Guest Editorial: Baton Rouge Mayor’s Race Is the Most Important Election in Louisiana

That headline is sure to come off as strange to many of our readers, who will note that in 2024 we have a Presidential election, six Congressional races in newly-redrawn districts, a Public Service Commission race which is open with Craig Greene’s decision not to run for re-election and lots of judicial and other races.

So why is the Mayor-President race in Baton Rouge so important? Who cares whether Sharon Weston Broome gets re-elected for a disastrous third term or Ted James, who might be even more far-left than Broome, gets elected to replace her?

Because out of nowhere, a very interesting Republican candidate has showed up, that’s why!

Besides, we already know Donald Trump will crush Kamala Harris, or whoever else the Democrats nominate, in the Presidential race in Louisiana. We can predict with 98 percent certainty, the winners of those six Congressional races. And while the PSC race between John Paul Coussan and Julie Quinn offers some potential for drama, there isn’t a night-and-day difference between the two Republicans.

But this mayoral race could be night-and-day!

If you’ve lived in Baton Rouge and you know anything about the local sports scene, the name Sid Edwards has probably penetrated your consciousness. Edwards is one of the most successful high school football coaches in Louisiana, having spent 10 years as a very prominent assistant coach at Catholic High, seven years as the head coach at Redemptorist High School, including two state championships, and 17 years as the head coach and Athletic Director at Central High School. He’s currently the head coach at Istrouma High School.

Sid Edwards has won a very large number of football games. He was given an award as the National High School Coach of the Year by the NFL in 2000. That was an award he was nominated for by Warrick Dunn, one of Baton Rouge’s all-time favorite sons and one of Edwards’ leading protégés.

Edwards isn’t a politician, but he’s something more interesting – he’s a guy whose resume shows demonstrable success in driving positive outcomes and making a real difference in people’s lives.

Broome’s eight years don’t demonstrate that at all. Neither does James’ career as a state legislator and federal bureaucrat who may or may not have been let go by the Small Business Administration.

It’s good Coach Sid isn’t a politician. What Baton Rouge needs right now isn’t a politician. Baton Rouge needs a winner. This city hasn’t won in a long time. It’s on a losing streak which, if it continues, will turn this place into a hollowed-out husk of a city like Jackson, Mississippi, is.

And the political class can’t turn Baton Rouge around.

On the Democrat side, it’s all about stopping anything positive from happening in Baton Rouge. Their aims are almost purely racial at this point and the focus is to take as much power and prestige as possible for the black political class in the city. 

A perfect example of that is the local NAACP’s cancel-culture effort aimed at Republican school board member Nathan Rust for his sin of inviting a member of the Moms for Liberty conservative group to hold a seat on a committee vetting candidates for school superintendent. 

The Democrats have managed to make that search so toxic that all of the candidates earning a favorable rating for the superintendent position ran screaming from the job, and they’re good with that.  It means the current acting head of the school system gets to stay on and will probably end up in the position permanently.

And nobody thinks he’s any good. But that doesn’t matter, because it isn’t about excellence – it’s about control.

And the political class on the Republican side is anxious to abandon Baton Rouge to its fate as the next Detroit, St. Louis, Newark or Jackson. Not a single Republican politician of note bothered to run in this race despite the fact there is a path to victory for someone willing to walk it. It’s been 20 years since there was a Republican mayor here and in that time we’ve gone from calling ourselves The Next Great American City to shrugging as others call Baton Rouge a laughingstock.

Meanwhile the suburbs burgeon and the out migration intensifies.

As much as we love having St. George incorporated in the parish and we think it’s a vital part of keeping East Baton Rouge Parish from completely falling apart, St. George cannot fix what’s wrong in Baton Rouge. Only leadership in the Mayor-President’s job can do that.

And we have to get someone in that job who can lead. Who can win in the job —not just win an election to get it.

Can Edwards?

We start from the proposition that running a city like Baton Rouge isn’t all that impossible to do. Most of what’s failed in this city over the past 20-25 years has failed because it was designed to, and if you just eliminate the intentional dysfunction coming out of petty corruption and misplaced priorities you’ll find that our citizenry will do pretty well on their own. Be even the remotest bit friendly to business, and you’ll likely find yourself with a lively economy. 

Exercise actual managerial competence and you might just become that next great city, for the simple reason that so many of the larger cities around the country are actively destroying themselves through woke socialist policies and utter lawlessness that regular people and fungible capital are actively searching for escape hatches.

And though you might scoff at the idea of a football coach running a city, we don’t. There is a skill set associated with success as a coach of a sports team which can transfer to the political realm.

First, you’ve got to be an effective communicator. You need to be able to handle public speaking and you need to be able to speak to the media. You’ve got to be able to motivate people and carry ideas and goals into the consciousness of your people. That’s true as a football coach, and it’s true in a political role.

Second, you have to devise and implement strategies. Whether it’s a spread offense or an economic development plan, you need to have a vision of what you want your team or city to look like, you need to be able to articulate that vision and you need to know how to bring it to life.

Third, you need to be able to find talented people and put them in proper roles, and then to train and motivate them to excel in those roles.

And fourth, you need to have a certain attention to detail. A well-run city and a well-run football team share something important, which is that when things go wrong or weaknesses surface, they need to be addressed promptly and thoroughly or else they’ll quickly metastasize and cause losses.

It’s hard to be excellent as a football coach. And your won-lost record marks you as what you are in a way that’s a lot more accountable than politicians are subjected to.

And against that standard Sid Edwards has performed well.

But can he win? Well, there are three other Republican candidates in the race. One, 30-year-old Nathaniel Hearn, appears to be a plant from Sharon Broome who’s intended to siphon St. George voters off James – a project which would be obsolete should Edwards mount a real campaign. 

The other two are Tammy Cook, an unknown real estate agent, and perennial gadfly candidate Steve Myers, who ran for state representative as a Democrat last fall. It would be a good idea if the field could be cleared for Edwards.  If he’s the only Republican, he’ll make the runoff against either Broome or James, possibly even as the top vote-getter in the primary.

And in the runoff, who knows? It’s likely a low-turnout election in December, in a bleak cycle for Democrats, and if Edwards is against Broome he could well benefit from voter fatigue with her eight years of failure.

If he’s against James, at issue is the latter’s political radicalism, questionable personal life and highly lackadaisical work ethic. James has also raised about a half-million dollars from “white” business interests as a protest against Broome’s mismanagement of the city; that spigot is largely tapped out if there’s a viable Republican candidate in the race.

It should be pointed out that in recent elections both Monroe, which is 63 percent black, and Shreveport, which like Baton Rouge is a roughly 50-50 city, have both elected Republican mayors. If it can happen there, it isn’t impossible to do it here.

And in Edwards, there might just be a candidate with a skill set and an outreach across the aisle – having coached at three high schools in the northern part of the parish and affected so many black kids in a positive way over the years, Edwards has some relationships and credibility in that community that a typical Republican politician couldn’t hope to have – who can continue that trend.

The Baton Rouge mayoral campaign has just started. It’s far too early to judge it. But with Edwards jumping in on Friday, all of a sudden there is an opportunity to save Louisiana’s capital city from the accelerating decline so many other towns have seen. And that makes this race the most important on the ballot this fall.