise zest, bitter sarcasm along with some occasional sweetness. I’ll skip the blood orange jokes because I have satsumas on my mind as well as in a bowl on my kitchen counter. Plaquemines Parish satsumas to be precise.

We begin this edition of the 13th Ward Rambler in earnest with some political season’s greetings from Chairman Adam Schiff:

MERRY SCHIFFMAS

I wrote about the new holiday meme at First Draft so I won’t quote myself but send you there instead. It’s a diabolical plot to have more hits at my other home on the interweb. Humor me.

It’s time to kick things off with a segment whose alternate title could be How Sweet It Is.

GEAUX TIGERS

As a fanatical Coach O fan, I am thrilled by the Tigers season. They appear to be a team of destiny, which is a thing in football. I am beyond pleased for Ed Orgeron and his guys, especially since the championship game will be played in the Superdome. They must beat Oklahoma first but anyone who bets against LSU will be immediately denounced as TIGER BAIT.

QB Joe Burrow is the leading candidate for the Heisman Trophy. He’ll be the first Tiger to win since Billy Cannon in 1959 and only the second ever. I would be remiss in not posting Cannon’s legendary Halloween run against Ole Miss:

Hopefully, Burrow won’t duplicate Cannon’s post football career as a dentist and convicted felon. I think Joe will dodge the Billy bullet: they make a lot more money in pro football than they did in Cannon’s time with the Houston Oilers, Oakland Raiders, and Kansas City Chiefs.

Joe Burrow’s emergence as the best player in the country has led to a plethora of comparisons. Some say Tom Brady; both men are absurdly handsome in an all-American boy kind of way. I think Burrow’s skills as a passer and runner make him a right-handed Steve Young. I know I’ll get some shit from Saints fans for this since Young played for the San Francisco 49ers. Get over it and move on, y’all.

Speaking of moving on, it’s time to talk politics.

The Second Phoniest Man In American Politics

The first is, of course, Donald J. Trump. It’s hard to top an Insult Comedian with a dead nutria pelt atop his head for sheer phoniness but Louisiana Senator John Neely Kennedy is giving President* Pennywise a run for his money.

I’ve been asked if I ever plan to update my Neelyisms piece. I might but I came to bury Neely today, not praise him. The cornpone, hicking it up act just isn’t funny anymore, especially when it’s in service of defending Trump by spreading lies about the Ukraine affair. The Russians ratfucked our 2016 election, not Ukraine. You’re spreading Russian disinformation, dude. 

Neely has combined his love of publicity with relentless pandering to the dimmer members of the MAGA cult. It’s earned him some well-deserved mockery, especially for the way this well-educated man plays the fool. Louisianans know that Neely is a phony, not a nitwit but it’s not obvious to the national press corps. 

Here’s a Twitter exchange between former Gambit Weekly editors Kevin Allman and Michael Tisserand:

Kevin, who is leaving Louisiana in the broad daylight this week, wrote a scathing piece for the Gambit about our Junior Senator:

Before President Donald Trump’s hero worship of Putin, no American politician would have dared to appear squishy on Russia. Kennedy’s servile parroting of the Ukrainian interferencemyth goes beyond shameless water-carrying for the president. It is, frankly, dark and disturbing. It makes us wonder all the more why he spent that Fourth of July in Moscow.

If Kennedy were a dumbass, his recent actions could be chalked up to political naivete or just plain stupidity. But he is no dummy — far from it — which raises even more troubling questions about him.

Meanwhile, we’ll take the word of U.S. intel agencies over Kremlin propaganda. On the question of 2016 election interference, John Neely Kennedy is full of borscht.

The late, great cartoonist and writer Greg Peters called what I just did “lazy quoting of better writers.” Kevin Allman is going home to Southern California to hang out with his elderly mother and pursue other literary opportunities. He will be missed.

Back to John Neely Kennedy. I’m particularly vexed by his shameless opportunism because I voted for him twice when he was a Democrat. In 2004, when he ran for the Senate as the center/left alternative to Blue Dogs and Diaper Dave, I was a strong supporter. The last line of Some Like It Hot applies here:

Now that I’ve ranted about Neely’s shameless hackery and verbal hickery, let’s close things out on an upbeat note.

Bayou Brief Briefs

In addition to becoming the 13th Ward Rambler on September 5th, I’ve written some pretty darn good stuff for Bayou Brief this year. Is it immodest to pat myself on the pack? Even if it is, a brief recap is in order. It’s the age of braggadocio, after all. Believe me.

Before I was the 13th Ward Rambler, I was the listicle guy:

Louisiana Tunes: The Top 50 Songs About The Gret Stet.

Set In Louisiana: Top 40 Movies 1938-Present.

I also wrote features about New Orleans culturethe end of the NOLA newspaper warthe Zulu conundrum, and Krewe du Vieux. I feel a Sinatra song coming on:

Speaking of Krewe du Vieux, we just had our annual fundraiser at which both the mother krewe and sub-krewes raise money. It’s a dubious cause but it’s ours all ours.

My very own Krewe of Spank is notorious for our Dirty Weiner Drop sideshow-type game. Past targets have included Bobby Jindal, pervy super chef John Besh, creepy real estate developer Sidney (Trashanova) Torres, and David Vitter.

This year’s target was the mendacious minority whip from Metry, Steve Scalise.

I decided to skip the picture with the beer can shoved in Scalise’s big fat bazoo. The Dirty Weiner Drop is not for the faint of heart. If you want to see it, click on this link.

It’s been a great year for Bayou Brief. Lamar has done a tremendous job of creating and maintaining an internet news site loaded with fine reporting and writing. We’re on the map and nobody’s taking us off it, ya heard? Please consider donating some money so we can keep on rocking it.

Finally, all I want for Schiffmas is impeachment with the prospect of some GOP votes in the Senate. This is my last 2019 column in the Last Month Of The Year. See you in 2020.

The last word goes to the Staple Singers and Chris Isaak with a holiday gospel classic:

The Winning Message

“The hardest thing about any political campaign is how to win without proving that you are unworthy of winning.”

Adlai Stevenson

Elections, especially big elections, often hinge on how effective a candidate’s turnout operation is, but to move people to the polls, you also need to be able to tell the more compelling and credible story. In a recent report in the Bayou Brief about this year’s gubernatorial election, Lynda Woolard details how a broad and diverse coalition of grassroots organizations came together after the jungle primary and catapulted John Bel Edwards into a second term.

This is about the other aspect that guaranteed the governor’s success: The ways in which his campaign and a network of like-minded allies, led by Trey Ourso’s GumboPAC, were able to defuse the biggest weapon in the Republican Party’s arsenal- Donald J. Trump- and consistently control and ultimately win the messaging war.

So how, exactly, did John Bel Edwards’ message succeed in a red state in the Deep South, where so many other Democratic candidates have failed? And what difference, really, did Donald Trump end up making?

If you listen only to the national media, you may be under the impression that this year’s election in Louisiana was, like almost everything else in the news, all about Trump. For the second time in a month, he had invested his political capital in support of a losing Republican gubernatorial candidate in a ruby red state, and this, we were told, was a sign that Trump has lost some of his luster in the very places he had dominated only three years ago.

GumboPAC’s Trey Ourso (left) celebrates with a colleague while former U.S. Sen. John Breaux and Gov. John Bel Edwards await the results of the runoff election at the Edwards campaign “war room” in Baton Rouge’s Renaissance Hotel. Photo credit: Lynda Woolard.

“… and as for the President, God bless his heart.”

John Bel Edwards

The Long Shot Becomes the Frontrunner

According to people close to the governor, Trump’s decision to wade into this year’s election in Louisiana caught him by surprise and was tremendously disappointing. Edwards had spent three years cultivating a good working relationship with the president, who had once told him that he was his “favorite Democrat.” When Trump hosted French President Emmanuel Macron for his very first state dinner at the White House, only one Democrat made the cut, the governor of Louisiana.

As a result, John Bel Edwards was a rare, if not singular, figure in American politics: An elected Democrat well-liked by a Republican president who didn’t get along with anyone. Indeed, at some point early this year, several people in Edwards’ inner circle believed Trump had been persuaded to remain neutral.

No doubt, there were obvious political reasons for Edwards to keep the president in his good graces. Donald Trump had carried Louisiana by nearly twenty points in 2016, and the state’s electorate had been tilting conservative for most of the past decade. Four years ago, when Edwards defied the odds and won resoundingly against David Vitter, Democratic candidates running statewide had lost fourteen consecutive elections, and until his reelection earlier this month, no other Democrat had won a statewide election since then.

Truth be told, the entire 2015 campaign season was much more entertaining than it was this year.

There were prostitutes, patriots, and one pathetic private eye who- only a couple of days before the jungle primary- blew his cover while eavesdropping on- of all people- the sheriff of Jefferson Parish at a popular local coffee shop in Metairie. The spy, who worked for Vitter, attempted to flee from law enforcement on foot, abandoning his rental car and a trove of documents he left on the passenger seat. At some point, during the pursuit, he had to dart across the backyards and jump over the fences of homes in an otherwise quiet residential neighborhood, drawing immediate comparisons to a scene in “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.” When the police finally apprehended him, the man- a resident of Dallas- “sang like a canary.”

The consensus view of the political and media establishment- at least initially- was that David Vitter would inevitably be the winner, despite the credible campaigns of two other Republicans and Edwards, the previously obscure state representative from Amite who had successfully cleared the field as the lone Democrat. The first round of polls showed Vitter with a commanding lead. But Edwards had been running much stronger than most anticipated, and Vitter decided to run much uglier- against his fellow Republicans- than anyone other than his small cadre of loyal, long-time staff thought necessary.

On Election Day, Vitter, literally, got into a car wreck. Thankfully, no one got hurt, but a perfect metaphor had materialized. Vitter’s driver worked for the political action committee supporting his campaign; by law, they were prohibited from coordinating with each other. So there was that too.

Political reporters Tyler Bridges and Jeremy Alford collaborated on a definitive book about the 2015 Louisiana gubernatorial election; they titled it “Long Shot,” which is how many had first described Edwards’ chances of victory.

But if John Bel Edwards was the long shot in 2015, four years later, he was the frontrunner.

Several White House aides were perplexed by Donald Trump’s decision to campaign in Louisiana this year, believing it was much riskier for the president than he had been led to believe. While a narrow majority of the state’s voters continue to approve of Trump’s job performance, they also give Edwards higher numbers than anyone else. According to Bryan Reed, campaign manager for Eddie Rispone, their internal polling showed Edwards with a 60% job approval at the beginning of the campaign season; by Election Day, that number had dipped down to 56%, which is still higher than Trump’s. Shortly after Edwards won reelection, the New York Times reported that the state’s congressional leaders blamed one of their own for misleading the president.

“In Congress, Louisiana lawmakers and their aides grumbled that Mr. Trump was not being shown quality polling indicating how formidable Mr. Edwards was with Republican-leaning voters,” the Times reported. “And some in the delegation pointed a finger at Louisiana’s voluble junior senator, John Kennedy, who has become a close White House ally, for pushing the president to campaign in the state.”

Notably, John Neely Kennedy, who had publicly flirted with a run for governor and who some believe could have been a formidable opponent, is viewed favorably by only 46% of voters, according to the most recent polling by Morning Consult.

The state’s reliably quotable junior senator has generated national attention for recycling a list of playful idioms and turns of phrases, which has occasionally earned Trump’s attention and amusement, but when addressing his constituents back home, Kennedy frequently attempts to revise history and obscure the truth about what occurred to Louisiana’s budget during his tenure as State Treasurer and under the direction of former Gov. Bobby Jindal.

For his part, Edwards has maintained strong approval numbers, defying conventional wisdom about the state’s increasingly conservative and polarized electorate, by building a solid record of accomplishments during his first term. Shortly after taking office, Edwards discovered the state’s budget crisis was far worse than anyone had been led to believe. Jindal hadn’t left behind a $1 billion deficit, as had been frequently reported; the real number was actually $2.1 billion. Today, the state is projecting a $500 million budget surplus.

In addition, as a result of Edwards’ decision to accept Medicaid expansion funding that had been available to Louisiana through the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act— something he has repeatedly called “the easiest big decision” he has ever had to make, more than 470,000 Louisianians now have health insurance. The expansion, which had been blocked by Jindal as a way of demonstrating his opposition to President Barack Obama’s signature domestic policy achievement, carried the added benefits of creating thousands of new jobs and providing the state with an additional source of critically-needed revenue. In the past four years, as a consequence, Louisiana hasn’t closed a single rural hospital in the state.

Edwards also successfully pushed through the first teacher pay raise in over a decade and has reprioritized investments in higher education after eight years of neglect and draconian cuts under Jindal, and because of a series of criminal justice reforms that received the support of a broad, bipartisan coalition, Louisiana no longer has the ignoble distinction of being the “prison capital of the world.”

As he prepared the groundwork for his reelection campaign, Edwards’ one and only vulnerability was his party affiliation, something that even Republican leaders privately conceded would not be enough to ensure his defeat. More than anything else, this is why the state’s three leading Republicans- state Attorney General Jeff Landry, U.S. Rep. Steve Scalise, and U.S. Sen. John Neely Kennedy- decided to stay put.

It’d be difficult to make a convincing case against an incumbent with such a strong record. However, no one, it seems, bothered to tell Donald Trump.

Sen. John Neely Kennedy speaks at a “Keep America Great” rally in Bossier City two days before the runoff election, as President Donald Trump and Sen. Bill Cassidy look on. Image by the Bayou Brief.

The erector set

For nearly two years, Baton Rouge construction magnates Lane Grigsby and Eddie Rispone had been rifling through their Rolodexes and working the phones. They were on a mission to recruit a Republican who could prevent John Bel Edwards from winning a second term, and with Steve Scalise- their top choice- already signaling he would remain in Congress, they weren’t having much luck.

The two men have been close friends for more than thirty years. Rispone’s brother and business partner Gary even named his son Lane and for a good reason.

In 1988, when Eddie Rispone was approaching forty, Grigsby told him something that would forever alter the course of his life. It was, according to Grigsby, “the best piece of advice I ever gave anyone.” Sue Lincoln of the Bayou Brief first reported the Grigsby-Rispone origin story in March of this year.

Eddie Rispone had spent previous thirteen years working for the construction firm Matthews-McCracken-Rutland (better known as MMR), eventually rising to become a company Vice President. A year before, in 1987, MMR went public, and suddenly, Rispone found himself in possession of nearly 30,000 shares of MMR stock.

As Lincoln explains in her report, the “sanitized” version of the story goes something like this: Eddie Rispone had grown increasingly listless and dissatisfied with his job at MMR; he was in the throes of what some may characterize as a “mid-life crisis” and was eager for a career change. That’s when Lane Grigsby, the founder of Cajun Industries, steps in to counsel his friend.

“Liquidate all your stock,” he told Rispone, “and start your own business.”

Eddie Rispone took the advice, resigning from his job and selling off 27,000 shares of MMR in between the months of April and July of 1988. He would use his new-found wealth to launch his own business, ISC Constructors, a firm that specialized in the same type of construction projects he’d worked on during his career at MMR.

His timing could not have been more fortuitous: Months later, in November of 1988, the U.S. Department of Justice indicted Rispone’s former boss, MMR President James “Pepper” Rutland, and the company’s former Chairman, Robert McCracken, on charges related to bid-rigging the building of the power plant Big Cajun #2 back in 1981. Both men were later convicted, and Rutland, who had recruited Rispone to MMR in 1975, ended up serving six months in prison.

During this year’s gubernatorial election, the story went largely unnoticed, though it was the subject of one of GumboPAC’s final television commercials.

Rispone, of course, would go onto make an enormous fortune with ISC Constructors, which today boasts annual revenue of more than $350 million and employs nearly 2,000 people. Only one construction company in Baton Rouge is larger than ISC: Cajun Industries.

It is unclear what precisely Grigsby and Rispone were looking for when they set out to recruit a candidate to run against John Bel Edwards. According to Tyler Bridges of the Advocate, on Feb. 18, 2018, the two men met for 45 minutes with Congressman Ralph Abraham, who had traveled to Grigsby’s office on Airline Highway in Baton Rouge to pitch them on his intention to run for governor.

“I’m sorry,” Grigsby said after the meeting broke up. “I don’t think Ralph Abramson will ever be governor.” He had confused the congressman’s last name with the name of an outgoing state representative from New Orleans.

Increasingly frustrated with their inability to recruit an acceptable candidate, Rispone began getting restless. They were running out of time, and they didn’t seem to have any options. But shortly after their meeting with Abraham, a sleep-deprived Rispone made a decision: He would run for governor. Later, he claimed that idea came to him through an act of divine intervention; God has told him to become a candidate, he said. Who was he to refuse an order from the Almighty Himself?

Eddie Rispone may have been completely unknown outside of a small group of GOP mega-donors and the Baton Rouge business community, but he was willing to stake a bulk of his own personal fortune on the campaign. All told, he’d eventually spend $15 million of his own money, $5 million more than he intended. Name recognition, though, wouldn’t be a problem. Lane Grigsby, who later became one of Rispone’s biggest liabilities, would fund a series of PACs and dark money groups to handle everything the campaign couldn’t.

The only problem, however, was figuring out his message. Edwards was not a typical Democrat. Among other things, he was an outspoken supporter of the Second Amendment and widely favored by the state’s law enforcement community. He was also staunchly pro-life; earlier this year, he signed one of the most restrictive abortion laws in the nation, outraging many in the Democratic base. (Edwards may have underestimated the extent to which that affected enthusiasm for his reelection campaign, particularly during the jungle primary. By one estimate, his support among women dropped by five points shortly after he signed the bill into law).

Either way, the typical Republican playbook wasn’t going to work against Edwards; Rispone would need to take a different approach. He quickly assembled an all-star team of national consultants, borrowing heavily from the roster that Donald Trump had put together in 2016. They decided to model their effort after the one used by Bill Lee, the newly-elected Republican governor of Tennessee. Rispone would market himself as a champion of the business community, a social conservative, and a political outsider, just like the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

However, from the very beginning, Rispone’s campaign made a tactical error, one that they would continue to make over and over again throughout the election: They emphasized Rispone’s support of Trump more than anything else.

When Rispone rolled out his campaign with a commercial boasting about the Trump bumper sticker on his pick-up truck, internal polling showed he actually lost support because of the ad, a fact that Lionel Rainey III, a top advisor to Ralph Abraham, mentioned at a recent forum hosted by LSU’s Manship School. To be sure, the reason for the botched debut wasn’t merely because of the obsequious references to Trump; it was because Rispone came across as inauthentic and vapid and more than a little smug.

In many respects, in that introductory commercial, Eddie Rispone provided his opponents with the fodder they would successfully use to characterize him for the entire campaign season: Phony Rispone.

But before exploring the behind-the-scenes story of Phony Rispone and the impact it had in this year’s election, we should first consider the most prominent feature of Donald Trump’s role in the race for Louisiana governor: His made-for-TV rallies.

President Donald Trump appears alongside Phil Robertson of “Duck Dynasty” at a campaign rally in Monroe, Louisiana. Image by the Bayou Brief.

Preaching to the Choir

It’s hard to imagine Trump would have ever been elected president without the wall-to-wall coverage of the countless, often erratic, frequently offensive, and usually bombastic campaign rallies he held across the country.

By some estimates, because of the decision by CNN and FoxNews to air the majority of those rallies, front to finish, on national television, the Trump campaign benefitted from more than $3 billion in “earned media” coverage, an unprecedented gift from the corporate media to the self-proclaimed billionaire reality TV star and real estate mogul from New York.

The conventional wisdom, at least initially, was that Trump’s rallies would bolster turnout among Republicans, significantly improving Eddie Rispone’s chances against a popular incumbent. However, by the time the runoff campaign kicked off, it became obvious that Trump’s mere presence in the state had no real impact on the polls.

At a private fundraiser hosted by the legendary political strategist James Carville, Gov. Edwards directly addressed the concern among his supporters about Trump’s upcoming rallies. “There won’t be anyone (at those rallies) who hasn’t already made up their mind,” Edwards argued. “Their support for my opponent is baked-in.”

Indeed, the data suggests Rispone didn’t benefit much at all from Trump’s three rallies in the state. The first rally, which was held in Lake Charles on the eve of the jungle primary, required Trump to awkwardly support both Rispone and the other Republican in the race, Congressman Ralph Abraham, and in any event, it occurred too late to provide anything except for a few scripted attacks against John Bel Edwards that Rispone would later use in his first two commercials of the run-off, both of which didn’t include a single image of the candidate himself.

According to Dr. Mike Henderson, the Director of LSU’s Public Policy Research Lab, it’s difficult to gauge whether Trump’s appearance in Lake Charles had much of an effect, but at best, it only resulted in a 2,300 vote increase among Republican voters in Calcasieu Parish.

In his penultimate rally, held during the runoff in Monroe- the capital city of Abraham Country, there was a small uptick the following day in early votes by whites living in Ouachita Parish, which Rispone ultimately carried with 54.5% of the vote. But crucially, when Abraham took the stage that night, he focused entirely on praising Trump and mentioned Rispone only in passing, signaling to many that there was still a rift between the two men, a consequence of Rispone’s decision to launch a series of attack ads against the avuncular country doctor in the waning days of the jungle primary.

(Bryan Reed, Rispone’s campaign manager, later claimed that the decision to launch negative ads against Abraham changed the dynamic of the primary, resulting in Rispone climbing ahead of Abraham and into second place in the polls for the first time ever).

At Trump’s final rally in Bossier City, held only two days before the election, Eddie Rispone seemed like an afterthought, appearing on stage very briefly and looking nervous and out of his element. When Rispone concluded his comments, which were primarily an effusive and fawning love letter to the president, Trump waddled back to the podium and attempted to lock arms with the candidate for a victory salute to the audience. Instead, though, he didn’t manage to catch Rispone’s hand, and when the two men hoisted their arms to the sky, the lasting image was of a bloated and flush-faced Trump flinging Rispone’s arm up into the air by the wrist.

Ostensibly, the rally had been planned to bolster Rispone’s campaign, yet aside from his cameo appearance behind the podium, there was little evidence of any support for the Baton Rouge Republican. No one sported a Rispone t-shirt; no one even held up one of his campaign signs. That night, the CenturyLink Center in Bossier City was a sea of red hats and MAGA gear. While two out of three voters in Bossier Parish, as expected, supported the Republican, John Bel Edwards carried the precinct that had hosted the rally.

As analysis conducted by the nonprofit organization Together Louisiana demonstrates, while turnout increased between the jungle primary and the runoff in most of the state’s urban areas, it actually went down in most of the Republican-heavy rural precincts near Monroe and Lake Charles. In Caddo Parish, John Bel Edwards received 13,000 more votes than Rispone, enough to make up for Rispone’s 12,000 vote margin across the Red River in Bossier.

“The most important role of Trump has less to do with anything he did or said and more to do with the fact that he is a Republican president who is relatively popular in a state that tends to vote for Republicans,” Henderson explained.

“There’s an old saying that victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan.”

John F. Kennedy

The True story of Phony Rispone

Four years ago, if you were approaching the Superdome from I-10 East, you couldn’t avoid the billboard with the cryptic message, framing the downtown skyline and towering above the interstate directly next to the Jefferson Davis overpass. “ABV,” the sign read in huge yellow letters. There was a website address listed underneath, but depending on how fast you were driving, you easily could have missed it and wondered whether the sign was a reference to a new brand of beer (“ABV,” after all, is the acronym for “Alcohol by Volume”) or maybe an airport (but why would there be a billboard advertising the code for the airport in Abuja, Nigeria?).

If you were a tourist visiting New Orleans and not well-versed in Louisiana politics, chances are you would still be confused, even if you had managed to read the name of the website: www.AnybodyButVitter.com.

GumboPAC’s ABV billboard in New Orleans.

The billboard, which went up in early June of 2015, introduced New Orleans to a brand-new political action committee, GumboPAC, and Vitter, as anyone from Louisiana could tell you, referred to the state’s junior United States Senator, David Bruce Vitter, who at that point, was considered to be the prohibitive favorite to become the state’s next governor.

The simple, three-letter message certainly caught people’s attention, but because GumboPAC was completely unknown, it wasn’t clear whether this was just a gimmick or a part of a larger campaign. “It’s an eye-catching billboard,” Gambit’s Clancy DuBos told WWL, “but if that’s all there is, it’s going to be kind of a flash in the pan.”

Five months later, as the final votes were being counted in the runoff election between Vitter, a Republican, and John Bel Edwards, his Democratic opponent, it was clear that GumboPAC wasn’t just a “flash in the pan.” Indeed, their relentless campaign against Vitter was almost too successful.

“That one billboard created a buzz and inspired several news stories,” said GumboPAC’s chief strategist Trey Ourso, a Baton Rouge-based political guru and former executive director of the Louisiana Democratic Party. “It launched the ABV movement that would carry our message for the rest of the campaign. The team later joked that is was ‘the billboard heard round the world.’”  

Although their commercials, billboards, direct mailers, and digital ads focused on electing “anybody but Vitter,” Ourso quietly hoped Vitter would lose in the runoff against Edwards, not to one of the two Republican candidates he faced in the state’s jungle primary. (Edwards, as the lone Democrat in the field, was all but guaranteed a first-place finish in the primary and a spot in the runoff; the race, therefore, was for second place).

Vitter, who had seemed inevitable only months ago, suddenly now appeared vulnerable and managed to narrowly capture second place with only 23% of the vote. For Ourso, it couldn’t have been scripted any better. John Bel Edwards would clobber David Vitter in the runoff by more than 12 points, and Ourso’s work with GumboPAC would win a string of national awards.

To learn more about Ourso’s work in the 2015 Louisiana gubernatorial campaign, read his essay “Engineering a Surprise Democratic Victory in the Deep South” for the industry publication Campaigns & Elections.

During the past four years, Ourso continued to operate GumboPAC, though it often took a backseat to Rebuild Louisiana, a nonprofit organization that supports the governor’s legislative agenda. However, at the conclusion of this year’s legislative session, GumboPAC got back into gear.

As a brief digression, it is important to note that federal and state law prohibits political action committees from coordinating with any campaigns they support or for which they advocate. This also meant that, shortly after the conclusion of this year’s legislative session, no one associated with GumboPAC, including Ourso, could discuss strategy with anyone involved with the Edwards campaign. Like every other political reporter at every other news publication in Louisiana that covered the 2019 election, I occasionally spoke with individuals working for all three major candidates and those associated with various PACs and nonprofit organizations. I never saw any indication whatsoever that Edwards, Abraham, or Rispone engaged in anything even remotely similar to the kind of brazen coordination that members of David Vitter’s 2015 gubernatorial campaign or Bobby Jindal’s 2016 presidential campaign appeared to be conducting with PACs supporting their candidacies; in Jindal’s case, the same political consulting firm that was running his campaign was also running his PAC.

For Democrats, this year would require a different approach than the one employed in 2015, because although Republicans failed to field a top-tier recruit, the two candidates who emerged as Edwards’ leading opponents, Ralph Abraham and Eddie Rispone, both posed unique challenges.

Abraham, a three-term congressman representing the state’s sprawling Fifth District, may have not been a household name outside of Monroe and Alexandria, but among those who knew him, he was generally well-liked and had a solid conservative voting record. Rispone, on other hand, may have been completely unknown, but he had the financial resources to tell a compelling story about creating one of Louisiana’s biggest and most successful construction companies.

Moreover, unlike in 2015, neither the Edwards’ campaign nor the Louisiana Democratic Party, could count on the support of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), which was reluctant to lend financial support to Edwards because of the so-called “heartbeat” bill restricting access to abortion that he had signed into law earlier in the year. The DNC would later change its position during the runoff, once Donald Trump gambled his own political capital on the race, but during the first several months of the campaign, this meant Louisiana Democrats would have less money for organizing and messaging.

Fortunately for Edwards and the state party, despite the DNC’s reluctance, another national organization, the Democratic Governors Association (DGA), was still willing to invest in Louisiana, and as they learned during the runoff election four years ago, the DGA knew where they could get the biggest bang for their buck: GumboPAC.

(Note: Before unpacking what exactly GumboPAC did that was, at least in my opinion, so critical to ensuring Edwards’ re-election, I think it’s important to note a few important points about the work we did here on the Bayou Brief, especially considering that a handful of their campaign commercials referenced and relied on reporting we published here. Sue Lincoln and I both began researching and reporting on this year’s election several months before GumboPAC turned on their ignition, and we learned about the decision to amplify our coverage of Abraham and Rispone the same exact way everyone else did: By seeing it either on television or through social media. I am immensely proud of our work and particularly grateful to Sue Lincoln, whose diligent and methodical reporting on Rispone helped inform hundreds of thousands of Louisiana voters, myself included. The Bayou Brief does not and has never accepted financial contributions or support from any political action committee or political campaign).

Now, with that out of the way:

This year, GumboPAC proved to be critical, once again, to ensuring Edwards’ win because it decided to do something that- for reasons I will never understand- neither of his two opponents thought necessary: In a series of commercials and through relentless social media promotions, GumboPAC introduced the overwhelming majority of Louisiana voters to Ralph Abraham and Eddie Rispone before either man’s campaign decided it was necessary to introduce themselves. In so doing, they effectively defined both candidates and left their campaigns scrambling to figure out how to respond.

In the case of Abraham, much of the blame can be assigned directly on the congressman himself, because only weeks after he announced his candidacy, with the federal government in the midst of a shutdown, a reporter for the Advocate decided to survey members of Louisiana’s congressional delegation with a simple question: Are you going to continue collecting your salary?

Abraham’s office confirmed that he would, in fact, cash his government paychecks, which may have struck some people as shameless in its own right, but there was something much more problematic about the answer. Ralph Abraham had been elected by promising voters he would donate his entire salary to St. Jude’s Hospital for Children and to a charity that provides artificial limbs and support services to wounded warriors suffering from multiple amputations. The congressman later attempted to clarify that his pledge to charity was only valid for his first term in office, but it didn’t take long to discover that his campaign website continued to advertise the pledge during his campaign for a second term and references to the pledge during his campaign for a third. Moreover, neither his office nor his campaign ever produced any documentation verifying donations to either charity.

While GumboPAC’s first ad this year was a playful cartoon about Mardi Gras that featured Abraham and Rispone and a cameo by Bobby Jindal, the first direct hit they landed was about Abraham’s broken promise. The congressman had essentially written it himself.

There were other troubling aspects of Abraham’s record, particularly for someone claiming to be a conservative Republican: He and his family had received millions in federal farm subsidies; he had sued an oil and gas company for damaging his property when it constructed a pipeline through it, and he’d continually missed important votes in Congress, including several for the reauthorization of the federal flood insurance program.

In the final weeks before the jungle primary, the Drug Enforcement Agency disclosed a massive database of pharmacies across the entire nation that dispensed opioids. Two of those pharmacies were owned either in part or outright by Abraham, a detail most had never known before I reported the story here on the Bayou Brief. Both pharmacies dispensed a massive supply of the powerful painkillers, and Abraham, as a physician, was also known to be one of the state’s most prolific prescribers of opioids. Indeed, at a candidate forum during his first campaign for Congress, Abraham responded to a question about medical marijuana by rejecting research about its benefits and boasted instead about name-brand opioids.

GumboPAC may have promoted those other reports through their digital ads on social media, but for the most part, it kept its attention focused on the congressman’s broken promise.

Rispone presented a different set of issues, because the millionaire businessman had effectively abandoned any attempt at presenting himself as his own man in favor of latching himself almost entirely onto Donald Trump.

For Edwards to win, however, he would require the support of a sizable portion of people who had voted for Trump only three years prior, which meant that, despite the desire of most Democrats, both the governor and his allies needed to be careful not to frame the election around the president. By simultaneously relinquishing his message to Trump and avoiding substantive discussions about public policy while also calling himself a “political outsider,” Rispone walked right into the message GumboPAC and, later, the Edwards’ campaign would use to characterize him to anyone unfamiliar: Phony Rispone.

The nickname was created by Adam Magnus, a DC-based consultant who was born and raised in New Orleans, and it became the most memorable part of this year’s election.

GumboPAC introduced “Phony Rispone” with this ad, which became the most-watched commercial of the entire election season and is based on a report I published here on the Bayou Brief.

It is highly unusual for a candidate to appropriate the branding created by a supporting PAC, but to the surprise of Ourso and his team at GumboPAC, during the runoff, the Edwards campaign picked up the “Phony Rispone” message and ran with it themselves.

These are from two commercials that the Edwards campaign aired during the runoff campaign (Note: I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out, as our readers already know, that both of these are based on reporting exclusively published here on the Bayou Brief, which, unlike GumboPAC, the campaign deliberately failed to acknowledge. Personally, though, I’m just happy he won).

Coda

To paraphrase the quote I included from President Kennedy, because of John Bel Edwards’ victory, everyone who contributed, in ways both big and small, can share in the credit for his win, particularly African American voters who showed up in unexpectedly large numbers during the runoff. While Abraham revealed himself to be a flawed candidate from the beginning and Rispone proved himself to be an incompetent one at the end and although Sen. John Neely Kennedy made things easier by misleading Donald Trump and Trey Ourso’s GumboPAC once again proved to be the best political strategist in a state in which nearly everyone believes themselves to be a political strategist, the truth is that one person- and one person alone- is responsible for winning the message war and ultimately the election: John Bel Edwards.

Notwithstanding Sue Lincoln’s critique of the Edwards’ campaign uneven messaging toward women and with tremendous respect and appreciation for the hundreds of grassroots leaders and volunteers Lynda Woolard mentioned in her report, John Bel Edwards won because he was the better candidate with a better record, a better campaign behind him, and a better story to tell (and for his supporters to tell on his behalf).

To that end, the people at the core of his campaign- those who ensured his message remained consistent and not derailed by Donald Trump or anyone who may have hoped to crown themselves as a “kingmaker”- served the governor extraordinarily well. Without question, even though his victory over Vitter was by a larger margin, the men and women who worked on his behalf this year accomplished something much more significant. Unlike four years ago, the Edwards campaign didn’t slip up, not even once, and in so doing, they helped to validate the trust and faith that the voters of Louisiana placed in him to lead the state for another four years.

“Combat in the Courtroom” Episode One: The Murder Trial of Aaron Mintz

Listen to Episode One of “Combat in the Courtroom” on Apple Podcast by clicking here.

It was Super Bowl Sunday, 1984. The game, a blowout win by the Los Angeles Raiders over the Washington Redskins, was unremarkable, but that night, with six minutes and twenty-two seconds left to play in the third quarter, the world was introduced to a revolutionary piece of technology that would eventually transform the global economy, the arts, culture, education, and science.

Even today, the commercial that aired that night is still hailed as “the greatest television ad of all-time.” I’m referring, of course, to the Apple’s “1984” commercial, which marked the debut of its new personal computer, the Macintosh.

Apple’s iconic “1984” commercial, which announced the Macintosh personal computer.

In New Orleans, football season had ended with the last game of the regular season, with the Saints finishing a disappointing 7-9 under head coach Bum Philips. The city, instead, was in the middle of preparing for the gargantuan 1984 World’s Fair, which was set to open in May. Edwin Washington Edwards had just been re-elected to an unprecedented third term as Louisiana governor in the most expensive non-presidential election in American history. On that particular Sunday, Edwards wasn’t in Louisiana. He and 617 of his top supporters were traveling together on an unforgettable vacation to Versailles; it was hailed as the single biggest political fundraiser of all-time.

Early that morning, on Versailles Boulevard in Uptown New Orleans, well before the sun came up, Aaron Mintz, a well-known furniture store owner and a member of one of the city’s most prominent families, padded down the stairs of his home. Aaron, who was battling a painful case of the shingles, had been having trouble sleeping. So, with his wife Palma (sometimes called by the nickname Pam) upstairs in the couple’s master bedroom, he turned on the living room television, hoping that it would lull him to sleep, at least for a few hours.

Sometime between 5:20 and 5:30 in the morning, Aaron heard a loud bang upstairs. He fumbled through the darkened home and back up the stairs. When he walked into the master bedroom, he saw Palma, still in bed and covered in a pool of blood. She was gripping a small gun- a Mauser- in her hand. Aaron panicked. He draped himself over her body. His hands and the robe he was wearing were now covered in blood.

Beside Palma, he noticed a foam pillow that was out of place; it belonged with the daybed in an adjoining room. For some reason- maybe it was panic, maybe it was adrenaline, he picked up the pillow, walked through the bathroom that connected to the room with the daybed, smearing blood on the light switches, and then, he put the pillow back where it belonged.

He remembered one of his neighbors was a doctor, Ralph Meier, so he rushed back down the stairs and hurried over to the doctor’s house. Dr. Meier followed him back, and almost immediately after seeing Palma’s body, he told Aaron the news he feared the most: His wife Palma was dead.

At 5:55AM, the doctor called 911.

Image by the Bayou Brief.

The murder trial of Aaron Mintz became an unprecedented media sensation. Local news stations breathlessly reported on every detail, both big and small, that occurred inside of the courtroom; their satellite trucks lined the perimeter of the Orleans Criminal Court on the corner of Tulane and Broad. WWL brought on a new special correspondent: Ralph Capitelli, who had served as one of District Attorney Harry Connick, Sr.’s top deputies before resigning to start his own criminal defense firm.

By the end of the trial, nearly everyone involved had become a local celebrity, and no one’s star rose more quickly than Aaron Mintz’s attorney, Mike Fawer. A decade before Shreveport’s Johnnie Cochran would assemble a legendary legal “dream team” to defend O.J. Simpson, Mike Fawer recruited his own team of nationally-renowned forensics experts to join Aaron Mintz’s defense team.

Money was no object, and, as it turned out, Aaron Mintz was going to need to spend a fortune if he had any chance at convincing a jury to vote for an acquittal.

The government’s case appeared to be solid, and because of the media hype, the majority of New Orleanians had made up their minds before the trial even began. In the court of public opinion, Aaron Mintz had already been found guilty.

According to prosecutors, Mintz had shot and killed his wife Palma in the early hours of Super Bowl Sunday after she confronted him about having an affair. To add to the intrigue, Aaron’s mistress was someone who’d been in the spotlight herself; she worked as a publicist for the World’s Fair. She wasn’t in New Orleans on the day of Palma’s death, however; she was in France, celebrating Edwin Edwards’ victory over Dave Treen.

The affair had been well-known, at least among the Mintz’s neighbors and friends. Aaron and Palma publicly kept up appearances, but barely. Palma’s closest friends knew she had been miserable in her marriage. She was angry with Aaron, without question, but she was also clearly depressed. Palma Mintz was a beautiful, refined woman and a talented artist. However, there was a sense that she may have also felt trapped in her marriage, even before Aaron began cheating on her. The prosecution’s theory- that Aaron murdered her in a fit of rage- wasn’t inconceivable.

Ralph Meier, the neighbor who had been summoned over to the Mintz house, initially believed Palma had committed suicide, but he’d since changed his mind. Aaron’s behavior that morning was suspicious and erratic, and investigators, led by Detective John Dillman, and later prosecutors zeroed in on one key piece of evidence: The pillow that Aaron moved into another room only seconds after finding his wife’s body.

The pillow contained what appeared to be a damning clue: A bullet hole.

Aaron Mintz, according to the prosecution, must’ve used the pillow as a silencer. That had to have been why his first impulse wasn’t to call 911 but to, instead, carry the pillow away from the scene of the crime.

Because cameras were not allowed inside of the courtroom, television news stations in New Orleans hired their own sketch artists to chronicle the daily drama.

Mike Fawer opens his memoir From the Bronx to the Bayou with a chapter about the Mintz case titled “The Pillow, the Damned Pillow,” because more than anything else, the murder trial of Aaron Mintz hinged on that one piece of evidence. He understood as much from the very beginning, and it’s the reason he put together a team of forensic experts. If he could prove that Aaron did not use the pillow in the commission of his wife’s murder, then the government’s entire case would unravel.

There were several good reasons for Mike to remain hopeful. He’d actually been present at the Mintz home while the police were processing the crime scene. Although it was the first time in his life he’d ever walked into an active investigation, he could immediately tell that things were not being handled by the book. A police photographer trampled all over the floor of the master bedroom. Once Palma’s body had been taken to the coroner, they realized a shell casing was missing, and thinking it must’ve been hidden in the bedding, they began folding over the sheets, effectively destroying much of the blood spatter evidence.

It was incredibly sloppy work (the missing casing was later found lodged in the gurney used to transport Palma’s body), and it was all overseen by Detective John Dillman.

Dillman was one of the first people Mike had met when he arrived at the police station that day to meet with his new client, and he seemed already convinced that Aaron was responsible for Palma’s death. To Mike, Detective Dillman was working backward from that assumption, instead of being guided by the evidence. When you do that, you’re bound to overlook something; mistakes are almost inevitable. By the time of the trial, Mike was convinced that Dillman wasn’t exactly an exemplar of ethics. In other words, there was a good reason to believe that a team of forensic experts may uncover plenty of things that Dillman and the Orleans Parish District Attorney’s Office had overlooked or simply ignored in their rush for a conviction.

As Mike’s team began their own investigation into Palma’s death, it didn’t take long for them to uncover a series of facts that cut directly against the prosecution’s case.

Uptown New Orleans, especially the part that was inhabited by Aaron and Palma Mintz, wasn’t a place anyone would ever move if they wanted to become anonymous. I once heard someone describe New Orleans as “a city of 5,000 people and a million mirrors.” By the time the trial kicked off, everyone, it seemed, had their own story about the Mintz family.

Donald Mintz, Aaron’s first cousin, had been making a name for himself as a brilliant civil defense lawyer and a leader in the New Orleans Jewish community. Donald was a founder and an original partner of the law firm McGlinchey Stafford, which now ranks as one of the top firms in the nation, with offices in ten states (including Washington D.C.); he made two unsuccessful runs for Mayor of New Orleans before his sudden death in 1996 at the age of 53. And the Mintz family name had been known in the Crescent City since 1923, when Morris Mintz, along with Joseph Horwitz, founded the furniture store Hurwitz Mintz. (Aaron had owned a different, lesser-known furniture store).

Mike’s team knew how to separate gossip from fact, however, and they understood that in order to secure an acquittal, they’d need to methodically dismantle the government’s case. They began by piecing together the facts about Palma and quickly discovered that she’d long been aware that her husband Aaron was cheating on her, which seemed to weaken the theory that Aaron had murdered her after she confronted him about the affair. They also looked into the medications Palma had been taking, copious quantities of anti-depressants and anti-anxiety drugs. When they interviewed the neighborhood pharmacist who dispensed some of those medications, he revealed a shocking detail: Only a few weeks before, Palma had asked him a hypothetical: If you wanted to kill yourself, what would be the best way? The pharmacist recalled only ever being asked the question once before, by a man who would commit suicide soon after.

In addition to the pharmacist, they interviewed the couple’s two maids. One recalled seeing the pillow in a pile of laundry in Palma’s car, which seemed out of place. The other remembered something even more troubling: She noticed that a small gun had been wedged underneath Palma’s side of the bed the day before her death. The gun belonged to Palma, who had taken an interest in training herself on how to use a firearm.

But the most critical evidence they uncovered came from the tests they conducted with an identical foam pillow. If the prosecution’s theory was correct- that Aaron had held the pillow up against Palma’s head in order to muzzle the sound of the gunshot, then there should have been foam particles inside of her head. There weren’t. Moreover, because the pillow had a bullet hole in it, it’d mean that two shots, not one, had been fired, yet only one shell casing was recovered from the scene.

Based on their findings, Mike and his experts had come to a different conclusion than the prosecution: Palma Mintz had staged her own suicide to make it appear as if Aaron murdered her.

Their theory was that Palma, a few days prior, had driven to Metairie, along with her gun and the pillow from the daybed, in order to practice shooting. She’d used the pillow as a target and, once back home, surreptitiously placed it onto the bed in the master bedroom. It would be by her side when she fished her gun from beneath the mattress.

Mike Fawer being interviewed outside of the Orleans Parish Criminal Court, shortly after the jury voted to acquit Aaron Mintz.

To this day, Mike still doesn’t know whether Aaron Mintz killed his wife, but he is certain of one thing: The pillow that had been at the center of the government’s case wasn’t a factor at all. The jury agreed and voted for acquittal, 10-2.

Mike hadn’t anticipated how quickly the jury would take to render a verdict. After a day’s worth of deliberating, the judge dismissed the jury for a dinner break, and Mike and his team, along with Aaron, headed down the street for dinner. Shortly after finishing their meals, Mike learned the jury had made a decision and rushed back to the courtroom. He may have had too much to eat, he says, or too much to drink or maybe both. Either way, he wasn’t feeling well when the acquittal was announced, and as his client and the team celebrated, Mike headed back into the judge’s chambers and proceeded to vomit all over his white dress shirt.

The assembled media picked up on the pandemonium behind the scenes; one news station mistakenly reported that Mike had just suffered a heart attack. But he was fine and quickly recovered. He tossed his shirt into the trash, put back on his blue blazer, and headed outside, where the media had gathered.

It was, at the time, the most important moment in Mike’s entire legal career. He was already being hailed as the best lawyer in New Orleans, and by securing an acquittal, with the entire city looking on, Mike hadn’t just proven his skill; he’d become a local celebrity. That night, the three major local news station carried his press conference on the courthouse steps on live television, and somehow, the fact that Aaron Mintz’s star attorney appeared shirtless before the cameras was still the least interesting part of the story.

Eleven years later, Aaron Mintz received a license to operate video poker machines and shortly thereafter was accused of using his license in order to help members of the mafia conceal income earned through an illegal video poker ring. He was ultimately convicted on a lesser charge and ordered to surrender his license and pay a $15,000 fine.

“Combat in the Courtroom” Chronicles the Extraordinary Career of a Legendary Louisiana Lawyer

Ten months ago, when I first met Mike Fawer, the only thing I knew about him was that he’d just published a memoir with the word “bayou” in the title. That was enough to pique my interest. If the memoir, which is titled “From the Bronx to the Bayou,” was good, I’d be happy to write a review on the Bayou Brief.

The writer Jason Berry, whose book about the history of New Orleans- “City of a Million Dreams”- is, at least in my opinion, a genuine masterpiece, had connected the two of us. If Jason vouched for him, then, at the very least, I knew Mike Fawer must’ve had a story to tell.

Still, I’m always skeptical about the literary merit of memoirs written by someone who hadn’t ever been known as a writer. More often than not, the prose is frustratingly sloppy, and by the end, even if the person’s story is compelling, it’s impossible not to imagine how much better it would have been with the help of a professional editor.

So, when I agreed to meet Mike Fawer, who I was told worked as a big-shot lawyer, for lunch at Cochon in New Orleans, I wasn’t sure what to expect, which was, even in hindsight, the best possible way for me to meet someone as remarkable as Mike.

I decided I liked the guy almost immediately. In his memoir, he acknowledges some of his own personal shortcomings when he was in what others may describe as the prime of his career, but it was clear he had long since dropped whatever pretense he may have carried as a younger man.

At the time, he was only a few weeks away from retirement, and at 83, he could have passed for someone 20 years younger. He’d decided to grow his hair out, to trade his suits for comfortable but style-conscious linens. He looked more like a writer than a lawyer, I thought. Plus, he knew the art of the curse word, and over the course of lunch, I discovered he also was a damn good conversationalist with a damn good story to tell.

I had to read Mike’s book, even though I’d already made a decision to not simply write a review. He was eager to tell his story, and no one could tell it better than he could. You needed to hear it in his voice, not mine.

Click to visit Mike’s website.

I told him I wanted to meet again and that I was happy to help him get his story out. First though, I needed to read his book.

I soon discovered that there isn’t another criminal defense attorney in Louisiana who had collected as many riveting stories about the law as Mike Fawer. His memoir isn’t just good; it’s great.

He graduated from Columbia Law School in 1959; one of his classmates was a transfer student from Harvard named Ruth Bader Ginsburg. His very first job out of law school was working for the Department of Justice under Bobby Kennedy, where he’d encounter a man named Carlos Marcello, a man he’d later cross paths with decades later while working in New Orleans.

The very first time he ever argued a case inside of a courtroom was, by pure happenstance, in front of the 89-year-old American icon, Judge Learned Hand, who spent 45 minutes engaging him in a robust discussion. It was one of the final cases ever decided by Judge Hand; he passed away only a few months later.

When he arrived in New Orleans, he quickly earned a name for himself as a brilliant criminal defense attorney with a knack for selecting the right juries and a zealous attention to detail that is exceptionally rare, even among criminal defense attorneys.

He was breakaway star of the first case in New Orleans history to ever earn wall-to-wall coverage on television, which is the subject of the first episode of the podcast.

Mike helped earn Edwin Edwards an acquittal, working alongside the legendary attorney Camille Gravel. On the morning Congressman Bill Jefferson’s Virginia townhome was raided by the FBI, Mike was one of the first people he called. “I’m headed to your office,” Jefferson said. Mike didn’t know who he was talking to.

During his sixty year career, Mike Fawer represented poor people, rich people, accused murderers, civil rights icons, and corrupt politicians in some of the most sensational cases in Louisiana history. He also made his mark in Mississippi history as well.

Over the course of seven months, Mike shared with me some of his most remarkable stories in a series of conversations I recorded for a podcast we’re officially launching today, Combat in the Courtroom.

I later brought on Ben Collinsworth to produce and edit the series, a process that has required countless hours and without which none of this would have been possible. Some of my conversations with Mike required another take; as it turns out, I’m a terrible audio engineer. As a consequence, Ben also had the opportunity to interview Mike as well.

Ben also lined up an original theme song (think “Law and Order” redone in the style of a New Orleans funk band).

This podcast wouldn’t have been possible without Ben’s talent and expertise.

But Mike came up with the name.

The first two episodes are already online, and if you want to skip ahead, you can. But during the next week, we’ll be publishing compendiums to both episodes, so you may want to wait.

Either way, before you do anything else, you should buy Mike’s book, “From the Bronx to the Bayou,” which is available on Amazon in hardcover and on Kindle.

Now Be Thankful

Peter’s mother, Edna Benson Athas, in her heyday.

This edition of 13th Ward Rambler is an adaptation of a piece I’ve posted at First Draft the last few years. I decided to publish it here because we’re just getting to know one another. I plan to write for the Bayou Brief as long as Lamar will have me. I believe in this project more than I believe in Santa Claus. Sorry, Mr. Bingle. Enough with this introduction, on to the main course, which will be alternately savory and sweet like any good Thanksgiving meal.

The holidays are hard for me. I like Thanksgiving’s gluttonous aspects but it’s still hard for me. It’s when I think of my mother who died in 2001. My mother was the sort of person who took in strays for the holidays. We’d have up to 20 people around the table; some of whom were friends of friends of friends. Mom believed that everyone should have a home cooked meal on Thanksgiving and Christmas. Many of our guests for Christmas dinner were, in fact, Jewish. No Chinese food for her Jewish friends.

Mom spent Thanksgiving week cooking in our home on the San Francisco Peninsula. She was a perfectionist when it came to entertaining: no holiday buffets for Edna Benson Athas. We had to gather around the table, and it had to have a starched white tablecloth. There were no paper plates or people eating whilst milling about: fine china, silver, and crystal were mandatory. She was informal the rest of the year, but holidays were state occasions when, as my father was wont to say, we put on the dog.

When I got old enough, one of my jobs was to set the table. I made sure that Mom had final approval, she wanted everything just so. I recall feeling triumphant one Thanksgiving: I’d set the table perfectly on the first try. There were usually changes but not that year. I was inordinately proud of myself, but she admonished me not to get too cocky. It was the Midwestern Norwegian Lutheran in her coming out. She left the bragging to my dad. It’s what Greeks do, y’all. Not me, of course, other Greeks….

I also helped make a fresh cranberry/orange sauce from the recipe on the back of the Ocean Spray bag. We had a venerable hand-cranked grinder that had to be attached to the kitchen table. We spread newspaper around because it was messy. There was a bucket at my feet to catch the bitter red cranberry drippings. Mom was not sentimental about her kitchen gadgets: she bought a food processor the first time she saw one. I was away from home and past the cranberry grinding, table setting phase of my life by then.

My favorite part of the traditional turkey dinner was the stuffing. I looked forward to it every year. It was loaded with herbs as well as pine nuts and chestnuts. We didn’t exactly roast them on an open fire, but I helped shell the bastards. They were uncooperative, downright surly. When I was very young, I was convinced they were alive, but my no-nonsense mother disabused me of that notion. She informed me that I’d seen the Wizard of Oz one too many times. As usual, she was right.

Unfortunately, there was often conflict at the dinner table during the holidays. I’m the youngest of three by thirteen years. My sisters were off living life and I was raised more like an only child. I admit to liking it that way. My oldest sister thrives on drama and conflict. There was always one big row per holiday, which drove my poor mother crazy. She was always the woman in the middle. When she died, so did our nuclear family for reasons too complex to go into. The good news is that holidays are more tranquil, but I miss the glue of my family.

Thanksgivings in Louisiana had a familiar feel when I moved here. It’s all about the food, y’all.  I married into an old Louisiana family and learned some new traditions. What’s not to love about oyster dressing? I still missed my mom’s stuffing. It was a part of me.

My first wife, Dee, was a petite, feisty, beautiful, and brilliant spitfire. She took the idea of being a redhead seriously and had a temper to match my own. Her mother Louise took me in as one of her own but made it clear that when we moved to Baton Rouge, we’d have to tie the knot. That’s right, her mother proposed. Unfortunately, the paternal side of Dee’s family tree was a witches brew of genetic maladies and she died of cancer during what should have been her final year at LSU Law School.

She died a week before Thanksgiving, so the holidays were rough sledding for me until I met and fell in love with the tall, feisty, beautiful, and brilliant woman known to you as Dr. A. The good news is that Dr. A and Louise instantly hit it off and she was admitted to the Louisiana family post-haste. It was Dr. A who started calling our Louisiana family the outlaws and the nickname stuck.

We spent many holidays with the outlaws in Red Stick over the years and are about to do so again. Louise has left the comfortable house that she shared with her late second husband Eddie to whom I pay tribute every Memorial Day at First Draft. She’s 98 now and lives at St. James Place, which is a somewhat posh retirement community. We’ll be eating in the dining room but it’s still homey; we’ve gotten to know many of the residents over the last decade. I’m lucky that Dr. A and mother-in-law #1 get on so well. Louise is also a howling liberal (to use her own phrase) so there will be no Trump-driven conflict.

Thanksgiving 2019 in Baton Rouge, however, will be tinged with sadness.

My mother-in-law’s close friend former Congresswoman Cathy Long died last Saturday at the age of 94. The two families bonded when they were neighbors in Alexandria, Louisiana in the Sixties. So much so that Cathy’s son George lived with Louise for a year so he could graduate from high school in Louisiana after his father Gillis returned to Congress.

I got to know and love Cathy when Dee and I lived in Washington. We stayed with the Longs while the ink on the lease of our Foggy Bottom apartment dried. Her husband, the late Louisiana Congressman Gillis Long, was intimidating on first meeting. I was, however, interested in the family business: politics. I spent hours talking to Mr. Long about everything under the political sun including his unsuccessful runs for Governor in 1963 and 1971 and how he survived as a liberal congressman in central Louisiana: Constituent service was the answer.

Cathy often said that Mr. Long liked me because I was one of the few young people who wasn’t afraid of him. I *was* intimidated by his piercing gaze and brilliant mind but did a good job of hiding it. He was always Mr. Long, not Gillis, to me, even now some 34 years after his death. I’ll write more about Mr. Long another time. He’s not as well-remembered as his second cousins Huey and Earl or third cousin Russell but he deserves to be according to this biased observer.

Cathy ran for, and won, her husband’s seat in Congress after his death but served only one term. It’s a pity; she was even more liberal than Mr. Long. She was also a major character with a distinctive birdlike voice that I can almost hear as I write this.

Cathy was a pistol: the worst driver I’ve ever backseat driven with, but she loved helping people. To this day, I have a Congressional trunk she gave me that we use as a coffee table. Dr. A used to joke that Gillis Long’s remains were inside. I’m not the only one with a dark sense of humor in the family.

Catherine Small Long was a kind, caring, and compassionate woman who will be missed by everyone whose life she touched. My condolences to her children, George and Janis, and the rest of her family.

Here’s a picture of Gillis and Cathy Long around the time I met them:

I sat down to write a nostalgic food-centric column and ended up explaining my tangled family tree as well as various Louisiana tributaries. So, it goes. I never hide the fact that I was a widower at a young age, but I only tell people when asked how I came to the Gret Stet of Louisiana from California by way of Washington D.C. It’s a long and painful story but I’m fortunate to have married well twice.

I still miss my mother. She could dance on my last nerve, but I miss our long conversations and teasing her about her crazy dog Brutus. I learned how to listen from her and how to schmooze from my father.

Mothers are powerful. They have the ability to make you revert to childhood. I know that many of your mothers get on your nerves. It’s what they do. Shrug it off and remember that they won’t always be with you.

Around the holidays is when I miss my mom and Dr. A misses her charming, beautiful, and eccentric mother, Eileen. Mother-in-law #2, however, was not a good cook and expected us to consume the radishes she’d lovingly cut. I hate radishes but her company was the best.

Happy Thanksgiving.

The last word goes to Fairport Convention with the gorgeous Richard Thompson song that gave this column its title:

Here’s another one from the songwriter. It’s a day for gluttony, after all:

Ground Game

This phrase became a mantra for me over the course of this election year, a sentiment I shared in conversation and on social media. It was first crafted in response to a tweeter who was kvetching about not having a candidate that they loved.

To me, it also strikes at the heart of the organizing work that was accomplished in Louisiana in this 2019 election cycle for the governor’s race.

Two years ago, I met with Gov. Edwards to pitch to him my belief that early and robust field efforts would be required for his re-election bid given two significant shifts in the landscape since his 2015 victory:

1) He was now the incumbent, no longer the underdog candidate, a known quantity. Actions he had taken in office as governor that had disappointed those on left and angered those on the right were going to be used against him. It would be helpful for us to expand our voting base, and

2) There has been a change in the mood of the country, an increased polarization, and the Republicans were not going to sit back without a challenge. As he himself said, he had a big target on his back. I had always said if I could get John Bel in a room with someone, he’d win their vote, but he was not going to be able to speak to each voter himself. Instead, he needed teams of regional organizers who could engage in direct voter contact and to use his sizable volunteer base as proxies to help him connect on the ground, get his message out, build enthusiasm, and alert low-propensity voters that the election was on the horizon. 

From my experience with national and statewide races, I knew that this kind of machine would take time to build. Having the number of trained staff and volunteers necessary to canvass, call, and text voters in sufficient numbers to secure victory wouldn’t magically happen overnight. I also knew that modern field campaigns that use data for targeting and accountability- and those that allow sufficient time to build capacity- can shift elections by about five percentage points. That’s significant when the polls are tight, or when you’re trying to move the needle a few percentage points to get over the requisite 50% vote threshold that allows a candidate to win outright in a jungle primary.

A sign encouraging people to vote outside of Kermit Ruffins’ Mother-in-Law Lounge in the Treme neighborhood of New Orleans. Morgan Clevenger, President of the Fairgrounds Triangle Neighborhood Association, raised money to print signs that their organization could post throughout their community. Photo credit: Morgan Clevenger.

In January of 2019, I set about to formalize the plan that I’d been knocking around in my head since that meeting, to calculate our Win Number and how we would reach it and to strategize how we could bring on field staff in an intentional way (that is, a staff that was team-oriented and diverse based on geography, ethnicity and gender). Importantly, we also needed to identify the existing coalitions we had in our corner that could help us reach our goals.

While there was a level of field experience we’d want for regional leaders, we’d also want to include some younger, less experienced organizers who could be trained in their own community on recruiting and retaining volunteers, navigating our database, staying on message, and implementing best practices for modern campaigns. If we did that effectively, we would be able to leave behind some sort of infrastructure for the party and future candidates, even after the campaign closed up shop. As the most successful field efforts are integrated with communications, digital, creative, community outreach and political work, those elements were included in the masterplan as well. 

Traditionally, this sort of supportive field effort for a statewide race would be housed in a coordinated campaign through the state party. Knowing that both Louisiana Democratic Party Chair Karen Carter Peterson and Executive Director Stephen Handwerk are proponents of mobilization through direct voter contact, I felt confident we would be on the same page. And indeed, we were all fired up and ready to go. However, by the spring of 2019, it became clear that, for a variety of reasons, the program I designed would not be funded. So, by definition, this story is not about me.

This story, the story that must be told about 2019, is how community groups and grassroots leaders stepped up to fill in for that missing piece of the puzzle.

This is about a few of the many folks who made a tremendous impact on the results of the Louisiana governor’s race, ensuring John Bel Edwards will serve a second term in office.

Volunteers for Mayor LaToya Cantrell’s Action New Orleans preparing to knock on doors in advance of the 2019 Louisiana runoff election. Source: Action New Orleans

ACTION NEW ORLEANS

Action New Orleans is the 527 political organization born out of LaToya Cantrell’s successful campaign for mayor of New Orleans. This year, because Mayor Cantrell had propositions on the ballot, her team had geared up to support those issues. However, the mayor stepped up to support Gov. Edwards’ re-election in a big way and then redoubled her efforts for the runoff, with an intended goal of increasing turnout in the city by 30%.

Republican candidate Eddie Rispone had broadcast his intention to rain political fire on New Orleans, so it was only natural that the crew supporting the mayor’s initiatives wanted to do all they could to stop that from coming to pass. Edwards was also a solid partner for Cantrell on her Fair Share plan, and unlike Rispone, he recognized that the city is an economic driver for the state.

Action New Orleans’ Executive Director Maggie Carroll and Deputy Executive Director Sam Barton set about strategizing how to increase voter turnout in New Orleans in the runoff, serving as a central contact for local groups like the Power Coalition, the National Urban League, and Together Louisiana so they could avoid duplicating efforts. They also adopted Step Up Louisiana’s plan to focus on a different city council district for each day of Early Voting.

For their own initiatives, they started earlier this year with a group of thirty fellows, whose only compensation would be political experience. Because of their early investment in training them on fieldwork and messaging, they were able to ramp up relatively quickly for the runoff election by growing their organizing army to 250 fellows and volunteers, with their initial recruits acting as trainers for the newcomers.

Further, because of their own fundraising efforts, they were able to hire four full-time experienced field organizers, and eventually pay 100 college fellows for their work, thus opening up the opportunity for young people who might not have otherwise been able to have access to that campaign experience.

By building this capacity in a smart, well-planned way, they were able to speak to voters one-on-one by knocking on more than 70,000 doors, making more than 50,000 contacts by phone calls, and sending approximately 350,000 text messages.

In addition to direct voter contact through field, Action New Orleans also integrated some community outreach efforts through the city’s churches, campuses, senior centers, and greek organizations. They hosted several visibility events to make sure the public was aware of upcoming election dates and what was at stake, including a large music festival with donated entertainment from some of New Orleans’ most popular musicians. And there was a vibrant media movement to make sure New Orleans voters were getting the message that it was time to go vote in every format available. Facebook ads alone were seen 1.2 million times.

On Election Day, they were able to mount a quick response effort so that by monitoring where voting was happening (and not happening) across the city, they could shift resources to where backup support was needed. Every goal they set for themselves they were able to pass.

Action New Orleans notes that the city’s 90% vote for Gov. Edwards – a margin of nearly 101,000 votes – helped give him his 40,000-vote margin.

Ashley Shelton, Will Harrell, and Raegan Carter at a Power Coalition meeting. Photo credit: Lynda Woolard

THE POWER COALITION

Grit and power are the two words Ashley Shelton, Executive Director of the Power Coalition for Equity and Justice, attaches to the team of people who work alongside her. She is quick to point out that it was the organizers, the boots on the ground, who deserve the credit for boosting voter turnout.

The Power Coalition has field offices in Shreveport, Alexandria, Lafayette, Baton Rouge, New Orleans, Houma, and Jefferson Parish/West Bank.

This year, more than $80 million was spent on a governor’s race. Yet, for a fraction of that, Shelton’s coalition continued on its path to building a permanent infrastructure of black-led organizations that work at scale to turn out the best candidate for the issues that matter to their communities.

Their intentional focus is on low-propensity voters in neighborhoods who often feel forgotten.

“We knock on doors, and it’s like Christmas. People tell us no one has knocked on my door before,” Shelton tells me, illuminating just how starved for engagement many of these voters are. This busts the myth that voters don’t turn out simply because of apathy.

People do care about healthcare, better jobs, higher wages, and equal pay, Shelton explains. She is guided by the belief that when you can show someone how their voice can make a difference, they show up.

The Power Coalition’s modus operandi is to connect with voters and solve their real problems in real time, whether it’s paying fines or procuring proper IDs. Continuous engagement for them means not just electing candidates, but, importantly, also holding elected officials accountable on the issues that are meaningful to their base. 

According to a press release distributed by the group’s Communications Director Peter Robins-Brown, in this election year, member organizations made 1.1 million attempted voter contacts, with the approximate split being 325,000 door knocks, 310,000 phone calls, and 510,000 texts.

While a significant portion of the coalition’s work was concentrated in black neighborhoods, they also connected with communities that are often overlooked. VAYLA’s (the Vietnamese American Young Leaders Association) field work included Vietnamese communities in New Orleans East, and Asian American and Pacific Islanders statewide.

The Workers’ Center for Racial Justice connected with Spanish language voters in Kenner. Jericho Road worked with students at Xavier University, reaching out to college-aged voters who, by definition, don’t have a history of voting.

While Democratic candidates can point to black women as their most reliable voting block, Women with a Vision focused their integrated voter engagement program on black women, specifically those who are registered to vote but do not tend to show up at the polls, in a hyper-targeted set of New Orleans districts.

The Power Coalition also served as a convener for other groups looking to do this community work. They hosted statewide organizational calls once a week for churches and faith groups, exploring ways they could activate their congregations. They worked with fraternities and sororities across Louisiana to strategize how they could be most effective this year. When nonprofits who were doing non-partisan voter outreach needed printed materials, the Power Coalition was there to make sure they had ballots, flyers, and push cards. They helped groups write their press releases, and hosted regional community forums.

Unlike the old guard political machines, the Power Coalition has invested heavily in technology and data, so that they can have a smart, modern, targeted strategy that provides them with feedback on where they are making the most advances.

Their goal has always been slow, sustainable growth, and Ashley Shelton identifies a 10% voter increase in the primary that she feels they contributed to, but believes that was offset by low-propensity conservative voters who may have been motivated to vote by Trump. Therefore, they knew they needed to accelerate their efforts for the runoff.

In addition to their year-long non-partisan (c)(3) canvassing efforts in all the cities in which they work, they also activated their (c)(4) political arm and supported its endorsement of John Bel Edwards through canvassing in Caddo, Orleans, and East Baton Rouge. Additionally, they ran radio ads on urban radio stations in all of the state’s major media markets.

For those who are looking for hope for the future of Louisiana, this is where it lives.

There is talk of breaking the political machine, of guarding against supermajorities and oppressive gerrymandering, and of making sure no seat goes unchallenged in future elections. With all these great organizers awakening the political passions of voters, the next step is leadership development and building the bench for future generations of progressive candidates.

Members of VOTE outside New Orleans City Hall celebrating reinstatement of their rights to vote as Act 636 took effect on March 1, 2019. Photo credit: Lynda Woolard.

VOICE OF THE EXPERIENCED (VOTE)

If you’re unfamiliar with Voice of the Experience (better known as VOTE), they work with formerly incarcerated people (FIP), helping them with re-entry and re-enfranchisement. Their organization spent the early part of 2019 reaching out to the tens of thousands of Louisianians on parole and probation who were newly eligible to register to vote as of March 1st, because of bipartisan legislation passed last year and signed into law by Gov. Edwards as Act 636.

As Election Day approached, they shifted their focus from registration to voter turnout, making phone calls to voters, text blasting, and knocking doors. Like the Power Coalition, their targets were low-propensity voters in areas where there were competitive state house races, and their goal was face-to-face conversations, letting people know why this election should matter to them and explaining how the policies the current governor’s administration supports are advantageous to their communities.

They underscored that the results of this election cycle would be a game-changer for the next twenty years in regards to protecting the progress they had already made, and guarding against unfair redistricting practices after next year’s decennial Census. VOTE chapters are located in places that are feeders for the correctional system: New Orleans, Baton Rouge, Lafayette, and Shreveport.

Part of their strategy was to have their 30,000 members who live in the correctional system contact their friends and family and ask them to “vote for those who are not enfranchised.” They knew that criminal justice reform was important to their constituencies because it directly impacted them, but they also realized that the other issues on the ballot – healthcare, SNAP, teacher pay raises – affected those who were related to the people “on the inside.”

VOTE worked closely with the Power Coalition, and jointly spent close to a million dollars of their own money towards these voter turnout efforts.

When I ask Norris Henderson, Founder and Executive Director of VOTE, how their strategy changed for the runoff, he explains that they simply doubled down on their efforts, moving more people onto the streets in the parts of the state where they have a physical presence. They personally asked those voters who do not turnout for every election to make their voices heard.

After the election, Henderson says it is important to let those people know how much he personally appreciates them for voting.

In addition to their members reaching voters where they are, in person, shaking hands, Henderson leveraged his relationship with musician John Legend, which is a consequence of their advocacy for criminal justice reform, to produce a robocall that made an appeal to targeted voters to get out to protect the reforms that had been made. Legend also sent a tweet endorsing John Bel Edwards the day before the General Election.

Listen to John Legend’s robocall on behalf of Gov. John Bel Edwards.
A Step Up Louisiana canvasser making one of their 50,000 door knocks during this year’s election. Photo credit: Ben Zucker.

STEP UP LOUISIANA

Step Up Louisiana is a democratic (small d), membership-based organization with a focus on economic and education justice. The brain child of Maria Harmon and Benjamin Zucker, Step Up is a member organization of the Power Coalition.

It was founded in New Orleans in 2017, with a game plan that included as one of its core goals to impact the 2019 elections. To that end, this year they hosted candidate forums for down ballot races, and employed twenty paid canvassers from September through November 16th.

Their contributions to the Power Coalition’s field totals were over 50,000 doors knocked. Their members also volunteered for phone banks and text banks, and helped organize busses for Early Voting. For the second year in a row, they partnered with Dillard University’s service outreach program through legendary organizer Ronnie Moore of Catholic Charities, and had the entire freshman class on the doors all over the Gentilly neighborhood of New Orleans.

Last year, Maria returned to Baton Rouge, where she had previously organized for a decade, to open up their second office. Between their New Orleans and Baton Rouge activities, Step Up was able to deploy 90 people on the streets to canvass voters on Election Day alone.

Ben called the results of the primary a Wake Up Call, and realized they had to ramp up their efforts in the runoff. Step Up saw the same data the rest of us did. While they deal in the “(c)(3)” world of nonprofits, a large percentage of voters in the areas where they organize will pull the lever for candidates who support the issues they advocate on year round, namely raising the minimum wage, and supporting public education.

Ben said Step Up Louisiana had one imperative, “Just get everybody out to vote.”

TOGETHER LOUISIANA

Faith-based organizations were mentioned by every single person I spoke to for this piece, with pastors and ministers being repeatedly credited with doing heavy lifting for voter turnout. I was eager to speak with Broderick Baggert of Together Louisiana because, in addition to being a faith-based coalition that comes from a theological perspective of caring for the least of these, they utilized targeting based on data from the Secretary of State for their voter engagement plan.

The focus of their work ended up being in Shreveport, Baton Rouge, New Orleans, Alexandria, and a few other places that had the capacity, like Pointe Coupee and Lake Providence.

Baggert described the runoff efforts as trying to aim a firehose of energy, trying to direct work that should have started nine months before Election Day. However, he says, “It was one of those rare moments that the civic sector roared to life.”

1,200 people from faith-based organizations, civic institutions, and HBCUs across the state made the commitment to organize precincts in mostly low-income, African American communities, many of which carry a historical legacy of violence and oppression. Their targets were voters who voted in the last presidential election, but not in the recent gubernatorial primary. Each volunteer would be responsible for thirty voters, with a goal of five contacts per voter before the election.

To incentivize the volunteers, they created a scoring system for various forms of contact. Any attempt at contact, like a text, would get you a point. A phone conversation gained two points, and a face-to-face, in person conversation would net you five points. The points were just for bragging rights, but helped underscore the importance of the various methods of direct voter contact.

“If voting is an abstraction for someone, you can make it real by connecting a real person to it,” Baggert explained.

While Together Louisiana is a non-partisan group that saw an urgent need to act in whatever way they could, he personally credits John Bel Edwards with doing “one helluva job tactically.”

After Election Day, Baggert created this map, showing what he calls a “vote bomb in the cities,” which he believes confirms the success of the targeted, organized actions from all the coalitions that focused on voter turnout in those areas.

Some members of the Governor’s staff took annual leave to assist with everything from constituency outreach to texting voters. Photo credit: Lynda Woolard.

MEMBERS OF THE EDWARDS ADMINISTRATION

Many members of the governor’s administration took their annual leave to do some grassroots work on behalf of the campaign.

Bruce Parker, Director of Community Programs, and Tina Vanichchagorn, the Governor’s Executive Counsel, used some of their annual leave to visit with progressive and pro-choice women across the state. Parker additionally put in some work with LGBTQ groups in Shreveport, Baton Rouge and New Orleans, as well as HIV/AIDS advocates in Shreveport and Lafayette.

Their message was simple: The cavalry is not coming; you’re the cavalry. They met with small groups and encouraged them to take ownership of the campaign and initiate person-to-person conversations amongst their own network of contacts.

Having been included in one of these meetings coordinated by Charmaine Caccioppi, Chair of the Louisiana Women’s Policy and Research Commission, I saw how it played out. Young, white progressive women had unofficially surveyed their friends and discovered that many of them had sat out the primary, believing the results wouldn’t impact them personally. Once the conversation turned to what was really at stake for their generation, a fire was lit to find creative and personal ways to engage nonvoters. Inviting friends over for wine and cheese and talking John Bel became an organizational tactic.

Parker says he had several text chains operating throughout the runoff, concentrating on regional and constituency activities to turn out pockets of voters. Talking points and news reports were passed along by text to group leaders to be shared widely. And whenever he was asked for graphics and memes from the campaign to share on social media, Parker would reply, “Don’t wait for the campaign.”

Cacciopicci’s daughter Candice had brought her friend Marcelle Beaulieu along to the meeting I attended. That directive was all the latter needed to launch You Can Ring My Bel on Instagram, which became an overnight sensation (and which is covered in detail later on).

Bambi Polotzola had deep connections in the disabilities advocacy community before taking on the role as the Executive Director of the Governor’s Office of Disability Affairs. Like other staff from the administration, she took annual leave to coordinate efforts with other Disability Advocates for John Bel Edwards through their Facebook group.

Their members shared their stories at Medicaid meetings and on social media. They made calls and sent texts on behalf of the governor’s campaign, because they have seen first hand the effect Gov. Edwards’ policies has had on their families in the last four years. The reprieve from having to go before the legislature every year to ask for Medicaid waivers alone has been a saving grace for many of those with young children who have a disability.

Polotzola also worked with women’s groups in her home parish of St. Landry through sororities, local members of the National Association of University Women, and Democratic women’s organizations that implemented a program for volunteers to adopt a precinct on Election Day. Additionally, she worked within the campaign structure, prioritizing canvasses and phone banks in her parish on the six Saturdays of voting for both the primary and the runoff.

Katina Semien is the Executive Director of the Louisiana Children’s Trust Fund and the South Central Regional Director of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc. She saw sororities and fraternities working in silos on their individual efforts on voter turnout and launched a project dubbed “The Collective” to bring African American-led organizations together for a more concerted plan.

The initial connections were through the Divine Nine, the nine historically Black Greek letter organizations: Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Kappa Alpha Psi Fraternity, Omega Psi Phi Fraternity, Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Phi Beta Sigma Fraternity, Zeta Phi Beta Sorority, Sigma Gamma Rho Sorority, and Iota Phi Theta Fraternity. The circle widened to include The Links Inc., 100 Black Men, 100 Black Women, Jack and Jill of America, Top Ladies of Distinction, and faith-based leaders from the National Baptist Convention and the African Methodist Episcopal Church.

Semien credits the NAACP as instrumental in bringing folks on board. They strategized with the Power Coalition and focused their efforts on transporting voters in nursing homes to Early Voting on weekdays and Souls to the Polls efforts on Saturdays. They encouraged members to “Drive Five” and find five voters who needed rides to the polls. “The Collective” spoke to voters via canvassing and phone calls. They encouraged member engagement through conference calls.

The first day of Early Voting happened to fall during Homecoming Weekend for Southern and Grambling, so they pitched tents among the tailgates and shuttled voters to the polls. The stated mission of The Collective was to come together quickly for this year’s initiative, but the plan is to continue to work together beyond this election.

“Our organizations have more than a century of Civil Rights leadership from people like Martin Luther King, Jr., Coretta Scott King, and Rosa Parks,” Semien says, “and our members today are on the front lines keeping their spirit alive by fighting for the right to vote.”

Chaunda Mitchell, Executive Director for the Governor’s Office of Diversity and Inclusion, spent her free time during the runoff working with the state-recognized tribes of Louisiana Native Americans. The leadership she helped organize represented communities along the coast in Terrebonne and Lafourche parishes.

They were interested in impressing upon their own members how important voting is, in general. However, they also wanted to highlight the governor’s recognition of their tribes through proclamations establishing Indiginous People’s Day and Native American Heritage Month in Louisiana. They used their own lists to reach out to their voting block and share information about the governor’s support for the indigenous people of our state.

YOU CAN RING MY BEL

Marcelle Beaulieu saw the percent turnout in New Orleans the day after the primary, and knew she needed to get involved. She didn’t feel like anyone had spoken to her demographic. Her targets were millennial voters and pro-choice women who were still angry over the governor signing the abortion bill after legislative session. She wanted to speak to them in a way that validated their views, yet didn’t conflict with the messaging coming from the governor.

The post-primary meeting she attended was seen as a green light to launch the campaign. Beaulieu was aware that Instagram was the primary social media platform for younger voters, so she built @YouCanRingMyBel in that format (although there is also a Facebook page and a website).

Her recurring image of Christopher Walken was borrowed from the popular Saturday Night Live sketch where he relentlessly demands: More Cowbell. She transformed that to #MoreJohnBel. The tagline deemed most appropriate to reach an ambivalent voting block was: We don’t love him, but we need him.

While sharing this branded meme, Beaulieu slipped in facts about John Bel Edwards’ record as governor and warnings about what Eddie Rispone was admitting he would do if elected. She was careful in how she drafted her message, so that, while it was designed as a progressive leaning account, it was also a friendly space for moderate voters.

Beaulieu thought getting the message out through this vehicle was particularly important, because most of the people she knows don’t watch TV so were not seeing the ads running there.

Feedback was immediate and wildly positive. Proof that she stayed on message was that many of the folks on the governor’s team would share her posts on their personal accounts. Post shares exploded, in general, with New Orleans restaurants and musicians boosting their reach. In the final week of the election, You Can Ring My Bel reached 13,000 accounts and made over 90,000 impressions on Instagram alone.

Like the efforts of the community groups who focus on outreach, Beaulieu saw a need for her demographic of voters to become more engaged. Her belief is that humor is an important tool in achieving that goal.

“Being able to make someone laugh is instrumental in keeping them engaged as they are processing information that might be overwhelming or despairing,” Beaulieu tells me. She wants to make sure that people know there is “no shame in not knowing the basics” about our political system, and moving forward, she wants to use the account to continue to empower voters with information about legislation and elections.

GumboPAC ran ads on television and social media encouraging people to vote for Gov. John Bel Edwards

GUMBO PAC

While I’m not including data from Gumbo PAC in this report, if digital efforts are being mentioned at all, a shout-out must be given to Trey Ourso of Gumbo PAC, who ran sustained digital efforts in support of John Bel Edwards for over five years. Ourso’s extraordinary, nationally-acclaimed work will be featured in an upcoming Bayou Brief article that publisher Lamar White, Jr. is assembling, which specifically focuses on how Edwards and his supporters won the messaging war.

Organizer Alvin Anthony and his volunteers with Victory for Louisiana phonebanking in Baton Rouge for John Bel Edwards’ reelection. Photo credit: Kaleb Harmon.

VICTORY FOR LOUISIANA

Voter outreach and visibility was more of Team JBE’s style. They had, for example, a long-standing parade krewe for festivals run by Lynda Guidry and a tailgating squad for this fall’s football games. Nevertheless, there were some earnest field efforts that took place, mostly through Victory for Louisiana, the coordinated campaign between John Bel for Louisiana and the Louisiana Democratic Party.

From winter through late summer, all organizing was being done in Baton Rouge. In the final three months, six regional offices and a remote phone banking operation were added. Supporters had the opportunity to contribute by making phone calls every day but Sunday and canvassing on any Saturday when voting was taking place.

Democratic Parish Executive Committees (DPECs), Democratic groups, women’s groups, and College Democrats of Louisiana, as well as Louisiana High School Democrats, pitched in to open satellite offices, produce their own ballots and radio ads, and host voter outreach efforts on their own initiative.

Members of Team JBE at the Breaux Bridge Crawfish Festival . Photo source: Lynda Guidry.

Added up, the volunteers and various organizations that worked directly with the governor’s campaign this year made a total of voter contact attempts leading up to the primary in these rounded numbers: 4,200 door knocks, 137,000 phone calls, and 500,000 texts. We filled in some of the gaps in our field program with paid firms whose business model allows them to spin up mobilization efforts rapidly.

Their paid work boosted pre-primary contact attempts by: 231,000 door knocks, 192,000 phone calls (during Fridays and Saturdays of voting only), and an additional 500,000 texts. The point of data-driven, goal oriented, measurable field efforts became clear when we got to the runoff.

For candidates, collecting data matters, because if you go into a runoff (or plan to run for re-election or another office in the future), it’s a strategic imperative to know who your supporters are from the first round of voting. That saves you time and money in the long run. 

As I wrote my mobilization plan back in January, based on past gubernatorial elections, I was predicting a 42% voter turnout for the primary. Most of the modeling experts expected a lower turnout number than that. As it happened, we all undershot. The actual percent of registered voters who voted on October 12th, 2019 was 46%. The reason this number matters for a field program is that you are attempting to calculate just how many conversations with voters you need to have to identify enough supporters leading up to election day. Ideally, you would already know by the time voting starts that you have enough voters who support you so that all you need to do is get those people to the polls. In campaign parlance, if you’re still trying to persuade voters to vote for you in the last four days of an election, you’re doing it wrong.

At any rate, I had assumed we’d need to find just over 645,000 voters during the primary. In reality, we would have needed closer to 672,000. Still, it would have been beneficial to have had many more conversations with voters over the course of the year, as turnout increased to 51% in the General Election and the final number of votes John Bel Edwards needed to win exceeded 750,000. Yet we went into the final turn with only 100,000 identified supporters from the campaign’s combined voter contacts, both volunteer and paid, throughout 2019. It takes a lot of attempts to actually reach a voter. That’s why this process is so time consuming and laborious.

As I mentioned, I realized my big mobilization plan would not be funded and that instead we’d end up farming out much of our field work to paid firms as we got closer to Election Day. I was fortunate, then, to have the opportunity to switch my role to do some constituency outreach work directly for the governor’s campaign, reporting directly to campaign manager, Richard Carbo. I was happy to have a way to continue to contribute to the cause. That said, once we found ourselves in a runoff with Eddie Rispone- with polls tightening, our strategies and my role shifted once again.

An integrated field effort I could get excited about was embraced when Scott Arceneaux joined the team in mid-October. I was grateful when he and Carbo approached me about running the Early Vote program. Arceneaux, rightly, pointed out that with thirty days left in the campaign we couldn’t exactly build our own canvassing apparatus.

“My Governor is out here phone banking again!!! #organizerfeels #teamjbe” – @lyndawoolard. Photo credit: Jayce Genco

While the gold standard of direct voter contact is a face-to-face conversation through canvassing, statistically speaking, the less habitual voting is for a person, the more reminders to vote they’ll require. For non-chronic voters, the number of “touches” they need ranges from four to ten across a variety of formats.

So, Arceneaux’s premise was that we could create a program that would prime our voters for the knocks on the door they were receiving from those who were already doing turnout work. His idea was to layer a communications effort that included a digital campaign, direct mail, robocalls, paid live calls, and texting. Additionally, a big push on radio made sure that voters were alerted to when the election was happening.

Arceneaux perceives a rare benefit to the Louisiana jungle primary system is that when you advance to the General Election, you essentially get a do-over. You can look at your pool of voters and see who they are.

“It’s very difficult in a short period of time to get someone to do something they have no habit of doing. Therefore, we identified folks with an Early Voting history and found our targets there. Then it just became a numbers game,” Arceneaux explains.

Could we identify enough of our voters? And did we have sufficient time and resources to reach them? Given that our most reliable voters are black Democratic voters, that’s where our first contacts started. But as results were coming in during the second round of Early Voting, data suggested we would need to expand our conversations to include young, white Democratic voters as well. While it was too late to adjust our direct mail and digital buys, we had much more flexibility with our paid phones and volunteer texting programs. 

A critical contributor in the implementation of this plan was the coordinated campaign’s Data Director, Calahan Riley. Riley was a whiz with finding our voters in the database and was also committed to updating our data as quickly as possible for each day of Early Voting. This gave us incredible agility as we worked this program.

The centerpiece of direct voter contact for the runoff was the texting program, in which we sent almost two million texts in the final two weeks of the campaign. Such was the efficiency of the work we were doing with countless volunteers on the front end and a small group of dedicated volunteers responding to texts on the back end, that with a few hours left to vote on Election Day, Riley informed us that we were out of numbers to text. 

In that last month, our volunteers and Democratic organizations upped the number of call attempts they made to 76,000 and door knocks to 3,500. We boosted those numbers with paid live phone calls on the last two Fridays and Saturdays of the election to add an additional 262,000 call attempts. Again, what made this program effective is that it was considered a supplement to the work of the community groups on the ground. In turn, the foundation those groups had been laying for two years or more allowed them the capacity to rapidly escalate their efforts in the final weeks of the General Election.

As they do for each election, the Louisiana Democratic Party hosted a voter protection unit and operated the perennial 225-255-3401 voter protection hotline during each day of voting. This year, this effort received support from Stacey Abrams’ group, Fair Fight.

A few Democratic state parties and presidential candidates (past and present) used their networks to recruit volunteers to phone bank and text bank in the runoff. Legislative candidate volunteers reported that they reminded people to support John Bel, too, when they spoke to voters. Labor and teachers’ unions organized their members. The NAACP paid for Uber to give any voter a ride to the polls. Untold numbers of neighborhood groups raised money to print and post signs, pass out flyers with voting information, and cart their neighbors to vote.

The story of the 2019 election is one of a full team effort by, on one side of the political wall, the campaign and the party, and on the other side, all the progressive and community groups who knew their members would be impacted by the results.

A homemade yard sign promoting the reelection of Gov. John Bel Edwards on Election Day in Uptown New Orleans. Photo credit: Nick Albares

CODA

Right now, all we have are numbers of votes and the places where those votes were cast. We’ll understand more about how all this played out when we have individual voter data from the Secretary of State later this year.

Nationally, the narrative of this election shifted from being about a pro-life, moderate Democrat who the left was hesitant to get behind, to being about continuing Democratic momentum on the heels of victories in Kentucky and Virginia. For most of the folks who organize in Louisiana, though, there was no such swing of investment.

The import of this election was always about protecting healthcare for 450,000 Louisianians, securing harm reduction for our most vulnerable communities, and providing a shot at fairer congressional and legislative districts after the 2020 census.

Still, this story of who showed up to turn out voters illustrates the vast patchwork of efforts that had to come together to keep a Democratic governor in office in the Deep South. It was no small feat, and clearly required an extraordinary amount of energy and resources. This is significant because many of these groups are building permanent infrastructures and training future leaders.

MoVE (the Millennial Voter Engagement Project) partnered with the Urban League on their nonpartisan Wake Up Geaux Vote initiative. Using organizers from 7 college campuses – LSU, Southern, SUNO, Dillard, Tulane, Loyola, & Xavier. They focused on pushing students to vote during Early Voting. Photo credit: Noa Elliott.

As a state, we’ve proven that, with the right candidate or cause, we have the ability to come together and accomplish what, at first, might seem out of reach. Most of the people I spoke with intend to continue the work they did in 2019 and build on it. Their sustained efforts deserve to be amplified and funded.

If you are reading this and wondering how you can continue in this moment to work to support progressive issues in Louisiana, these groups and individuals are really good places to start. 

I was asked earlier this year about a municipal race where a candidate won using a strong field program that only resulted in about 30% turnout of the whole electorate. The question was, “If field was so successful, why didn’t more people turn out to vote?”

It would be a misconception that low turnout in general is a failure of field.

“Getting out the vote” does not require you to get out all voters. It just requires you to motivate enough of your own supporters to get to the polls. That’s the goal of these efforts overall: To increase participation and engagement among those who share our values, the very most basic of which state that everyone deserves a living wage, access to healthcare, and an opportunity for a quality education.

Not for the first or last time, I’ll say, I am firmly on Team #FieldWins. Democratic hopefuls should be looking at this year’s election through this lens and plan to integrate these kind of direct voter contact methods with every other element of their campaign plan. And we should all be supporting these coalitions and community groups who do the year round work of voter engagement, even if it doesn’t center on Democratic candidates.

Because while candidates do need to focus their turnout efforts on their own voters, the simple fact is that higher turnout tends to favor Democrats.

More importantly, elections with more voters favor a better democracy.

To every voter, volunteer, intern, staff member, and candidate who showed up this year, take a bow. You own a piece of this historic accomplishment. Thank you for stepping up.   

Featured image: Mayor LaToya Cantrell with volunteers and fellows for Action New Orleans get hyped to canvass on Election Day for Gov. John Bel Edwards and the #BallotofYes. Photo credit: Action New Orleans

Louisiana’s Van Gogh: The Illuminating Works of James Michalopoulos

Featured image: “Garden Quake” by James Michalopoulos. Photo credit: Cayman Clevenger

Last month, Cayman Clevenger, our Arts & Culture Editor, traveled up to Shreveport to cover the opening of James Michalopoulos’ solo exhibition “Heart of the Matter: The Celebration of the Essential in Everyday Life,” at the beautiful R.W. Norton Museum on Creswell Ave in the heart of Shreveport. This exhibition, which is free and open to the public, runs through Dec. 15, with an Ask the Artist scheduled for Dec. 1, 2019. 

Photo credit: Cayman Clevenger.

George Rodrigue is often referred to as Louisiana’s Henri Rousseau. If that is the case, James Michalopoulos must be Louisiana’s Vincent van Gogh, not just because his technique is similar. Michalopoulos’ work conjures emotion, movement, and the ethereal in the quotidian: Vibrant flowers, homes and buildings that waltz across the canvas, and vignettes of everyday life that are transformed into something profound.

To say he is having a moment would be to misapprehend what he has been doing for nearly four decades: Sanctifying what most of us in Louisiana take for granted.

James Michalopoulos was born in Pennsylvania in 1951. His father was an architect whose modernist buildings now define downtown Pittsburg. His uncle, William Baziotes, was a renowned surrealist painter whose works now hang on the walls of the Guggenheim and the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Art Institute in Chicago.

In 1981, Michalopoulos was drawn to New Orleans, enchanted by, in his words, “the duality of beauty and decay.” The architecture of the city became his muse, he often says.

James Michalopoulos with “Simple Sweet.” Photo credit: Cayman Clevenger.

On the night of his solo opening at the R.W. Norton Museum of Art in Shreveport, Michalopoulos wore a blue and black tuxedo and a blue checkered shirt. Usually when he walks into a room, you know he must be an artist. He’s typically dressed in bright poppy colors that look like they came directly from his color palate.

As he entered the R.W. Norton, the museum was filled with people admiring the largest exhibition of the artist’s paintings to ever be displayed in the ArkLaTex. Some patrons gasped- literally- when first encountering his work. Others patiently waited to tell him how his art had touched their lives. A couple who had purchased one of Michalopolous’ very first works on a weekend trip to the French Quarter nearly forty years ago told him how much they continue to cherish it. He remembered the painting; it was of a former girlfriend, he said.  

Perhaps the most well-known of his works are the six (and counting) posters he has painted over the years for the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival: Dr. John, Louis Armstrong, Mahalia Jackson, Fats Domino, Allen Toussaint, and Aaron Neville. No one else has had the honor of painting as many of the works selected as the artistic centerpiece of Jazz Fest.

But there aren’t any paintings of well-known musicians on display in Shreveport.

The exhibition, titled “Heart of the Matter: The Celebration of the Essential in Everyday Life,” features works that span Michalopoulos’ career and includes works from the artist’s personal collection, works currently available through the Michalopoulos Gallery, and works from private collections. It’s an excellent representation of the artist’s catalogue— with portraits, landscapes, architecturals, animals, sunflowers, and cityscapes. 

Color abounds, both in Michalopoulos’ work, and in the wall color chosen for the exhibition: a deep purple that contrasts well with the artist’s palate. The entrance to the exhibit is a hallway lined with his works, with an incredibly large painting at the end of the hallway that draws you in. Two large rooms jut off the hallway and give way to work after perfectly lit work, displayed to highlight the artist’s clever use of light and movement in his subjects. 

At center, “Chimera” 60×72 by James Michalopoulos. Photo credit: Cayman Clevenger.

Some works require you to look closely, inviting you so close to the piece that you can smell the pungent perfume of oil paint. Other scenes become more clear from across the room.

Michalopoulos’ thick impasto (layering of paint) creates a truly three-dimensional quality to his work, something even more apparent when looking at the variety and sheer quantity of his oeuvre.       

Perhaps more than anyone else, Michalopoulos has the unique ability and perspective to capture the way New Orleans feels in his paintings. His iconic crooked houses and buildings- and the way he applies movement to inanimate objects- is the very movement you can often feel as the ground moves below you when a large truck rumbles down the street. Or maybe it is a vision of the city many folks see when they partake in the libations that have made New Orleans famous. 

The focus of most of the critical acclaim of Michalopoulos’ work is his architectural subjects and their movement, how they “seem to dance and sway, the upper floors appearing to head in one direction and the ground floors in another,” writes Wayne Curtis in Garden & Gun. ”The inanimate seems animate, and it’s all at once enchanting and haunting.”

His use of light and color to capture, in particular, the Louisiana skies over the Crescent City, are perhaps the most overlooked, but critically important elements of his work. The shared experience of a New Orleans sky is what transfixes locals and tourists alike.

New Orleans may be Michalopoulos’ most prolific muse, but he also paints the French Countryside (where he lives half of the year), landscapes, sunflowers, and, this year, even donkeys.

He has had galleries in Lausanne, Switzerland, and Boston and has had exhibits in Geneva, London, and Berlin. Today, he has a beautiful gallery on Bienville in the French Quarter and another opened seasonally in Culny, France.

He also owns a sprawling, partially open air studio, complete with a metal workshop, on Elysian Fields in the Marigny. Before he bought the place, it had been a funeral home. Next to a massive collection of works, spanning his entire career, you’ll occasionally find a casket.

The private studio and workspace of Michalopoulos on Elysian Fields in New Orleans. Photo credit: Cayman Clevenger.

It is entirely appropriate that Michalopoulos paints the majority of his works in a former funeral home: what better reminder that life is to be cherished and celebrated, the central theme of Michalopoulos’s work and this exhibit. 

The choice of the R.W. Norton as the venue for this show was an obvious one for Michalopoulos.

“I had wandered around the grounds here for several hours and was blown away by how beautiful it was,” he explained. ”Then I found the art museum, which was free to the public, and I thought, ‘What an incredible place.’” 

The R.W. Norton is equally thrilled by the opportunity.

“Having an artist of Mr. Michalopoulos’s caliber at the museum is always a thrill for us, but it is especially exciting to introduce him to north Louisiana,” Emily Feazel, designer of exhibits and special events, told me. ”While we love showcasing artists from around the world, those from our own backyard and who can make as much of a splash as Mr. Michalopoulos does, are truly special. His heavy impasto and bold color combined with his portrayal of authentic Louisiana architecture, street corners, and musicians will have you humming a Dr. John song in no time.”

This is hardly Michalopoulos’ first solo exhibition. His works have been exhibited at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans, the Venice Biennale Art Festival, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Ohr-O’Keefe Museum of Art in Biloxi, Mississippi, the Amouse Bouche Winery in Napa, California, and the Morris Museum of Art in Augusta, Georgia, among others. 

Do yourself a favor: Take a trip to Shreveport before Dec. 15th and soak in this remarkable exhibition. If you want to meet Michalopoulos and hear him discuss his work- an experience I highly recommend- clear your calendar on Dec. 1st from 2PM to 3:30PM.

Photo credit: Cayman Clevenger.

The R.W. Norton Art Gallery’s permanent collection ranges from 2,400 BC Egyptian works through 21st Century contemporary artists living and working today such as Kadir Nelson and Andrea Kowch. From Rembrandt to Remington and Cassatt to Cole, the collection is solidly grounded in the great masters of the past as well as the up-and-coming talents of today.

With a prolific education department, community programing, and special exhibitions throughout the year, the Norton is a cultural beacon in the North Louisiana arts community and a true gem for the entire state. The Norton also boasts stunning gardens and grounds that make for an experience in of themselves.

Books for Your Gift List

A couple of months ago, a friend, with whom I share a meal and hours of inspiring conversation every two weeks or so, mentioned a book title which I found amusing: Men Are Not Cost Effective. Once I finished giggling, she explained it was written by June Stephenson, Ph.D, a research psychologist who authored a number of other books in the feminist genre.

“I believe it’s out of print now,” my friend said, “But if you can track down and acquire a copy of it, I promise you will find the author’s premise intriguing.”

She was right, and I’ll be sharing that concept with you in a future article. What I bring you today is a related source of amusement from the site where I found and purchased the aforementioned recommended book, because in addition to the standard categories one would expect at an on-line bookstore – history, reference, cookbooks, novels, etc. – AbeBooks.com also has the “Weird Book Room.”

Scrolling through the offerings, I came across the ideally-titled epic for readers in Louisiana:

And that’s when I knew I had to share excerpts from the listings with y’all, because, with the holiday season upon us, who doesn’t have one or two hard-to-buy-for family on friends on their gift list?

For your MAGA hat-wearing uncle, this book could get him started with the ideal hobby to pull him away from wall-to-wall FOX News watching.

Have a sister who is a yarn-hoarder? You know the one– she is always working on a baby blanket for some pregnant member of her church. Now here’s a way to help keep her hands occupied and her mind and spirit focused on “the reason for the season”, as this includes the complete set of patterns for knitting her own Nativity scene.

For your mother-in-law, here’s a book that helps her create tree ornaments and other biblically-themed gifts based on this book’s illustrations. It also does double-duty as a book of bedtime stories to share when the grandkids come to visit.

Staying with the religion theme, I always thought I was well-versed in the Bible, but apparently there are some areas of study and stories from its pages that I utterly missed. For example, there are these two titles.

It is possible I missed the IBS cure and God’s gift of ice cream because I was using the wrong Bible study guide. Maybe if I’d had this all along…

Moving on from our relationship with the Divine, the Weird Book Room also has lots of advice about interpersonal human relationships.

Do you have an abject fear of commitment? Then this book is for you.

And if, somehow, that doesn’t work and you do end up married, there’s this invaluable guide to dealing with your spouse and/or in-laws.

If all else fails, prepare your significant other for your departure from your life and hers.

Please don’t construe that as a recommendation for suicide. You don’t have to REALLY be dead. Follow the instructions from this valuable little volume instead.

From the time I learned to read, I’ve always held some reverence in my heart and mind for book authors – especially those whose writings captured my imagination or provided me with insights to self and others. And then there have been those authors whose characters and storylines engaged me so completely that I could hardly wait to complete the day’s duties of “real” life, and escape back into the pages of that book.

And say what you will of the problems attendant with our omnipresent interconnectedness through social media platforms on the worldwide web, it has, for me, provided many opportunities to thank and chat with those book authors who have enriched my internal life.

When I went back to college in 1999, I was at McNeese, majoring in criminal justice and minoring in Women’s Studies. In the late summer of 2000, a job offer meant moving from Lake Charles to Baton Rouge and transferring to LSU for January 2001. (Since LSU doesn’t have a criminal justice program of study, it also meant changing my major to General Studies, with minors in Sociology, Women’s Studies, English, and History, in order to expedite my graduation date.) I’ve retained my fascination with criminalistics in particular, and police work, in general.

Also in January, 2001, a former Baton Rouge Police officer published a book of short stories about policing, from the female perspective. I encountered the book in 2004, after it came out in paperback, and I read it not long before starting my coverage of Derrick Todd Lee’s murder trials in West and then East Baton Rouge parishes.

Perhaps it was the timing – bringing together my personal interests with my job duties – that made Anything You Say Can and Will Be Used Against You, by Laurie Lynn Drummond, resonate so deeply with me. Certainly, her narrative regarding a crime scene exuding an aura of violence long after the police tape is shredded by the wind and the blood washed away by rain was something I had felt myself. From the time victims’ bodies were found until their killer was convicted, when driving across the Atchafalaya on I-10, at Whiskey Bay I’d hear in my mind the outcry, and feel waves of fear and sadness.

Yet more than where I was personally and professionally when I first read the book, it’s the caliber (pun intended) of Drummond’s word choices and sentence structure, and the ways she takes us behind the gun and the badge to remind us that – inside the anonymity and authority of the uniform – are human beings, replete with doubts and fears like our own.

Telling her stories through the voices of five female cops, Drummond, who spent five years on patrol with BRPD, succinctly writes from her experience walking that balance beam between being tough enough to be “on the job” and looking at the physical, mental, emotional and psychological marks that leaves on those who protect and serve. In one story, she writes of getting home and touching “the constant, steady bruise on the hip bone where my gun caresses the skin a deeper purple day after day.” It the voice of the same officer that gives, “Just the facts: I killed a man. I shot him at 1:33 am. He died at 1:57 am. That’s when I couldn’t get a pulse, a heartbeat. That’s when the EMS boys got there and took over CPR. When they said, “Shit, sister. You fucking flatlined him.”

Drummond, who has taught creative writing at the University of Oregon, Eugene, and at St. Edwards University in Austin, TX, now teaches at LSU. You can find her book here, or here.

(Full discolsure: Laurie Lynn and I met in person this summer, after a mutual friend shared Drummond’s Facebook post regarding a rental. As I was looking to downsize my household following my husband’s death, she became my landlord. It’s a nicely growing friendship, too, since she’s been a fan of my work, as I have been of hers.)

At the start of this decade, I left radio for awhile, and took a contract with public television, covering education issues for LPB. I had to learn to shoot my own stories, and while I had help from LPB’s expert videographers at first, after a few months, they weren’t with me on scene. Cameramen from the commercial stations were kind enough to answer questions when I had them, with Rick Portier from WAFB being the most helpful. Over the previous several years, Rick and I had stood side-by-side, covering innumerable news stories and press conferences, and he suggested I check out his blog, turdpolishertv,wordpress,com.

That’s where I found out about his first book, Shooter in the Crosshairs.

(Portier’s second e-book, published a couple of years later, is a succinct compilation of much that he shared with me regarding camerawork. His Broadcast Journalism Pocket Checklist should be downloaded on every J-school students’ and working reporters’ phone, and be reviewed daily.)

Portier’s novel is framed through the eyes of a videographer who feels he’s well past his prime, having been passed up and passed over, rather than being passed on to the networks. Despite that, he still takes pride in his art and endeavors – daily – to be a turdpolisher. (Turdpolishing is defined as “the act of trying to make something hopelessly weak and unattractive appear strong and appealing, which is often a futile effort.”)

Drawing from his own experience of (then) more than two decades shooting TV news stories, Portier’s protagonist reads – right down to the gritty language – as utterly authentic. Take his main character’s description of the sweet young newbie reporter with whom he’s been assigned to shoot.

“Every time her pouty lips parted, I half-expected to hear the ocean pouring from her empty head. The relaxing rhythms of crashing waves and sea gulls would have been a welcome change from the high-pitched voice she used in conversation.”

Yep. As newscast viewers, we’ve all groaned inwardly when Miss Perky Reporter strides forward to the camera in her stand up, and – as Don Henley put it in “Dirty Laundry” – “tells you about the plane crash with a gleam in her eye.”

Portier’s plotline premise, of arson fires killing the homeless, with business associations functioning as meeting points for modern klansmen, seems even more plausible today than when the book was first published in 2011. Since then, we have seen Baton Rouge make international headlines over the 2016 police shooting of Alton Sterling, and, less than two weeks later, watched in horror as a madman retaliated, killing three Baton Rouge area officers and then himself. Further, there’s been the whole St. George movement, pointing up the ugliness of racism that continues to simmer in the capital region.

So if you’re looking for a way to evade the post-Turkey Day torpor, may I suggest you immerse yourself in the fast pace of Portier’s plot development, or raise your consciousness through contemplation-provoking essays from Drummond’s book.

Better yet, read both.

The Blind Spot in the 2019 Campaign

With a mere margin of 40,000 votes out of one-and-a-half million votes cast, Gov. John Bel Edwards squeaked out a 51% to 49% re-election victory in the runoff against Eddie Rispone. Post-campaign analyses are the present hot topic in Louisiana political news, with pollsters and poli sci profs up and down the state picking apart the demographics of who punched the box beside which name in the voting booth.

More than a few analysts are drilling down on race, while others are endeavoring to determine how many independents and crossover Republicans it took to give the Democratic governor of a mostly red state a second term.

I have yet to see or hear any of the current crop of (male) political analysts so much as mention the “female factor” – how women, who comprise 55% of all registered voters in Louisiana, were courted by the candidates and thence impacted the outcome of this election.

In the week immediately following Kathleen Blanco’s 2003 runoff victory over Bobby Jindal (she prevailed with 52% of the vote to Jindal’s 48%), I asked LSU Political Science Professor Wayne Parent for his thoughts on the “female factor” as a voting bloc.

“I don’t think there was a ‘female factor’ that contributed to Blanco’s win,” he said. “Women in Louisiana don’t coalesce around being female, or use that as a political force.”

And the following year, when Dr. Parent published Inside the Carnival: Unmasking Louisiana Politics, his book discusses the state’s (pre-Katrina) voting blocs in great depth: north Louisiana vs. south Louisiana, white vs. black, urban vs. rural, Protestant vs. Catholic, New Orleans vs. everyone else. He also elaborates on what was formerly the unpredictable wild card in Louisiana voting: the Cajun bloc in south Louisiana, which had for decades often chosen to support more liberal candidates or causes than one might conventionally expect. Yet Parent never mentions or indexes “women,” “female,” or even what has become a seminal gender issue — “abortion” — in this important book on Louisiana political theory.

A decade and a half later, there remains a blind spot regarding women in the Bayou State, and their ability to become a wedge that could split wide the wooden worldview of Louisiana’s masculinized culture. It’s one part of what feminist scholarship refers to as “the male gaze” – men heteronormatively objectifying rather than humanizing women.

Rep. Pat Smith speaking at women’s luncheon, Nov. 14, 2019. Photo by Sue Lincoln.

“It gnaws at me inside – the fact that I’ve had to support that man’s election – because he clearly doesn’t support us in return.”

“But remember, the alternative is far worse.”

Although I heard these statements just last week at a gathering of Democratic women, female friends involved with Republican Party politics tell me they’ve heard similar sentiments privately expressed at GOP women’s functions.

Certainly, Gov. John Bel Edwards’ stance on abortion, proudly supporting every Louisiana legislative attempt to diminish and ultimately eliminate a woman’s right to choose, made whole-hearted advocacy for his re-election awkward for the more liberal-leaning sisters among us.

But Eddie Rispone’s adoration of “grab ‘em by the pussy” Donald Trump presented its own set of soul-searchings for women, particularly the evangelical Christian contingent which has, almost unswervingly, aligned itself with the Republican Party.

And the boys who were running the campaigns had tunnel vision. They aimed fixedly for the light at the end, ignoring any possible merging of peripheral traffic, thus increasing the chances they could crash and burn. And while I expected no better from the Republican side, I was and remain deeply disappointed (and frankly dismayed) at how tone-deaf the Edwards’ camp proved to be.

Conventional political wisdom was clear: John Bel Edwards had a narrow path to victory in 2019, just as he did four years previously. This time he would again require what he achieved in 2015: crossover voters who were uncomfortable with how far to the right the Republican Party was determined to yank the state’s chains. The guys running the governor’s re-election campaign focused the messaging at that demographic.

Their first TV ad, 30 seconds long, was released July 8th and was titled “Surplus.” It referenced the Edwards administration solving the $2 billion budget hole left behind by the Jindal administration and how state revenues are now achieving small annual surpluses. The ad also notes public school teachers have, under Edwards, gotten pay raises.

The next ad, “Family Tradition,” pays tribute to the men of the Edwards family – John Bel’s father, grandfather, and great-grandfather who each served as sheriff, and how that inspired his attendance of West Point and becoming an Airborne Ranger. At the end, showing a picture of (a much younger) Capt. Edwards in uniform with his wife and their then-toddler daughter, Edwards says, “My greatest responsibility is still fighting for and protecting our families.”

And while he doesn’t say “womenfolk,” it’s still there subliminally, in the messaging.

On August 5th, the campaign issued another 30-second ad that was essentially a reprise of one that had proved effective four years prior. Donna Edwards speaks of her husband’s strong policy focus on improving education opportunities for “Every Child” in the state.

A week later, a full minute-long ad went up, showcasing the governor speaking about the importance of “Workforce Development.” The video is replete with images of suited men in conference rooms, or hard-hatted men working outside at industrial sites, along with women indoors, as nurses, lab assistants, and teachers.

It was clearly aimed at those businessmen along that previously-described narrow path — Republicans and independents who are most comfortable with men and women sticking to gender-traditional jobs.

One month later, on Sept 12th, the Edwards campaign put out an ad themed around one of the governor’s favorite maxims, taken from the U.S. Military Academy cadet prayer. His West Point classmates talk about John Bel’s leadership, and one quotes the line, “Choose the harder right instead of the easier wrong.”

The campaign titled the ad “Harder Right,” and a number of Democratic women running for office (or running campaigns) observed that title seemed to sum up the philosophical turn the governor’s politics appeared to be taking.

At this point, women – both inside and outside of the Edwards campaign organization – were expressing their dissatisfaction and concerns to the campaign’s management. They were told that the messaging – if it addressed women at all – was talking at or past women, rather than speaking to and with them regarding issues that involve women in particular. The response was, “But we show women in our ads, and there’s an entire ad done by the First Lady. Why, in our very first ad, we talked about teacher pay raises, and that affects every mom in the state?”

Hey, guys? Not every woman is, or wants to be, a mom.

Not every female heart is softened by the sight of cute little school kids. Take one of my daughters, for instance. She’s married, but won’t be having kids. She works in IT, and says while it’s nice that public school teachers got their first statewide pay raise in a decade, she wants to know that there’s a law guaranteeing she gets paid the same as the dude in the cubical next to her. Louisiana has no such law protecting workers in the private sector, and the campaign wasn’t addressing that or other gender-based workplace protections.

Sadly, this time they weren’t even mentioning raising the minimum wage, since that might not sit well with those middle-class, moderately conservative businessmen the campaign was working so hard to woo.

In fact, it wasn’t until the beginning of October, when the Lane Grigsby-created “Truth In Politics” PAC tried to trash the governor’s handling of a 2017 sexual harassment incident with an ad utterly misrepresenting the sequence of events that the John Bel Edwards campaign reached out to women specifically.

The Grigsby-funded video had the purported victim saying she was out of a job after reporting the harassment, although the record shows she tendered her resignation a full three weeks before she reported the incidents. The anti-JBE ad is titled “John Bel Edwards Doesn’t Listen to Women.”

In response, John Bel’s campaign put out an ad called “We Know Gov. Edwards.” The ad features nine women of varying ages and ethnicities speaking out in support of the governor’s hiring and treatment of women, and refuting the implications made by the opposition’s ad.

Although the campaign might have hoped that was enough of a nod to the ladies, it wasn’t sufficient to put Edwards over the top and secure an outright win in the October 12th primary.

The runoff ads went after Rispone, courted the potential crossover voters, and again turned a blind eye and a deaf ear to that 55% of Louisiana’s voting population.

“Do your part in your sphere of influence,” Baton Rouge Mayor-President Sharon Weston Broome said to attendees at the Progressive Women’s luncheon, held Thursday, Nov. 14th, just two days before the runoff election. And, despite their misgivings about John Bel Edwards’ campaign overtly wooing independents and more moderate Republicans with conservative messaging, Democratic women – white and black – worked to get out the vote.

One of the messages the ladies shared comfortably and widely was “Four more years…for First Lady Donna Edwards!”

Why did the women continue to work for John Bel’s re-election, even though his campaign seemed to mostly ignore their advice and concerns? You see, as the old phrase goes, the women “know which side of the bread their butter is on.” Of course, that’s primarily because they had to mix the dough, bake the bread, slice it and butter it themselves.

You doubt?

The latest “breadwinner” stats from the Center for American Progress, issued in May 2019, show that

in Louisiana, 48.3% of all mothers are the sole or primary breadwinners for their family, compared to the national average of 41%. The report, which follows the methodology originally used for the 2009 Shriver Report, states that 69% of all mothers in Louisiana – single and married – work for pay that constitutes 25% or more of the family’s total income.

Leaving aside the societal value judgment implied through only counting breadwinning mothers, let’s also look at pay equity.

In their most recent annual evaluation, the American Association of University Women (AAUW) show that – overall – women in Louisiana earn 70 cents compared to each dollar earned by a man. African-American females in the Bayou State average a mere 48 cents for each dollar earned Louisiana males – black or white.

Beyond the fact that Louisiana has no gender equity pay protection for workers in the private sector, a trio of reports released last week by the National Women’s Law Center determined that “tax policy is a major reason for the persistence of the gender labor-participation gap and the gender wage gap in the United States.”

“Nowhere in today’s tax code does it explicitly say that women shall be treated differently than men, or families of color treated differently than white families,” one report concludes. “But while the language of our tax laws may be neutral on its face, in many instances, its impact disadvantages women and people of color in practice.”

Louisiana State Capitol, January 2019. Photo by Sue Lincoln.

Even as next year marks the 100th anniversary of ratification of the 19th Amendment, giving women the right to vote, there’s still so much to be done to achieve any semblance of gender equality in Louisiana. And while John Bel Edwards will remain in residence at the Governor’s Mansion for four more years, he won’t have a strong legislative constituency to advance his policy proposals.

Not only will he have to deal with a Republican super-majority in the state Senate, the women aren’t represented in sufficient legislative numbers to have any gender clout whatsoever.

The first woman, Jeannette Rankin, was elected to Congress in 1916. This fall, 103 years later, Louisiana voted to increase its female legislative contingent just the slightest. Presently, women are five of the 39 state senators, and 17 of the 105 state representative. Next year, there will be six female senators and 18 female representatives. That’s 15% of the Senate and 17% of the House.

And although she won’t be among them, I’ll leave you with some of the comments and questions that Beverly Brooks Thompson, Ph.D, a state senate candidate, heard while campaigning.

“You know this is a lot of work, right?”

“You need to pay your dues.”

“We thought this was sweet at first, but you really want to win this thing, huh?”

“You’re too smart to be in office.”

And 45 years after enacting the 1974 state Constitution, which finally changed Louisiana women’s legal status from the chattel (property) of their husband, father or nearest male relative to that of a person, a self-actualized citizen, Dr. Thompson was asked – several times:

“What does your husband think of all this?”

Edwards Roars Back

Late last night, 84-year-old Raymond “Coach” Blanco arrived at the Renaissance Hotel in Baton Rouge, a building that originally served as the dormitories for Jimmy Swaggart Ministries, to personally congratulate John Bel Edwards for securing a second term as state’s chief executive. “She’s looking down on us right now,” Blanco said as his grandson steered his wheelchair into the packed hotel. He tilted his head upward.

He was beaming with pride, but the moment was bittersweet. Three months ago, his wife, former Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, died after a protracted battle with a rare and aggressive form of cancer. Only days before she passed away, in what would be her final public act, Kathleen Blanco became the first person to officially endorse John Bel Edwards for a second term.

“She’s here with us tonight,” Coach Blanco said.

Although Dave Wasserman of the Cook Political Report was the first to officially call the election for Edwards at 9:37PM, it became clear almost immediately after results began trickling in that his opponent, Republican businessman Eddie Rispone, was going to fall short, even if he had appeared to be leading early on.

At 9:15PM, I tweeted, “At this point, I don’t see any pathway for Rispone to win. There seems to be a ton of more votes left in heavily Democratic areas than in Republican areas of the state.” I wasn’t being clairvoyant. Orleans Parish had yet to report a single vote, and Rispone had been failing to hit his targets in far too many parishes, while Edwards was exceeding his goals.

Ultimately, Edwards bested Rispone by 40,341 votes, and while he only carried 24 of the state’s 64 parishes, Edwards piled up huge margins in the state’s most populated areas, easily winning in Shreveport, Baton Rouge, New Orleans, and suburban Jefferson Parish. Edwards’ victory is largely attributable to a major surge among African American voters, who supported the incumbent by a 95% margin and who comprised a total of 30.3% of the electorate.

As a consequence, John Bel Edwards became the first Democrat to win a second consecutive term since Edwin Edwards defeated state Sen. Bob Jones and Secretary of State Wade O. Martin, Jr. in 1975. (Edwin Edwards, who is not related to John Bel Edwards, was subsequently elected to two other, non-consecutive terms, making him the first and only four-term governor in Louisiana history).

Rispone called to concede the election at 9:51PM, telling Edwards he would help him steer Louisiana in the right direction.

“Well Eddie, I would tell you we got it moving the right direction,” Edwards said, “and we’re going to keep it moving in the right direction. But I appreciate the phone call.”

Gov. John Bel Edwards receives a phone call from Eddie Rispone, conceding the election on Nov. 16, 2019. Photo credit: Lynda Woolard.

Only five weeks ago, after failing to secure more than 50% of the vote in the state’s jungle primary, Edwards had appeared to be in real peril of losing the runoff to Rispone, a political neophyte who had spent nearly $14 million of his own fortune on a campaign that had defined itself with appeals to supporters of President Donald Trump. Although polls consistently showed Edwards with a narrow advantage (only two polls ever had Rispone leading), political oddsmakers had initially given Rispone a 2-to-1 advantage. In 2016, Trump carried Louisiana by nearly 20 points, and when Rispone’s votes in the primary were added to the votes received by the third-place finisher, U.S. Rep. Ralph Abraham, the two Republicans combined for more than half of all votes cast.

Rispone’s prospects had also appeared- at least initially- to be improved by Trump’s decision to spend significant political capital on the campaign. He visited Louisiana three times during the campaign, holding large rallies in Lake Charles, Monroe, and Bossier City. Trump also dispatched his son, Donald, Jr., for a visit in Lafayette and his running mate, Vice President Mike Pence, for two stops in Baton Rouge. Rispone, for his part, had introduced himself to voters in a television commercial that boasted about the Trump bumper sticker on his pickup truck. In the runoff campaign, Rispone didn’t even appear in the first pair of commercials his campaign aired; instead, they exclusively featured footage of Trump criticizing John Bel Edwards at the rally he hosted in Lake Charles.

But Rispone’s campaign was ultimately undone by a confluence of factors, many of which were of his own making. Bafflingly, he spent the first two weeks of the runoff completely off of the campaign trail. He agreed to participate in only one televised debate, snubbing invitations to participate in multiple candidate forums across the state, including at least one high-profile event hosted by the conservative-friendly Baton Rouge Area Chamber of Commerce.

Eddie Rispone concedes the election for Louisiana governor on Nov. 16, 2019.

To be sure, it wasn’t until Democrat Andy Beshear scored a surprising victory over incumbent Republican Matt Bevin in the Nov. 5th contest for Kentucky governor that oddsmakers began giving Edwards a clear advantage over Rispone, though the national narrative lagged behind what had already become increasingly clear to those on the ground in Louisiana. (Incidentally, because of Edwards’ win, for the first time since 1995, Kentucky and Louisiana both have governors who are members of the same political party).

If there is a single moment that tilted the election back toward Edwards and diminished Rispone’s chances for victory, it wasn’t anything that happened in Kentucky, and it had nothing to do with what Donald Trump said or tweeted. It was, instead, a comment made by Lane Grigsby, Rispone’s “political mentor” and a man who had spent millions of his own dollars to fund a series of attack ads against John Bel Edwards. When it had appeared as if a mistake by the Secretary of State would result in an unusual three-person runoff election for a state Senate seat, Grigsby brazenly offered one of the two Republican candidates a pledge to support a future run for a judicial seat if he dropped out of the race. His proposal appeared to be illegal, and, at the very least, it was clearly unethical.

Grigsby suddenly found himself the subject of bipartisan criticism, and when a reporter for the Baton Rouge Business Report asked him for comment, he gloated, “I’m the kingmaker. I talk from the throne.” Grigsby’s comments seemed to confirm what many had long suspected, that he believed he could simply purchase control of state government. Rispone, who had only decided to run for governor after he and Grigsby spent two years attempting to recruit someone to challenge Edwards, had been made to look like a corruptible bit player, a characterization he hadn’t done much to refute by defining himself as merely an extension of Donald Trump, not as his own man.

The admission played directly into the narrative that Trey Ourso of GumboPAC had brilliantly crafted during the primary: Rispone was a phony.

The Rispone campaign did nothing to disabuse that characterization; if anything, they enabled it. Grigsby seemed to confirm it.

But elections are determined and defined by a narrative (and the whims and the mood of the public) as much as they are by the mechanics of turning out voters. To that end, while some may look to the ill will that Rispone generated when he attacked Ralph Abraham during the primary, which was arguably the reason he underperformed in parishes Abraham had dominated, it’s likely Rispone would have never even made it into the runoff if he hadn’t criticized Abraham. (In 2015, David Vitter confronted a similar predicament after his campaign decided to invest heavily in attack ads against two other Republican candidates, Scott Angelle and Jay Dardenne. His campaign believes Vitter wouldn’t have narrowly made it into the runoff if they had played nice, but the attacks came at a cost during the runoff. Dardenne endorsed John Bel Edwards, and Angelle stayed out of the race completely).

The simple explanation for Edwards’ victory is that African Americans and women, the two core constituencies of the Democratic Party, showed up. We’ll unpack the reasons why the runoff was dramatically different than the jungle primary in a few days, but for now, perhaps the most instructive illustration of last night’s election is this comparison that J. Miles Coleman put together.

“Overall, Edwards’ margin last night was similar to the late Gov. Kathleen Blanco’s win 2003,” he tweeted. “(B)ut looking back at that race shows you how much the state changed. (Edwards) improved in the between New Orleans/Baton Rouge metros, as most everything else got more (Republican).”