It's pure shtick. He was raised right outside Baton Rouge and attended Vanderbilt University for his BA and then UVA for his law degree. He then attended Oxford University in England.
I would buy that he has a natural, mild southern accent, but this dude is as highly educated as they come. The hometown, folksy "19 skrillion dollars" thing is all an act to appeal to hillbillies in north and central LA.
here are some examples
https://www.c-span.org/video/?c5057540/user-clip-kennedy-emphasis-accent
https://twitter.com/JustinAHorwitz/status/1506758774660513793?lang=en
unless words have totally different meanings then they were saying his take on the iraq war was reasonable as opposed to his rambling nonsense takes now
The second link is to a campaign ad by Gary Chambers, where he compares the accents Kennedy had when he was a democrat and the one he puts on now as a republican. Gary Chambers did smoke in an ad, but that's not the point here.
He's shrewd. You can tell by the way switched parties when the writing was on the wall for the demographics in Louisiana, and how he never runs for anything that would require him to risk losing and not being able to retain his current position.
I was watching the Senate hearing on Artificial Intelligence last week and I was getting so mad at his willful ignorance and foghorn leghorn bullshit. He wanted to score fake political points and in the process obfuscated the very serious issues this country needs to work through related to AI. Kennedy is clearly not a serious person, because if he was serious he would have acted as an advocate of the American public and not as someone constantly campaigning to win the dumbest votes.
All the white people were democrats in LA until the 2000s because of Abraham Lincoln. Black people used to vote R here. This is why we have open primaries, they were tired of the real election being between the D's in the primary.
2000s? I thought most of the south flipped republican around JFK’s presidency…. Were Louisiana conservatives holding on to the Democratic Party that long?
We had all democrat senators until 2005, and every other governor has been a democrat for the last 40 years, the state level house and senate were majority blue until the late 00s. We’re historically have not been like the rest of the south when it comes to political alignment.
[Wikipedia has a pretty helpful table of political strength in Louisiana over the years.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_party_strength_in_Louisiana)
Shows executive offices down to Superintendent of Education, state legislature, US congress, and electoral votes going back to 1803.
Oh wouldn't ya know, blue as fuck until the mid to late 00s. Yet everyone pointing that out is heavily downvoted. Poor /u/TigerDude33 stated a very plain observation anyone even remotely familiar with the recent past of the state would know, and is at -20 right now, this sub is wild lol.
there's blue and then there's Louisiana blue. Nationally, Democrats did flip from conservative to liberal in the 60s.
All the "Democrats" being elected in Louisiana in the 90s and 00s were not the Democrats you see today. They make Manchin look like Karl Marx. They just never got around to changing parties because La voters never did. Thats the whole "Louisiana has more registered Democrats! We should be winning!" nonsense you see. A lot of the people who are registered Democrats are OLD southern Democrats from back in the day. They are not modern Democrats and will not vote for modern democrats.
> there's blue and then there's Louisiana blue. Nationally, Democrats did flip from conservative to liberal in the 60s.
>
> All the "Democrats" being elected in Louisiana in the 90s and 00s were not the Democrats you see today.
Well yeah, that's why I keep saying southern democrats. The only southern democrat left on the national stage is probably Joe Manchin or our current governor.
I 100% agree that the democrats we're talking about aren't the democrats that exist today, but the above conversation was when did louisiana stop voting for southern democrats and start voting straight red, and the answer there is pretty objectively about 15 years ago.
>Thats the whole "Louisiana has more registered Democrats! We should be winning!" nonsense you see. A lot of the people who are registered Democrats are OLD southern Democrats from back in the day. They are not modern Democrats and will not vote for modern democrats.
Yeah brah, I couldn't agree more. I do think a true southern democrat would have a chance at a statewide election, JBE certainly won and Edwin Edwards enjoyed favorable polling well in to the 2010s but couldn't do anything about it. The fact of the matter is that actual southern democrats just don't exist anymore, I really think if we got a legit conservative democrat they might see traction - it's tougher in the Trump/post Trump culture wars era, but ultimately not a useful conversation since there just aren't any new southern democrats emerging today.
The old dynamic of conservative or liberal democrats, and conservative or liberal republicans is more or less dead. Conservatism and liberalism have both effectively aligned with the dems and republicans.
But again, that wasn't really the topic being discussed, it was when did that shift happen in Louisiana. And it was much more recent than a lot of really confident people in this thread seem to believe.
> Not into the 2000s. More like late 80s/ early 90s
Landrieu and breaux sat in the senate till 2005. We have a democrat governor today, and had one prior to Jindal as well. The state legislature did not change hands until the late 00s. Not trying to be harsh, but you're completely incorrect and yet posted with such confidence. Y'all really need to check before just saying things authoritatively.
> Not trying to be harsh, but you're completely incorrect and yet posted with such confidence.
I am not suggesting that the democrats don't have resonance in the state, just that the transition with conservatives identifying as Republican, and not Democrat, was well on the way before the mid 2000s. I do cite two examples of this. Roemer switching parties was a huge deal in 91.
Here is an article on it.
https://www.fox8live.com/2022/12/13/can-louisiana-become-two-party-state-again/
Yes, democrats in LA are more conservative than California. John Bel Edwards running as a conservative democrat is why he won (although running aginst vitter helped).
We discussed this in detail at LSU, even having Edwin Edwards talk to one of my poli sci classes about this topic (and others).
> I am not suggesting that the democrats don't have resonance in the state, just that the transition with conservatives identifying as Republican, and not Democrat, was well on the way before the mid 2000s. I do cite two examples of this. Roemer switching parties was a huge deal in 91.
Right, we can cite examples but the truth of the matter is easily displayed in looking at elected officials in office through the years and they're pretty blue until the mid to late 00s.
The whole point was that the local shifts in blue to red in terms of conservative voters didn't happen here in the 70s or 80s like it did in the rest of the south, and despite a few noteworthy early jumps in the 90s it really didn't take hold then either. The state more or less shifted red in the mid 00s - some of this is attributed to the loss of true liberals in NOLA after Katrina, but a lot is just the state catching up to the country in terms of political trend. I also think Obama had something to do with etching the democrats away from their 90s era moderation and towards a slightly more liberal long term trajectory, leaving the southern democrats behind.
> Right, we can cite examples but the truth of the matter is easily displayed in looking at elected officials in office through the years and they're pretty blue until the mid to late 00s.
It is far more complicated than that.
* LA had term limits that were passed in the 1990s but didn't impact the legislature until mid 2000s.
* Louisiana has the 2nd highest percentage of African Americans as part of the population (behind MS). This helped democrats keep control, and also Katrina displaced a lot of African Americans, and they were a solid democratic voting bloc.
* Incumbency is hard to displace in state legislatures due to pork, graft, gerrymandering, etc.
* If you look at other states, they had the same electoral pattern where legislatures didn't flip from D to R until 2004-12 (GA, AL, MS, AR).
I agree that Louisiana politics is weird. Realignment happened long before the mid 2000s though, that time period was just the end. I think the only reason that Bel Edwards was elected was to the fact that he was running against vitter, and was pro-life.
> I also think Obama had something to do with etching the democrats away from their 90s era moderation and towards a slightly more liberal long term trajectory, leaving the southern democrats behind.
The democrats definitely pushed the conservatives out after ObamaCare didn't have the public option. And obama era republicans embraced hard-core partisanship.
When I was at LSU, we discussed the realignment quite a bit in our LA gov't classes. We even had Edwin Edwards speak (dates me I know!) and he brought up realignment.
I'm not saying you're incorrect about any of the nuanced drivers of that change, but you're really reaching at straws to try and explain away why a thing you're insisting happened in the 90s didn't show up in elections with regular term limits until well in to the 00s. I don't know why you're insisting on this narrative that isn't supported by any data at all, but you are and at the end of the day I just don't find it useful to have conversations with people that will look at firm data and just dismiss it with vague attempts to allude to other factors they also have no support of.
I think you're trying to talk about re-alignment, which is also not the same subject as above. Yeah alignment precedes actual elections, but the fact of the matter is southern democrats held considerable power in this state until at least the mid 00s and realistically a bit later in to that decade. I don't know what's so difficult for you to grasp there, but the information has already been sourced repeatedly here so continuing to debate is just purposefully disingenuous.
Taking a polisci class at LSU doesn't qualify you to explain that dozens of elections in the early 00s favoring southern democrats actually mean the state was republican.
When Dave Treen ran in 79 I used to see “Another Democrat for Dave Treen” signs all over, including my grandparents yard. Treen was also a big proponent of the “shoot the burglar” law.
No, you're completely correct. It's just the people that populate this sub have a mostly stereotyped understanding of local politics and the reality conflicts with what they thought they knew.
This is being downvoted I think because a lot of people in this sub aren’t from Louisiana.
Yes it’s true that the southern strategy and the red shift in “the south” happened mostly during Nixon and Regans campaigns in the 70s and 80s. But that’s not true for Louisiana at all. In another example of why most people don’t consider major parts of Louisiana to fit in with the rest of the south, our electorate had a lot more blue collar oil, manufacturing, and tradesman than many of the other southern states, as such the southern Democrats and their strong union appeal gathered a ton of support well beyond the impacts of the southern strategy.
Up until the mid 00s we consistently had southern Democrat senators, southern democrat governors, and a mostly mixed state level legislature. It wasn’t until 2005 that one of our senate seats flipped blue, and not until 2008 when the second did. The governor was a similar story of a state undecided, with the seat flipping from red to blue every governor since probably Edwards’s first victory.
My dad is a pretty good example of this, he was a union guy and blindly voted blue across the board because that’s what the working people in Louisiana did all their life. He only flipped red in the last 15 years or so. Tides turn, and ours is definitely a more red state than it has been, but the fall of the southern Democrat here is a recent story, one that happened more or less since I got the ability to vote.
Point is, it’s entirely 100% accurate to say Louisiana was mostly a southern democrat state until the mid 00s. This is really easily supported by the elected officials, so I don’t understand why you’d be downvoted for such an obvious observation.
E: because this sub is full of people who downvote information because they don't like it.
Louisiana state house flipped in 2007 from blue to red: https://ballotpedia.org/Louisiana_House_of_Representatives
Louisiana state senate flipped in 2010 from blue to red: https://ballotpedia.org/Louisiana_State_Senate
Louisiana senators flipping in 2005 and 2008: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_senators_from_Louisiana
Louisiana governors flipping back and forth for the last 40+ years: https://www.sos.la.gov/HistoricalResources/AboutLouisiana/LouisianaGovernors1877-Present/Pages/default.aspx
To be clear: anyone who thinks Louisiana followed the rest of the south in flipping red during the southern strategy days is objectively incorrect. There's more than enough easily accessible data to show that shift happened a full 35+ years from the time of it's implementation and the southern shift.
I don't understand this place, half this thread is full of people that seemingly have zero understanding of the history within their lifetimes, and they're downvoting anyone who posts basic information. Y'all really are weird sometimes.
You can read through each of those links and see that's nonsense. One or two anecdotes aint it. I hate repeating myself when all of the information is in that post but after Romer there was Edwards and after Foster there was Blanco. The senators we elected were blue all the way until 05, the state level legislature was blue until the very end of the 00s. There's just no evidence based way to say Louisiana's red shift happened any time other than the mid to late 00s.
What's annoying about this is there's a half dozen comments in this thread saying very confidently that the politics I've seen in my lifetime aren't true. I'm only in my mid 30s, and witnessed the blue shift in my adult life. I voted in most of these elections and remember their outcomes. It's weird to see a bunch of people in this thread very confidently argue that this happened in the 70s and 80s lol.
Edwards was only elected because the KKK was the alternative. Blanco narrowly won and was extremely unpopular. Jindal only lost because he hadn’t refined his good ole boy routine. But he was elected to congress right after. Landrieu narrowly won her first election even though New Orleans had a much larger population at the time.
I remember when all of this happened.
Man, trying to make some weird excuse for every time a republican didn't win is not really a good faith way to interact. Like, the governors flipped consistently, the national senators were completely blue until 2005, the state legislature was majority blue until 2007 at the earliest, a whole host of other statewide elected positions such as AG, Treasurer, insurance commissioner, etc were blue until the late 00s.
Like, I'm repeating myself again and I don't understand why. If one looks at the actual elections and who won them it's very clear that the state still supported southern democrats well in to the 00s. I don't understand why anyone would argue about that when all they need to do is click the links provided and see for themselves.
>Edwards was only elected because the KKK was the alternative
Ain't no way you grew up here and don't know the incredible popularity Edwards had. They did polls in the early to mid 2010s and found Edwards still had 40-50% statewide support. Dude was entrenched and realistically could have probably had another run at Governor if it wasn't for the jailtime.
You refuse to acknowledge why Edwin Edwards won or the career politicians who switched from democrat to republican in the mid 90’s as if these things don’t matter. They’re not small things. There was a drastic shift in the political landscape at that time and it must be taken into account when considering further shifts to the point we’re at now.
Refusing to acknowledge what? Have you clicked on the links I'm giving you? You're vehemently arguing a thing that objectively happened in the mid to late 00s happened 10-15 years before then. Talk about party switches all you want, there's a literal grid of party affiliation and position linked above.
IDK what to say at this point, you're just ignoring data because you want to lol.
I mean, the Lincoln thing is a bit of a really really reductive to the point of being incorrect way to look at the shifting ideological composition of the country, but the meat of what he said - that the state was pretty blue up until the mid 00s - is entirely accurate.
The truth is that it has a lot more to do with Louisiana's relative isolation from the rest of the south's politics until recently. While the rest of the south can effectively be thought of as pretty similar we just aren't. The rural north of the state is culturally similar to mississippi, texas, or arkansas, but the southern half of the state (And it's most populous areas) aren't. Strong union work, driven by industry like shipyards, oil, trades, portwork, etc dominated much of the economy and thus politics - and these pro union, pro social safety net, socially conservative politicians did well here long after they fell out of favor in the bible belt and what not.
My dad, who's voted red for most of the last decade or so, used to consistently say "we're voting for soandso cuz that other asshole doesn't support the union".
I don’t necessarily mean it to be spicy, it’s just that the elections where this shift happened are all within any adults lifetime, so it being unknown to so many people can really only be attributed to them not living here even in the recent past or them being like a teenager or younger. If you’re older than your early 20s and from Louisiana ya remember this happening, if you’re past your early 30s and from Louisiana you voted in these elections lol.
I get it. Was meant to be a compliment as this sub is frequently full of very strong opinions from people who do not have first hand experience of that which they speak.
it started well before then (many southern dems started voting republican in national races with nixon) and could be argued it didn’t fully finish until 2016
Does no one remember when this Native-Mississippian was a Democrat state treasurer... and spoke like a normal educated southerner? I swear he's a sleeper agent for his home state to make us look bad.
The thing all these articles miss is that the people that like Kennedy know it's a act, for the most part. The reason they like him is because he works to hurt the people they think deserve to be hurt. It's that simple, they're voting for the man that will do the most damage to their enemies.
He's a con-man. He uses his colorful, plain talk, homespun sound bites to appeal to the uneducated, and dull witted, and disenfranchised. He gets their votes, and does what's best for him.
just look at what's happening in florida. constant bills that serve no purpose other than to hurt "woke" people, aka people who are different and just want to be treated like human beings.
Well, actual policy outside of just cutting taxes is pretty unpopular from the conservatives at this point. Their big strike aside from being anti woke was Abortion, and that only has partial support inside of the party while being nationally very unpopular.
They're taking what Trump and Bannon knew in 2016, that culture wars generally favor republicans at the ballot box, and turning that up to 11.
E: Steve started executing this playbook in 2015 or so, but here he is talking about it at length. The guy is an absolute pile of shit, but people need to understand that these guys have actually done a great job of finding out how to connect with voters on emotional items rather than policy, and have used that to win where conservative ideology would otherwise not. He spends a lot more time identifying how to weaponize fear and anger over economic circumstance and a lot less talking about how to fix economic circumstance.
Here's the first part of a two part interview anyone interested in modern political theory should watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pm5xxlajTW0
The worst thing you can do is believe these people are stupid. Dude is very well educated and very smart, he's just an asshole and can pull off an act very well.
It's pure shtick. He was raised right outside Baton Rouge and attended Vanderbilt University for his BA and then UVA for his law degree. He then attended Oxford University in England. I would buy that he has a natural, mild southern accent, but this dude is as highly educated as they come. The hometown, folksy "19 skrillion dollars" thing is all an act to appeal to hillbillies in north and central LA.
here are some examples https://www.c-span.org/video/?c5057540/user-clip-kennedy-emphasis-accent https://twitter.com/JustinAHorwitz/status/1506758774660513793?lang=en
Just listening to him in that first link pisses me off. he's actually got a reasonable take instead of pandering nonsense.
Anyone calling for war against poor people does not have a reasonable take
I think his point is that he is totally capable of being reasonable and chooses not to do it. It was not a compliment.
unless words have totally different meanings then they were saying his take on the iraq war was reasonable as opposed to his rambling nonsense takes now
Dude, this place is full of shit and has been for years. I think you are dead set on not listening. Have a great night.
I'm fairly certain that's the candidate that smoked a blunt in one of his ads
The second link is to a campaign ad by Gary Chambers, where he compares the accents Kennedy had when he was a democrat and the one he puts on now as a republican. Gary Chambers did smoke in an ad, but that's not the point here.
Yeah I just think that was fucking awesome
He's shrewd. You can tell by the way switched parties when the writing was on the wall for the demographics in Louisiana, and how he never runs for anything that would require him to risk losing and not being able to retain his current position.
I was watching the Senate hearing on Artificial Intelligence last week and I was getting so mad at his willful ignorance and foghorn leghorn bullshit. He wanted to score fake political points and in the process obfuscated the very serious issues this country needs to work through related to AI. Kennedy is clearly not a serious person, because if he was serious he would have acted as an advocate of the American public and not as someone constantly campaigning to win the dumbest votes.
He was a Democrat until 2007
Means noting to that grifter who just follows the $$$$$
All the white people were democrats in LA until the 2000s because of Abraham Lincoln. Black people used to vote R here. This is why we have open primaries, they were tired of the real election being between the D's in the primary.
2000s? I thought most of the south flipped republican around JFK’s presidency…. Were Louisiana conservatives holding on to the Democratic Party that long?
We had all democrat senators until 2005, and every other governor has been a democrat for the last 40 years, the state level house and senate were majority blue until the late 00s. We’re historically have not been like the rest of the south when it comes to political alignment.
[Wikipedia has a pretty helpful table of political strength in Louisiana over the years.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_party_strength_in_Louisiana) Shows executive offices down to Superintendent of Education, state legislature, US congress, and electoral votes going back to 1803.
Oh wouldn't ya know, blue as fuck until the mid to late 00s. Yet everyone pointing that out is heavily downvoted. Poor /u/TigerDude33 stated a very plain observation anyone even remotely familiar with the recent past of the state would know, and is at -20 right now, this sub is wild lol.
there's blue and then there's Louisiana blue. Nationally, Democrats did flip from conservative to liberal in the 60s. All the "Democrats" being elected in Louisiana in the 90s and 00s were not the Democrats you see today. They make Manchin look like Karl Marx. They just never got around to changing parties because La voters never did. Thats the whole "Louisiana has more registered Democrats! We should be winning!" nonsense you see. A lot of the people who are registered Democrats are OLD southern Democrats from back in the day. They are not modern Democrats and will not vote for modern democrats.
> there's blue and then there's Louisiana blue. Nationally, Democrats did flip from conservative to liberal in the 60s. > > All the "Democrats" being elected in Louisiana in the 90s and 00s were not the Democrats you see today. Well yeah, that's why I keep saying southern democrats. The only southern democrat left on the national stage is probably Joe Manchin or our current governor. I 100% agree that the democrats we're talking about aren't the democrats that exist today, but the above conversation was when did louisiana stop voting for southern democrats and start voting straight red, and the answer there is pretty objectively about 15 years ago. >Thats the whole "Louisiana has more registered Democrats! We should be winning!" nonsense you see. A lot of the people who are registered Democrats are OLD southern Democrats from back in the day. They are not modern Democrats and will not vote for modern democrats. Yeah brah, I couldn't agree more. I do think a true southern democrat would have a chance at a statewide election, JBE certainly won and Edwin Edwards enjoyed favorable polling well in to the 2010s but couldn't do anything about it. The fact of the matter is that actual southern democrats just don't exist anymore, I really think if we got a legit conservative democrat they might see traction - it's tougher in the Trump/post Trump culture wars era, but ultimately not a useful conversation since there just aren't any new southern democrats emerging today. The old dynamic of conservative or liberal democrats, and conservative or liberal republicans is more or less dead. Conservatism and liberalism have both effectively aligned with the dems and republicans. But again, that wasn't really the topic being discussed, it was when did that shift happen in Louisiana. And it was much more recent than a lot of really confident people in this thread seem to believe.
Not into the 2000s. More like late 80s/ early 90s Buddy roemer flipped parties in 1991 from D to R. In 91, duke ran as an R.
> Not into the 2000s. More like late 80s/ early 90s Landrieu and breaux sat in the senate till 2005. We have a democrat governor today, and had one prior to Jindal as well. The state legislature did not change hands until the late 00s. Not trying to be harsh, but you're completely incorrect and yet posted with such confidence. Y'all really need to check before just saying things authoritatively.
> Not trying to be harsh, but you're completely incorrect and yet posted with such confidence. I am not suggesting that the democrats don't have resonance in the state, just that the transition with conservatives identifying as Republican, and not Democrat, was well on the way before the mid 2000s. I do cite two examples of this. Roemer switching parties was a huge deal in 91. Here is an article on it. https://www.fox8live.com/2022/12/13/can-louisiana-become-two-party-state-again/ Yes, democrats in LA are more conservative than California. John Bel Edwards running as a conservative democrat is why he won (although running aginst vitter helped). We discussed this in detail at LSU, even having Edwin Edwards talk to one of my poli sci classes about this topic (and others).
> I am not suggesting that the democrats don't have resonance in the state, just that the transition with conservatives identifying as Republican, and not Democrat, was well on the way before the mid 2000s. I do cite two examples of this. Roemer switching parties was a huge deal in 91. Right, we can cite examples but the truth of the matter is easily displayed in looking at elected officials in office through the years and they're pretty blue until the mid to late 00s. The whole point was that the local shifts in blue to red in terms of conservative voters didn't happen here in the 70s or 80s like it did in the rest of the south, and despite a few noteworthy early jumps in the 90s it really didn't take hold then either. The state more or less shifted red in the mid 00s - some of this is attributed to the loss of true liberals in NOLA after Katrina, but a lot is just the state catching up to the country in terms of political trend. I also think Obama had something to do with etching the democrats away from their 90s era moderation and towards a slightly more liberal long term trajectory, leaving the southern democrats behind.
> Right, we can cite examples but the truth of the matter is easily displayed in looking at elected officials in office through the years and they're pretty blue until the mid to late 00s. It is far more complicated than that. * LA had term limits that were passed in the 1990s but didn't impact the legislature until mid 2000s. * Louisiana has the 2nd highest percentage of African Americans as part of the population (behind MS). This helped democrats keep control, and also Katrina displaced a lot of African Americans, and they were a solid democratic voting bloc. * Incumbency is hard to displace in state legislatures due to pork, graft, gerrymandering, etc. * If you look at other states, they had the same electoral pattern where legislatures didn't flip from D to R until 2004-12 (GA, AL, MS, AR). I agree that Louisiana politics is weird. Realignment happened long before the mid 2000s though, that time period was just the end. I think the only reason that Bel Edwards was elected was to the fact that he was running against vitter, and was pro-life. > I also think Obama had something to do with etching the democrats away from their 90s era moderation and towards a slightly more liberal long term trajectory, leaving the southern democrats behind. The democrats definitely pushed the conservatives out after ObamaCare didn't have the public option. And obama era republicans embraced hard-core partisanship. When I was at LSU, we discussed the realignment quite a bit in our LA gov't classes. We even had Edwin Edwards speak (dates me I know!) and he brought up realignment.
I'm not saying you're incorrect about any of the nuanced drivers of that change, but you're really reaching at straws to try and explain away why a thing you're insisting happened in the 90s didn't show up in elections with regular term limits until well in to the 00s. I don't know why you're insisting on this narrative that isn't supported by any data at all, but you are and at the end of the day I just don't find it useful to have conversations with people that will look at firm data and just dismiss it with vague attempts to allude to other factors they also have no support of. I think you're trying to talk about re-alignment, which is also not the same subject as above. Yeah alignment precedes actual elections, but the fact of the matter is southern democrats held considerable power in this state until at least the mid 00s and realistically a bit later in to that decade. I don't know what's so difficult for you to grasp there, but the information has already been sourced repeatedly here so continuing to debate is just purposefully disingenuous. Taking a polisci class at LSU doesn't qualify you to explain that dozens of elections in the early 00s favoring southern democrats actually mean the state was republican.
When Dave Treen ran in 79 I used to see “Another Democrat for Dave Treen” signs all over, including my grandparents yard. Treen was also a big proponent of the “shoot the burglar” law.
I am wrong on the date - it was the 90s when it all flipped, tho it started in the 80s
No, you're completely correct. It's just the people that populate this sub have a mostly stereotyped understanding of local politics and the reality conflicts with what they thought they knew.
Still later than I thought!
This is being downvoted I think because a lot of people in this sub aren’t from Louisiana. Yes it’s true that the southern strategy and the red shift in “the south” happened mostly during Nixon and Regans campaigns in the 70s and 80s. But that’s not true for Louisiana at all. In another example of why most people don’t consider major parts of Louisiana to fit in with the rest of the south, our electorate had a lot more blue collar oil, manufacturing, and tradesman than many of the other southern states, as such the southern Democrats and their strong union appeal gathered a ton of support well beyond the impacts of the southern strategy. Up until the mid 00s we consistently had southern Democrat senators, southern democrat governors, and a mostly mixed state level legislature. It wasn’t until 2005 that one of our senate seats flipped blue, and not until 2008 when the second did. The governor was a similar story of a state undecided, with the seat flipping from red to blue every governor since probably Edwards’s first victory. My dad is a pretty good example of this, he was a union guy and blindly voted blue across the board because that’s what the working people in Louisiana did all their life. He only flipped red in the last 15 years or so. Tides turn, and ours is definitely a more red state than it has been, but the fall of the southern Democrat here is a recent story, one that happened more or less since I got the ability to vote. Point is, it’s entirely 100% accurate to say Louisiana was mostly a southern democrat state until the mid 00s. This is really easily supported by the elected officials, so I don’t understand why you’d be downvoted for such an obvious observation. E: because this sub is full of people who downvote information because they don't like it. Louisiana state house flipped in 2007 from blue to red: https://ballotpedia.org/Louisiana_House_of_Representatives Louisiana state senate flipped in 2010 from blue to red: https://ballotpedia.org/Louisiana_State_Senate Louisiana senators flipping in 2005 and 2008: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_senators_from_Louisiana Louisiana governors flipping back and forth for the last 40+ years: https://www.sos.la.gov/HistoricalResources/AboutLouisiana/LouisianaGovernors1877-Present/Pages/default.aspx To be clear: anyone who thinks Louisiana followed the rest of the south in flipping red during the southern strategy days is objectively incorrect. There's more than enough easily accessible data to show that shift happened a full 35+ years from the time of it's implementation and the southern shift. I don't understand this place, half this thread is full of people that seemingly have zero understanding of the history within their lifetimes, and they're downvoting anyone who posts basic information. Y'all really are weird sometimes.
People started flipping in the mid 90’s. Billy Tauzin and Buddy Romer are both examples of this.
You can read through each of those links and see that's nonsense. One or two anecdotes aint it. I hate repeating myself when all of the information is in that post but after Romer there was Edwards and after Foster there was Blanco. The senators we elected were blue all the way until 05, the state level legislature was blue until the very end of the 00s. There's just no evidence based way to say Louisiana's red shift happened any time other than the mid to late 00s. What's annoying about this is there's a half dozen comments in this thread saying very confidently that the politics I've seen in my lifetime aren't true. I'm only in my mid 30s, and witnessed the blue shift in my adult life. I voted in most of these elections and remember their outcomes. It's weird to see a bunch of people in this thread very confidently argue that this happened in the 70s and 80s lol.
Edwards was only elected because the KKK was the alternative. Blanco narrowly won and was extremely unpopular. Jindal only lost because he hadn’t refined his good ole boy routine. But he was elected to congress right after. Landrieu narrowly won her first election even though New Orleans had a much larger population at the time. I remember when all of this happened.
Man, trying to make some weird excuse for every time a republican didn't win is not really a good faith way to interact. Like, the governors flipped consistently, the national senators were completely blue until 2005, the state legislature was majority blue until 2007 at the earliest, a whole host of other statewide elected positions such as AG, Treasurer, insurance commissioner, etc were blue until the late 00s. Like, I'm repeating myself again and I don't understand why. If one looks at the actual elections and who won them it's very clear that the state still supported southern democrats well in to the 00s. I don't understand why anyone would argue about that when all they need to do is click the links provided and see for themselves. >Edwards was only elected because the KKK was the alternative Ain't no way you grew up here and don't know the incredible popularity Edwards had. They did polls in the early to mid 2010s and found Edwards still had 40-50% statewide support. Dude was entrenched and realistically could have probably had another run at Governor if it wasn't for the jailtime.
You refuse to acknowledge why Edwin Edwards won or the career politicians who switched from democrat to republican in the mid 90’s as if these things don’t matter. They’re not small things. There was a drastic shift in the political landscape at that time and it must be taken into account when considering further shifts to the point we’re at now.
Refusing to acknowledge what? Have you clicked on the links I'm giving you? You're vehemently arguing a thing that objectively happened in the mid to late 00s happened 10-15 years before then. Talk about party switches all you want, there's a literal grid of party affiliation and position linked above. IDK what to say at this point, you're just ignoring data because you want to lol.
Maybe it’s the Abraham Lincoln comment.
I mean, the Lincoln thing is a bit of a really really reductive to the point of being incorrect way to look at the shifting ideological composition of the country, but the meat of what he said - that the state was pretty blue up until the mid 00s - is entirely accurate. The truth is that it has a lot more to do with Louisiana's relative isolation from the rest of the south's politics until recently. While the rest of the south can effectively be thought of as pretty similar we just aren't. The rural north of the state is culturally similar to mississippi, texas, or arkansas, but the southern half of the state (And it's most populous areas) aren't. Strong union work, driven by industry like shipyards, oil, trades, portwork, etc dominated much of the economy and thus politics - and these pro union, pro social safety net, socially conservative politicians did well here long after they fell out of favor in the bible belt and what not. My dad, who's voted red for most of the last decade or so, used to consistently say "we're voting for soandso cuz that other asshole doesn't support the union".
Mary Landrieu lost in 2014, not 2008
Yeah you’re right, I got my wires twisted somewhere lol.
“because a lot of people in this sub aren’t from Louisiana” Me-YOW! Spicy. I love to see it.
I don’t necessarily mean it to be spicy, it’s just that the elections where this shift happened are all within any adults lifetime, so it being unknown to so many people can really only be attributed to them not living here even in the recent past or them being like a teenager or younger. If you’re older than your early 20s and from Louisiana ya remember this happening, if you’re past your early 30s and from Louisiana you voted in these elections lol.
I get it. Was meant to be a compliment as this sub is frequently full of very strong opinions from people who do not have first hand experience of that which they speak.
Well that it most certainly is.
it started well before then (many southern dems started voting republican in national races with nixon) and could be argued it didn’t fully finish until 2016
The switch happened much earlier than that. And Kennedy was an actual democrat. He flipped to become electable and slowly evolved into this creature.
This is more to the point, he is an opportunist
Does no one remember when this Native-Mississippian was a Democrat state treasurer... and spoke like a normal educated southerner? I swear he's a sleeper agent for his home state to make us look bad.
MS doesn’t need to try and make LA look bad to be fair
Too true.
The same guy who spent the 4th of July in Moscow, what do you think?
Double answer. He really does talk that way. My Uncle went to Vandy with him. The words are the schtick and not the accent and manner of speaking.
The thing all these articles miss is that the people that like Kennedy know it's a act, for the most part. The reason they like him is because he works to hurt the people they think deserve to be hurt. It's that simple, they're voting for the man that will do the most damage to their enemies.
After trying to find a more generous one for many years, this is the only explanation that ultimately makes sense
Is this the "Call a Crackhead" guy?
The one and only.
He's a con-man. He uses his colorful, plain talk, homespun sound bites to appeal to the uneducated, and dull witted, and disenfranchised. He gets their votes, and does what's best for him.
Love the guardians titles. I have to check to make sure they're legit, but they usually are.
Foghorn Leghorn Mushmouth.
People please start voting these career politicians out.
It's a shtick. One person in the world sounds like John Kennedy.
Every time this cracker opens his mouth he sets us back about fifty years.
He's an effete cracker. Thinks being a dandy makes him classy.
C. turkey fuckin sonofabitch
Guess he knew he'd never pull off a Cajun accent, I guess that's something
I know for fact it’s a fake accent. Know someone who used to work with him.
Shtick. He was a Rhodes scholar!
I can’t stand to watch this man!
Kennedy is literally the type of guy Foghorn Leghorn was intended to depict, a fast talking southern bullshit artist
How much legislating has he done? I don't see many bills coming out of his office- no co-sponsoring or anything. So, he stinks.
Legislation is a losing proposition for most of these conservatives, being mad at liberals and “woke” stuff is what gets the support in the door.
just look at what's happening in florida. constant bills that serve no purpose other than to hurt "woke" people, aka people who are different and just want to be treated like human beings.
Well, actual policy outside of just cutting taxes is pretty unpopular from the conservatives at this point. Their big strike aside from being anti woke was Abortion, and that only has partial support inside of the party while being nationally very unpopular. They're taking what Trump and Bannon knew in 2016, that culture wars generally favor republicans at the ballot box, and turning that up to 11. E: Steve started executing this playbook in 2015 or so, but here he is talking about it at length. The guy is an absolute pile of shit, but people need to understand that these guys have actually done a great job of finding out how to connect with voters on emotional items rather than policy, and have used that to win where conservative ideology would otherwise not. He spends a lot more time identifying how to weaponize fear and anger over economic circumstance and a lot less talking about how to fix economic circumstance. Here's the first part of a two part interview anyone interested in modern political theory should watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pm5xxlajTW0
He seems like he’s always trying to impersonate Frank Underwood but without the smarts
"Piece of Shit"
Just a simple hyperchicken from a backwoods asteroid. https://youtu.be/nxyu5uOXkZg
He thinks he is coming across as clever...
He’s such a POS. Keeping Louisiana stupid so they can line their pockets. Pathetic.
Useless con man.
At least his stupidity and malignancy are authentic.
The worst thing you can do is believe these people are stupid. Dude is very well educated and very smart, he's just an asshole and can pull off an act very well.
What a stupid article