Lost in the shuffle earlier this week is the fact that one U.S. Senate race still has to be determined:
The 2016 Election isn’t over yet
How a man you’ve never heard of could be our last chance to stop Trump.
Behind 48 seats to 52, Senate Democrats will need to seek out the few remaining moderate Republicans—at least three of them, if they want any hope of overriding bills put forward by the even more lopsided House of Representatives.
That is if Foster Campbell, a cattle rancher, in Louisiana, can’t beat his Republican challenger.
Because of it’s wacky primary system, Louisiana holds the final Senate and House elections on December 10th. If Campbell can pull an upset, it will have huge implications for the Democrats’ ability to check Donald Trump.
For any other Democrat, winning Louisiana seems unfeasible. After all, the state went 60–40 for Trump. However, Foster Campbell is not any other Democrat.
Foster will fare much better than Hillary because he knows the electorate. Through four decades of listening to those around him, he built up a huge network of support in a deeply Red State. He’s stood up to big Tobacco companies, fought to fund schools, and led a campaign to lower the high cost of telephone calls from Louisiana jails and prisons. In 2008 he was elected to the Louisiana Public Service Commission with more than 78 percent of the vote.
Read the whole piece. Here’s Campbell’s website. I just donated a few bucks to him myself.
Oh, and here’s some more detail about how the Nov. 8th “jungle primary” played out (ironically, the link goes to...FOX News):
Democrat Foster Campbell and Republican John Kennedy are set to square off on Dec. 10, an automatic runoff triggered when no candidate earned more than 50 percent of the vote in Tuesday’s election.
(Yes, that’s right...his Republican opponent’s name is...John Kennedy. Irony is not without a sense of humor, it seems).
Kennedy led Campbell 25-to-17 percent with 99 percent of precincts reporting early Wednesday morning. Republican Charles Boustany (15.4 percent), Democrat Caroline Fayard (12.5 percent) and Republican John Fleming (10.5 percent) were the only other candidates in a crowded field to win more than 10 percent of the vote.
Kennedy, the Louisiana state treasurer, and Campbell, the public service commissioner, are vying to replace retiring Republican Sen. David Vitter.
White supremacist David Duke was also running but had not polled in the top-tier in the field of two dozen candidates. Duke had captured just 3 percent of the vote as of Wednesday morning.
Well, I suppose there’s some comfort in knowing that only 3% of Louisiana residents were willing to vote for David Duke in a year in which his fave-rave Donald Trump won the Presidency...
Here’s the full results from the Louisiana SoS website:
I added up all of the GOP & Libertarian candidates and got about 1.2 million. All of the Dem candidates combined to around 700,000...so that’s roughly a 63 GOP / 37 Dem split overall. Ouch. However, as noted in the first article, runoff turnout tends to be absurdly tiny, and Campbell appears to be an excellent candidate.
The odds aren’t great, but if we pull this off it would be very important in helping to put the brakes on Trump’s insanity.