“It was a bad night for so-called reform,” said Bernie Pinsonat, long-time Louisiana pollster and political consultant.
Translation: it was a bad night for Landry.
His administration got a thrashing Saturday, with all four proposed constitutional amendments getting rejected by a 65-35 margin.
The opposition campaign was strong. But the most curious element to this is how Amendment 2 was built to appeal to high-turnout voters, i.e., teachers and seniors, yet Landry failed to succeed even in some of the most densely republican areas.
Saturday’s turnout almost doubled what was expected; between 21% and 22% of LA voters showed out.
This much is clear: the galvanization for the “Vote No” campaign was much stronger than Landry’s ability to communicate his message to voters.
Personally, I wasn't totally against the amendments. When you broke them down, you had a mix of good and bad. But the issue, as was evident by the result, was that the amendments were hard to digest, Amendment 2 specifically.
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Pinsonat added, “I think if you looked at a poll on the individual issues, I think they would've been overall popular. But you didn’t get the people who benefited from this tax election to show up, period.”
Even in the most republican precincts, the amendments passed by paper-thin margins. And overall, it wasn’t nearly enough to carry even one across the finish line.
As with any election post-mortem, we're all asking why things turned out the way they did.
It just seems like in a republican state, with a republican state legislature, and a republican executive office holder, there has to be something else in the undercurrent. I’m not convinced it's about personality or a rejection of Governor Landry. Rather, I feel that voters like the comfort of sticking with the decisions they made before, and to get people to undo that takes serious convincing.
Simply put, Landry failed to make convincing arguments. That’s what my callers said, callers who considered a yes-vote, but felt they were just being commanded to vote yes rather than persuaded to vote yes.
Pinsonat stated, “Whatever the Governor’s message was up and down the stretch, it obviously had no impact. There was nothing that was said or done that incited his voters to be as energized as the anti-voters. That’s the end of the story. There was a lack of enthusiasm… Some of the MAGA voters who were related to the churches and the property tax even voted against it.”
What this election indicates to me is that Louisiana voters are highly skeptical. Many don’t want to take the risk, even if it's their own party promoting advertising the changes as beneficial to their interests.
The messaging itself stank, though. There was little cohesion to prove to voters why they ought to mark YES down the ballot. Rather, Landry treated it as a piecemeal affair, focusing mainly on the most difficult issue, the 115-page Amendment 2.
One resounding thing I heard from folks was that they struggled connecting the dots between the amendments. And being uncertain, they stuck with the devil they knew rather than the devil they didn't.
“If you look at what Jeff tried to do for his supporters,” said Pinsonat. “Ok, we're cutting income tax. We're giving teachers a pay raise, all voters want that…We’re restricting budget growth… restricting expenditures… consolidating trust funds… They ended up with a huge bill with lots of stuff in it. I contend that the public is very sensitive when they go to the polls and they vote on something they don’t understand.”
On the other hand, Pinsonat notes, “The antis did exactly what they normally do. They went out en masse, and the Jeff (YES) voters didn’t vote. But it wasn't just anti-voters.”
It was so bad that Landry could hardly get the most consistent republican voting block to show up in numbers.
“We had a ballot of constitutional amendments with various issues that ended up being geared toward MAGA,” said Pinsonat. “There never was a cohesive message that resonated enough with voters to get them interested.”
I also got a chance to ask councilmember JP Morrell his thoughts on Saturday’s election.
“If you look across the state,” he said, “everyone wants to blame the Soros boogeyman for New Orleans and Baton Rouge. But across the state, all these amendments failed more than they succeeded. You know you have problems when you have lefty-lefties and Woody Jenkins agreeing on something.”
But the shooting down of these amendments means more than an unchanged constitution. There are decisions to be made in light of Saturday's results.
Morrell says, “I don’t know how the legislature is going to react to it (going into this legislative session). The real challenge, as I see it, is that it’ll cause a significant hole in the budget because they balanced the budget based on it passing… And when they have to cut the budget, given it didn't pass, they’re going to decide who to punish for it.”