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.

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.

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.

Rispone and the Erector Set: Best. Advice. Ever.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Eddie Rispone Relies on Controversial Program That Outsources Jobs to Foreign Workers

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Tomorrow is #ElectionDay for Louisiana! I'm proud to show my support for @JohnBelforLA who will continue the fight for progress in #Louisiana! #GeauxVote

— John Legend (@johnlegend) November 15, 2019

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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