Scott McKay: Ted James Can’t Win
Scott McKay, The Hayride
I hinted that this was coming in my signing-off-before-the-hurricane-comes post four weeks ago, and I noted the results of the poll in the Baton Rouge mayoral race.
The poll in question was a JMC Analytics survey, and it dropped about five weeks 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. 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 why Scott McKnight threw in behind James. That made no sense.
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.
If you think this means Ted James would govern as a centrist, you are absolutely deluding yourself. That is not how this works.
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 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. That 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.
While Ted James has been quick to accuse others of racism, 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.
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 out-migration of professionals and middle-class families to the suburbs. 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). 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 it won’t be.
Coach Sid Edwards happens to be a Republican who can win.
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. But more than that, Sid Edwards is already at 23 percent, and the vast majority of the undecideds in the JMC poll are Republican voters.
Four years ago, Republican candidates 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 opportunity for dramatic, dynamic change 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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