Louisiana’s Trumpy Next Guv Has Already Drawn First Blood
Louisiana Gov.-elect Jeff Landry had barely finished giving his victory speech late Saturday night when his first political casualty had already been recorded.
The two-term attorney general rolled to an unexpectedly easy first-primary victory with 52 percent of the votes in a crowded field of 15 candidates. He was already the presumed next governor, but most political observers thought he would at least be pushed into a runoff with Democrat Shawn Wilson. But Wilson, one of only two Democrats in the race, polled only 26 percent of the vote in the state’s lowest election turnout in a decade.
The time-honored political proverb “to the winner goes the spoils” has never been more in evidence as scores of political appointees will be replaced by Landry’s own people when he is inaugurated next January but at least one individual didn’t wait for the axe to fall.