I hinted that this was coming in my signing-off-before-the-hurricane-comes post on Wednesday, and I noted the results of that poll in the Baton Rouge mayoral race, but here’s the further discussion of the topic I’d promised.
The poll in question was a JMC Analytics survey, and it dropped about a week ago. The results…
We’re seeing that Ted James isn’t going to win this race and probably can’t make the runoff.
Sid Edwards can.
Compared to James and Broome, Edwards has barely raised or spent any money yet. He’s spent the last few weeks since his surprise qualification just staffing up a campaign and putting out some yard signs. He’s been cramming on policy and getting ramped up to present a professional campaign message. His campaign is completely made up of volunteers who haven’t worked electoral races before, though there are folks involved who have. The whole crew is essentially drinking out of a fire hose.
And Edwards is already tied with Ted James.
We thought about doing a name-and-shame thing for all of the Republicans who gave James money and support. That information is publicly available at the state Board of Ethics website. We decided against blasting all of that out in this post.
Because we get it. For the longest time, no Republican politician would get into this race. At the time it looked like Ted James was the only alternative to Sharon Weston Broome, and lots of Republicans wanted her out in the worst way.
So they gave him money.
What’s difficult to understand is how Scott McKnight, who was a pretty good state representative in the last legislative term before running for Treasurer and getting crushed by John Fleming last year, threw in behind James. That made no sense.
McKnight was all set to run for the Public Service Commission, but he didn’t. When he didn’t, the road was wide open for him to run for mayor. McKnight actually might have had a shot at winning the race. The demographics are such that if you’re a white Republican who can get white Democrats and maybe just a few black voters, and/or the people from the “other” demographics (Hispanics and Asians, specifically), you’re in the game.
Especially against Broome. When she’s polling at 29 percent in the primary, it’s pretty bad. Some 71 percent of the voters say they have zero interest in giving her a third term as mayor, and she’s got to find more than 21 percent among them – in other words, she needs 30 percent of the people who currently say she sucks too much to support – or else she’s cooked.
She’s cooked.
McKnight could have won the race, but he did some typical politician’s deal with Ted James and threw in with him to give James some sort of fake legitimacy with Republican voters. In return for some sort of role in a James administration, almost certainly.
If you think this means Ted James would govern as a centrist, you are absolutely deluding yourself. That is not how this works.
You come about this from a memory you have, which is that Kip Holden gathered a bunch of South Baton Rouge businesspeople about him and gave them some semblance of influence at City Hall during the 12 years he was mayor. And compared to Broome, Holden was seen as a centrist.
But two things are true about that. First, Kip Holden’s dozen years as Baton Rouge’s mayor were years of decline, not progress. Baton Rouge became more blighted, more dangerous, less vibrant and certainly less conducive to starting and growing a business. Traffic got worse. The population stagnated. We fell behind.
Those seem like halcyon days compared to the destruction Broome has wrought, to be certain. But only in the sense that you’d prefer slow decline to fast decline.
The other thing which is true is that Ted James is no Kip Holden.
Holden had a record in the state legislature before he was elected mayor-president in Baton Rouge of being slightly left of center. He also had a reputation of being a ball of activity. Kip Holden was everywhere. He would hustle every vote, he’d listen to everyone, he was a people-pleaser. As mayor that translated into a lot of wasted activity, and there were lots of stories making people wonder if he’d lost his mind, but it also translated, occasionally, to effective leadership or at least constituent service.
James? Kamala Harris’ state chairman in Louisiana? He brings none of that to the table.
Ted James is a racist who once posted a meme on his social media comparing Trayvon Martin with Emmitt Till. He was known as one of the worst race-baiters in the Louisiana legislature when he was a state representative. There were lots of stories from his time in the legislature of Ted James treating white constituents essentially as non-persons.
While Holden could claim to be something of a centrist, James was one of the most left-wing politicians at the Capitol while he was in office.
And Ted James has a reputation of being one of the laziest politicians in Louisiana.
The fact that he’ll take money from some GOP donors and support from Scott McKnight doesn’t change the fact that if Ted James were to be elected mayor of Baton Rouge he’d likely be even worse than Broome is.
And worse, and this is a big deal, were James to be elected you might be saddled with him for the next 12 years, whereas Broome would be termed out in the next four years.
Let’s understand that as a city declines, you get an inevitable outmigration of professionals and middle-class families to the suburban jurisdictions. They call that White Flight, but the reality of it is that it’s middle-class flight. For example, the populations of Livingston and Ascension Parishes have skyrocketed in the past couple of decades, but what nobody pays attention to is that both parishes have a higher share of minority residents now than before they started growing so rapidly.
The black middle class is every bit as “flighty” as the white middle class is, and for all the same reasons.
We talk about weaponized governmental failure (WGF) here at The Hayride all the time, and a dozen years of Ted James as the mayor will be the WGF dagger in the heart of this community. Defined as the intentional failure to do the basics of governance for the purposes of running off those voters who might opt for a Republican alternative to urban socialist governance, we’ve seen an acceleration of WGF in this town.
But the demographics of Baton Rouge are much more akin to those of Shreveport, Lake Charles and Monroe, all of which have Republican mayors (Friday Ellis in Monroe lists himself as an independent, but he’s a Republican), than, say, New Orleans. It’s still possible to elect a Republican mayor here, though after 12 years of James as mayor it won’t be.
Edwards happens to be a Republican who can win. Maybe more than McKnight would have been.
Edwards is a high school football coach who has spent this whole century coaching north of Florida Boulevard. He was at Redemptorist for seven years, then Central for 17, and now he’s at Istrouma. During that time he’s touched the lives of thousands of black families in a positive way. He’s more like a saint than a politician; you can’t say of Sid Edwards that he’s some white Republican who doesn’t care about black people. That’s demonstrably not true as it might be argued about the various politicians in South Baton Rouge.
But more than that, Sid Edwards is already at 23, and the vast majority of those 22 percent of the undecideds in the JMC poll are Republican voters.
Four years ago, Republican candidates (there were three: Jordan Piazza, Matt Watson and Steve Carter) pulled 43 percent of the vote in the primary against Broome. Carter in the runoff couldn’t get any more than that, for a number of reasons, but chiefly because he had no means of generating any black vote.
Also because Broome wasn’t anywhere near as unpopular as she is now. She’s ripe to be beaten much more so than she was four years ago. That’s why James wanted to run against her in the first place.
But he can’t take enough of Broome’s vote away to knock her out of the runoff, and Republican voters appear to be more interested in voting for one of their own than surrendering to a left-wing Democrat like McKnight has done with James.
So Sid Edwards is likely going to put some distance between himself and James in the next poll, and it’s going to be Edwards in the runoff with Broome with a real opportunity to flip Baton Rouge’s mayoral seat Republican in December.
This is a real possibility. And a real opportunity for dramatic, dynamic change here which could make this a very different place.
There is no reason to surrender to Ted James in an effort to get rid of Broome. James is likely to be worse than Broome, and for longer. Now that there is a better alternative it’s simply foolish to continue supporting him.
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