Is the GOP effort to sink the far-right frontrunner in the race to be Louisiana's next governor having an impact? Dueling polls tell different stories, but either way, the news still isn't good for the target of that campaign, Republican Attorney General Jeff Landry.
The contest took an early turn for the ugly last month when Reboot Louisiana, a super PAC backing former state Chamber of Commerce head Stephen Waguespack, launched an expensive ad blitz both promoting their candidate and slamming Landry. The PAC released a poll Wednesday arguing its efforts are starting to pay off, but a Democratic survey from a week earlier suggests the effects haven't been quite so dramatic.
That new internal from Reboot Louisiana, conducted by the Republican firm Remington Research, shows former state Transportation Secretary Shawn Wilson, who is the only serious Democrat in the race, taking 27% in the Oct. 14 all-party primary as Landry outpaces Waguespack 25-16 for the second-place spot in the likely runoff.
While that’s still a clear edge for the frontrunner, it's also the first time we've seen Waguespack taking more than 5%. Indeed, Remington says that an unreleased March survey gave him just 2% compared to 30% for Landry. The poll further finds Waguespack well ahead of the remainder of the field, with GOP Treasurer John Schroder a distant fourth with 7%.
This new poll was conducted June 22-25, which was about a week after another firm showed Waguespack performing very differently. The Kitchens Group, a Democratic pollster, put Landry ahead of Wilson 31-21, with Schroder at 6% and Waguespack at just 5. But pollster Jim Kitchens, who worked for termed-out Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards ahead of his upset 2015 win, argued that his results still shouldn't delight Landry.
“While Jeff Landry has a good start, he is in a similar position to where David Vitter began eight years ago,” Kitchens told NOLA.com’s Tyler Bridges. “With 25% of the electorate undecided, there is ample opportunity for any candidate to find a message and emerge as a strong contender.” Vitter, who spent most of that race as the frontrunner despite his myriad scandals, ended up only narrowly outpacing fellow Republican Scott Angelle just 23-19 a month before he badly lost the general to Edwards. (Kitchens, who says that a partner, Vantage Data House, sponsored this survey to get its name out, did not publicize any numbers looking at whether Wilson could score a third straight runoff victory for his party in this red state.)
One major difference between this race and the one that saw Edwards upset Vitter is just how early the mud has started to fly. In 2015, Republicans waited until around Labor Day to begin attacking one another on TV, but Waguespack’s backers deployed their first negative ad hitting Landry a month ago. The effort to both destroy the frontrunner’s tough-on-crime image and build up their man’s own name recognition hasn’t been cheap, as the GOP firm Medium Buying reports that Reboot Louisiana has already spent $1.5 million on TV and radio ads so far. (Schroeder himself has spent a comparable $1.45 million, but no one’s released any polls showing him escaping the single digits.)
Landry’s own super PAC allies at Protect Louisiana's Children responded with their own commercials informing viewers that Waguespack once served as chief of staff to former Gov. Bobby Jindal, a one-time GOP rising star who left office in 2016 with disastrous approval numbers after presiding over years of massive budget cuts. The PAC, according to Medium, has so far spent $385,000 on advertising, though.
Landry’s campaign, meanwhile, has deployed $465,000 on his own advertising, including messaging unsubtly blaming crime on Black Democratic mayors and district attorneys, but he’s yet to bring up any of his actual opponents by name. In fact, the attorney general doesn’t even want to be seen with his actual opponents: Bridges reports that, not only has Landry skipped every candidate forum so far, his team has informed organizers he’ll only show up to events if he gets the stage to himself.
