Leading Off:
●LA-Gov: In a result that would have been unthinkable even two months ago, Democratic state Rep. John Bel Edwards defeated GOP Sen. David Vitter by an impressive 56-44 margin in Saturday's gubernatorial runoff. Making Edwards’ victory more impressive, he took only 40 percent in October’s all-party primary while the three main Republicans combined for 57 percent, meaning that a sizable fraction of GOP voters switched sides in the second round of voting.
After his loss, Vitter announced that while he'll serve out the final year of his Senate term, he will not seek re-election in 2016 (see our LA-Sen item below for more). Meanwhile, Edwards' win gives Louisiana Democrats their first statewide victory since Mary Landrieu's re-election to the Senate in 2008, and it also makes Edwards the Deep South's only Democratic governor.
Overall, the race was dominated by two topics that were nothing but bad news for Republicans: outgoing Gov. Bobby Jindal's extroardinary unpopularity and renewed interest in Vitter's 2007 prostitution scandal. Edwards left jaws agape with an instantly classic ad that (100 percent factually) accused Vitter of "answer[ing] a prostitute's call minutes after he skipped a vote honoring 28 soldiers who gave their lives in defense of our freedom." Vitter, declared the ex-Army Ranger Edwards, chose "prostitutes over patriots."
It was Vitter’s Republican opponents in the primary who first revived the prostitution story, though, which many observers had incorrectly concluded was a dead letter after Vitter’s dominant 2010 re-election campaign. Vitter in turn went sharply negative on his two GOP rivals, Lt. Gov. Jay Dardenne and Public Service Commissioner Scott Angelle, who were in no mood to come to Vitter’s aid after he narrowly won the primary: Angelle refused to issue any endorsement, while Dardenne actually crossed party lines and gave his backing to Edwards.
Vitter and his allies repeatedly tried to link Edwards to President Obama, a tried-and-true tactic that has often worked in red states. But the charge never seemed to stick, possibly because Edwards lacked any connection to DC politics and is also quite conservative himself. An increasingly desperate Vitter then sought to exploit the Paris terror attacks in the final week of the campaign, running a grotesquely fear-mongering ad that charged Edwards and Obama with wanting to allow Syrian refugees to flood into the state. (An ad from a pro-Vitter super PAC was even worse.) Edwards was no hero on the issue, and his own views on accepting refugees weren't any different from Vitter’s, but rhetorically he remained sedate while Vitter openly stoked xenophobic panic. The good news is that Vitter’s hysteria utterly failed to save him campaign.
Earlier this month, polling badly underestimated Republicans across the board in Kentucky, including in the governor's race, and many Democrats feared the same thing would happen in Louisiana. However, four pollsters released results in the final days of the campaign, and all four showed Edwards winning. The highest marks go to Market Research Insight, which nailed Edwards' 12-point margin and was also the only pollster to correctly predict that Vitter would struggle to win last month's primary. BDPC was also close, giving Edwards a 10-point edge. JMC Analytics and the University of New Orleans, on the other hand, were both off the fairway: JMC's final poll had Edwards up just 5, while UNO gave him a 20-point edge.