Do not invest more money than you can afford to lose.
The Republican congressman from Lafayette said he’ll have a formal Senate candidacy announcement event soon in which he’ll outline his vision for Louisiana.
The U.S. senator also was hampered by high disapproval ratings for his fellow Republican, Jindal, who is blamed for the state’s financial problems.
Edwards, a 49-year-old state legislator, defeated Republican U.S. Senator David Vitter in a hotly contested runoff election that defied the political headwinds in a state where Republicans now hold all statewide offices. “Him, being culturally conservative was the final nail in Vitter’s coffin”.
Triumphant Democrats still buzzing from taking the governor’s mansion in Louisiana over the weekend face long odds in carrying that momentum into the 2016 Senate race to replace outgoing Sen.
Closer to home now, a Democrat has won the Louisiana’s bitter governor’s race.
It has something to do with embracing hope, and the politics of inclusion, as Edwards explained in his victory speech Saturday night. “It just shows that if you have an election where they spend all of their energy destroying one another, they’re going to have a more hard time”.
“I want to make sure that when we do it, we have a revenue source identified, so that when the match that the state has to put up is required – that it works and that it’s an arrangement that everybody’s comfortable with, including the federal government”, Edwards said Sunday. Increased voter turnout generally increased John Bel Edwards’ share of the vote at the parish level. “And probably 80 percent of us are stuck in the middle with nowhere to go”.
ELLIOTT: State Representative Kenny Havard is among those who broke GOP ranks to endorse Edwards.
And he fought for right things. Edwards and his supporters attacked Vitter’s character at every turn with harsh language, calling him a liar and a stain on Louisiana.
“Republicans now have another open seat to defend and it appears as though there will be a rush of candidates on the Republican side who will be battling one another”, said Sadie Weiner, communications director for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. The dynamic changed, Edwards says, because of his supporters.
“I can tell you that there’s many people across this state who’ve suffered tremendously because we’ve refused to expand Medicaid”, Nevers said. “I will never embarrass you”.
However, he said the voucher program should only be for students in failing public schools. For Republican operatives who cannot imagine that anyone likes Obama, those lines might have made sense. John Bel Edwards has pledged to work with Obama to bring Syrian refugees to Louisiana. Edwards only has three appointees to the 11-member education board.
The rest of the campaign proved just as tone deaf.
If the past couple of weeks around south Louisiana had a soundtrack, it would be the music of Allen Toussaint, the beloved New Orleans songsmith who died earlier this month, and whose vast catalogue has saturated the airwaves ever since. For the general election, turnout was nearly 39 percent and Edwards received 81,900 votes.
He quotes Elisabeth Pearson, the executive director of the Democratic Governors Association, “Republicans have gotten very good at using fear tactics…Before it popped in polling, and we knew it was important to address the issue”.
That did not happen by chance. However, a few other GOP officeholders backed Edwards. Turnout patterns matter. When turnout is up, that generally helps Democrats. Nevertheless, to get turnout up in those areas, Democrats must first excite voters and then pour energy into mobilizing them and getting them to the polls. In each case, there was a capable Democratic nominee and a controversial Republican nominee.
