President Donald Trump recently spent time campaigning in Louisiana — when he wasn’t paying a $2 million fine for misusing his charitable foundation for his own benefit, or live tweeting his own impeachment hearings — to try to bolster the chance of the Republican candidate for governor there.
That candidate, Eddie Risponse, lost to incumbent John Bel Edwards on Saturday night. And as pundits everywhere reacted to the results, attempting to decipher what it all means for Trump’s influence in the Republican Party moving forward, this spectacular tweet entered the world and I wanted to give it human form and embrace it in the longest of bear hugs.
The final margin is likely to be very close. A Dem strategist I just spoke with credits LSU's win vs. Alabama for voters' satisfaction w/ direction of state & Edwards's razor-thin victory. #LAGOV
— Dave Wasserman (@Redistrict) November 17, 2019
I’m not gloating over a Democratic win here. We can set aside my own political feelings for a moment. What I love most is that we still, in 2019, know so little about the forces moving our electorate that we’re liable to just give a recent football game the credit — AND THAT MIGHT BE ABSOLUTELY TRUE.
I have no doubt that the people of Louisiana may feel better about, well, everything in the wake of LSU finally beating Alabama at football again. That win has nothing to do with the governor — and everything to do with Coach O and his speeches — but sports is a thing we can all easily grasp and come together around. Public policy? Not so much.
That’s not great for the strength of our democracy, when you think about it, but it’s also not by any means a new phenomenon. Elections have long swung on popularity and general prosperity — whether or not those things were germane in any way.
Of course, former Alabama running back Mark Ingram has already blamed the Crimson Tide’s loss on Trump … so if that logic follows (it doesn’t, but go with me) then it was Trump, in the end, that doomed Republicans in Louisiana — via football, not all the the other stuff being debated on the Sunday morning shows as I type.
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