A week before Saturday’s remarkable gubernatorial runoff in Louisiana, the polls continued to show Democrat John Bel Edwards with an unlikely lead over Republican David Vitter. While there were plenty of reasons to be mistrustful of the polling (after all, Democrats found themselves ahead in Kentucky earlier this month, only to lose in the end), Vitter sank deep into the gutter with a grotesque move that reflected what turned out to be extreme desperation: He ran the sickening ad below trying to stoke fears over the horrendous Paris terror attacks and the Syrian refugee crisis.
Narrator: One of the Paris ISIS terrorists entered France posing as a Syrian refugee. Now Obama is sending Syrian refugees to Louisiana. David Vitter warned Obama the dangers of Syrian refugees weeks ago and promised as governor no Syrian refugees will enter Louisiana. John Bel Edwards has pledged to work with Obama to bring Syrian refugees to Louisiana.
A pro-Vitter super PAC piled on with an even more revolting spot that featured footage of what were presumably ISIS soldiers riding tanks. Now, Edwards was no hero on the matter of refugees: Like Vitter, he called for a halt in accepting more. But he most certainly did not deploy the naked and hysterical fearmongering that Vitter trumpeted around the clock in the last week of the campaign.
And in the end, Edwards won, by a decisive 56-44 margin. Campaigns are complex beasts, and there are many reasons why Vitter went down to defeat; it would be impossible to point to a single cause, even one as potent as the unexpected revival of Vitter’s prostitution scandal. That makes it difficult to draw conclusions about which attacks were actually effective on the campaign trail.
But thanks to the final results, we can say definitively that Vitter’s attempts to peddle xenophobia and hatred emphatically did not work. In fact, as you can see from Huffington Post Pollster’s average, which accurately forecast Edwards’ final margin, Vitter’s assault didn’t even budge the polls one bit.
Some amoral pundits have already decreed that fomenting fear over Syrian refugees is “smart politics.” It didn’t help Vitter at all, though—a fact that other politicians would be wise to remember.