Louisiana shock election sends message to Trump | Will Bunch Newsletter

Where’s the late Willard Scott when you need him, because all of America ought to be saying a big Happy 100th Birthday to one of the great ongoing stories in our nation’s journalism, the Philadelphia Daily News. Monday marked one century since the People Paper launched on March 31, 1925 with — fittingly — a violent murder on the front page. Although the staff, including me, merged with The Inquirer eight years ago, the Daily News lives on both in reality — in the spunky tabloid edition that still rocks the newsstands of Wawas and bodegas across Philly — and also in the in-your-face “attytood” our alums have carried to the no-longer staid Inquirer.

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It’s hard to imagine that anyone could suggest that the great state of Louisiana was soft on crime. In an America that sets the world standard for locking up its own citizens, the Bayou State somehow manages to incarcerate people at roughly twice the national average. Folks convicted of the worst crimes are dispatched to the notorious Angola State Prison, whose critics call it a perpetual hellhole, which made the transition from slave plantation to state penitentiary way too easily.

Yet Gov. Jeff Landry — America’s most right-wing governor that you may never have heard of — came into office last year arguing exactly that, that the nation’s most punitive criminal-justice system needed to get tougher. Last year, Landry — a former prosecutor — convinced the GOP supermajority in Baton Rouge to roll back some modest 2010s reforms that had lowered incarceration rates and saved tax dollars. As a result, Louisiana lengthened prison sentences, allowed 17-year-olds to be charged with more adult felonies, and ensured the state could resume executions.

That still wasn’t tough enough for Republicans in a state Donald Trump won last November with 60% of the vote. On Saturday, Landry and the GOP went straight to the voters of Louisiana with a ballot initiative to amend the state constitution to make it easier to charge even more teenagers with adult crimes. One state lawmaker insisted the measure, which could have paved the way to locking up 14-year-olds for crimes like stealing a phone, was needed because “[s]ome of these kids are already lost when they’re 2 years old.”

The ballot measure — one of four that would have given enormous power to Landry and his Republican juggernaut — was supposed to cement Louisiana’s reputation as one of the Trumpiest states in America, where any concession on crime would be too “woke.”

Instead, the good people of Louisiana turned out on Saturday to scream: “Enough!”

Almost as soon as the polls opened in arguably the most obscure statewide election — with no human candidates on the ballot — in an “off” election year, folks in the more Democratic corners of the state lined up to cast their ballots. In majority Black Orleans Parish, which includes New Orleans, some 91% cast “no” votes. Statewide, 66% of the electorate rejected the four measures, including majorities in parishes that are mostly white and Republican as well.

You’ll be shocked to learn that Landry did not take this defeat well. He claimed, based on weak evidence, that left-wing billionaire George “Soros and far left liberals poured millions into Louisiana with propaganda and outright lies...” and even seemed to blame his Louisiana constituents he claimed are “conditioned for failure.”

It’s weird that the Jeff Landrys of the world see the Hungarian-born, and Jewish, Soros behind every defeat, yet rarely speak of the influence of South Africa-born billionaire Elon Musk, who spent at least $277 million on electing Trump and has been allowed to take a chainsaw, figuratively and literally, to the federal safety net.

But money doesn’t seem to be what decided this race, where the statewide turnout of 21% was nearly double what experts expected. The election may not have been a direct referendum on MAGA Trumpism, but the voter enthusiasm in Democratic areas — especially in African American neighborhoods where pundits have claimed citizens are demoralized — and the size of the rebuke suggests people want to put the brakes on rapid rightward changes in America.

“In defeating Amendment 3″ — the criminal justice measure — “voters made clear their desire for the things that actually make our communities safer — like quality education and opportunity,” Sarah Omojola, Louisiana director for the Vera Institute, said in a statement after the stunning result.

For some strange reason, this public rejection of extreme conservatism down in Bayou Country didn’t make the New York Times or Washington Post, but Team Trump still ought to be terrified by this outcome. It dovetails with another recent election shocker right here in Pennsylvania — a Democratic state Senate win in a longtime GOP stronghold in Lancaster County — as well as new polls that show Trump’s approval ratings dropping as voters try to make sense of confusing tariff policies, rising prices for commodities like eggs, and nonstop violations of constitutional norms.

I’m writing this early Tuesday morning just a few hours before polls open in Wisconsin and Florida for three more key special elections that should offer an early window into the current mindset of U.S. voters.

In the Badger State, a race for the decisive seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court has been hijacked by the world’s richest man in Musk, who has poured millions into the contest and personally campaigned there — even awarding $1 million checks, of dubious legality, to two residents who’d already voted. Polls suggest the role of Musk — whose own approval rating is falling faster than the stock price of his Tesla electric-vehicle company — could backfire, and that the GOP could also lose at least one of two congressional races in Florida districts that just voted heavily for Trump.

Proof that the White House is starting to panic over the backlash came last week when Trump yanked the nomination of New York U.S. Rep Elise Stefanik as his U.N. ambassador, sparked by fears Republicans could lose her House seat and thus their razor-thin majority on Capitol Hill. More broadly, it feels like the Trump White House is racing with a string of executive orders to punish colleges and law firms and its shock deportations in order to cement American authoritarianism — before the people can make crystal clear they don’t want it.

It’s probably not a coincidence that Trump, in a Sunday morning interview with NBC’s Meet the Press, insisted there are “methods” he could use to run for a third term in 2029, even though the 22nd Amendment explicitly bars this. Pretending that he’s not a lame duck could help ram through his agenda, but it also distracts the media from focusing on his rising unpopularity. If voters in the blood-red swamps of Louisiana are this mad today, I doubt Trump could get elected alligator catcher four years from now.

Question: Are our protests making a difference? — CindyLC (@cindylc.bsky.social) via Bluesky

Answer: Yes, absolutely! I’ve already raved here about the national #TeslaTakedown movement, which has sent a message both to, and about, Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk by helping to bring sales of his electric vehicles to a crawl, reduce his net worth by more than $100 billion and counting, and show the world there are consequences for taking a chainsaw to democracy. The surge in protests — including, but not limited to, the demonstrations outside Tesla showrooms — has launched a virtuous cycle of angry people flooding congressional town hall meetings, encouraged politicos like Sen. Cory Booker to get more vocal, and hopefully made some GOP reps wonder if they are committing political harakiri. Please keep going with a huge round of protests scheduled for this Saturday.

Opinions among newsletter readers were fairly universal that universities — especially elite schools like Columbia or Penn with sizable endowments — should be fighting back to save their integrity rather than knuckling under to unreasonable demands from the Trump regime. “Evident that these ‘institutions’ only ‘follow the money’ — they have no scruples nor ethics,” Barbara Woodin wrote. “Just situational, so it follows they’d cave to Trump’s whims.” David Wiedner passed along this quote from Tom Stoppard’s play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead: “There must have been a time, in the beginning, when we could have said — no. But somehow we missed it. Oh well, we’ll know better next time."

📮 This week’s question: The White House Correspondents Association — the folks behind the so-called “nerd prom” annual D.C. gala — this weekend cancelled its planned headliner, comedian Amber Ruffin, apparently over fears she’d alienated Trump World. Is it finally time to cancel this annual Beltway event, or are there better ways journalists can actually celebrate the good work so many still do? Please email me your answer and put the exact phrase “media dinner” in the subject line.

They used to show old black-and-white movies from the 1930s and ‘40s on late-night TV when I was a teenager, and that’s how I fell in love with Frank Capra’s cinematic celebration of American democracy, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, which climaxes when the naive accidental senator played by Jimmy Stewart pulls an all-night filibuster to expose the corrupt boss seeking to destroy him. It’s a fair point to note that the movie glorified a maneuver that since the 19th century has caused more harm than good, but Capra’s bigger idea of one man against the system has inspired political geeks since its premiere in 1939.

Thus, it felt somewhat electrifying at 7 p.m. Monday when New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker rose on the Senate floor to channel the spirit of the fictional Jefferson Smith, promising to speak for as long as he can to highlight the corruption of today’s immoral boss, President Trump. Booker, who until now had not stood out as one of POTUS 47’s more vocal critics, invoked the spirit of the late John Lewis, the legendary civil rights activist: “Tonight I rise with the intention of getting in some ’good trouble’ — I rise with the intention of disrupting the normal business of the United States Senate for as long as I am physically able.”

The New Jersey Democrat said it was time to scream out that Trump’s dictatorial habits are not normal, and his all-night monologue — technically not a filibuster, since it’s not tied to a specific piece of pending legislation — is the most powerful way for him to do that. As a long night journeyed into dawn, Booker highlighted the president at his worst. “What kind of man is in our White House that makes fun of the disabled?” he asked. “Who lies so much that the fact-checkers lose count? Who minimizes the pain and the suffering?”

I know some folks will view with cynicism this gambit by a man whose political ambitions didn’t vanish when his 2020 presidential campaign died from a lack of attention. It’s not going to alter any trajectories on Capitol Hill, but that’s not the point. Booker is responding in the right way to core Democrats, and others, who are also screaming that this is not normal, and who are desperate for political leaders who share their sense of urgency. If Lewis were still here, he’d surely give a thumbs up to this modern-day outbreak of good trouble.

One of the many, many frustrations with Elon Musk’s badly misnamed Department of Governmental Efficiency, or DOGE, is that there’s little evidence it’s seriously going after the main source of actual waste, fraud and abuse in the government: the Pentagon. On this date four years ago, I wrote with disgust about the appalling $1.7 trillion (yes, with a “t”) that the Defense Department has wasted on a poorly performing F-35 stealth fighter jet. I dared ask “what if we went crazy and tackled senseless Pentagon waste and raised taxes on corporations AND on billionaires like Jeff Bezos and used the savings for our other massive needs, like making community college and public universities free to attend?" Read the rest: “Will U.S. learn from a $1.7 trillion goof that would have paid for Biden’s infrastructure plan?”

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