Louisiana Voice

BATON ROUGE (CNS)—While the media was busy gushing over the “overwhelming,” “record-setting” landslide re-election victory by Gov. Bobby Jindal Saturday night and on into Sunday, they overlooked a couple of pretty important points.

Someone once said statistics are for losers. Okay, so let’s look at the statistics while we lick our wounds.

Sure, Jindal pulled down a whopping 65.8 percent of the vote. But he had a $9 million campaign budget. If you lived in Louisiana and you have a phone, you received no less than a dozen pre-recorded messages from him. Those cost money, but he had plenty.

His opponent? Well, Haynesville school teacher Tara Hollis had a campaign budget in the neighborhood of $50,000. Most of that was in the form of in-kind contributions. In actual monetary expenditures, the total was more like $18,000, so give Jindal a 500-1 advantage in available bucks. Still, she managed to account for 17.8 percent of the vote.

The official numbers show that Jindal, with a four-year track record and that $10 million war chest, tallied 673,155 votes to Hollis’s 182,808. In all, 1,022,770 people cast votes.

But let’s look back at the last two gubernatorial elections.

Four years ago, when nearly 1.3 million people voted, Jindal got 699,275 votes. But in 2003, when 1.4 million voted, he got only 676,484. That means that Jindal has basically been a standstill candidate at best, incapable of drawing more than 700,000 votes from some three million registered voters.

That’s hardly a mandate by any measure. A mandate would have been reflected in a much larger turnout than the dismal 33 percent of registered voters who cast ballots last Saturday.

A mandate would seem to dictate that he would have received more votes in this election than he did in 2003—when he lost. But he didn’t.

If he were as great as the media makes him out to be it seems he would have gained substantial strength over the past eight years. Instead, he is held to 65.8 percent of the vote against an opponent with a mere fraction of his financial resources.

In 2003, in a head-to-head contest with Kathleen Blanco, those 1.4 million voters gave Blanco 52 percent to Jindal’s 48 percent. And Blanco was no Edwin Edwards.

Let’s look at 2007 a little more closely.

Four years ago he had two candidates who poured money into their campaigns. John Georges spent $9 million (roughly the same amount as Jindal spent this year) and got 14.4 percent of the vote. Walter Boasso spent $5 million and received 17.4 percent.

Did we mention that Tara Hollis spent $18,000 this year and got 17.8 percent?

That begs the question of what might the numbers have looked like had the Democratic Party run a candidate with greater name recognition—and a larger campaign war chest.

Jindal, knowing he was a lock for re-election, was not content to merely run for governor; he threw his support—and campaign money—behind 86 legislative candidates and five candidates for the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE).

But, it turned out much of that support—and money—was more style than substance, designed to make Jindal appear to be a wizard at handicapping elections. All one has to do is look at the track record of candidates endorsed by him in the past. A hint: he has a worse winning percentage in backing candidates than David Vitter. Ouch.

Of the 86 legislative candidates whom he endorsed, 54, or 63 percent, were unopposed. It’s pretty easy to back a winner that way. Of the remaining 32, He picked 18 winners outright (56 percent) and lost six. The remaining eight are headed for Nov. 19 runoffs.

Even more significantly, none of the incumbents targeted for defeat by Jindal lost. Repeat, none. These include Sen. Ben Nevers (D-Bogalusa), Rep. Bernard LeBas (D-Ville Platte), Rep. Robert Johnson (D-Marksville) and about a half-dozen others.

With the exception of districts in which incumbents were pitted against each other because of reapportionment, not a single statewide official or legislator running re-election was defeated. That says more for voter apathy than it does for Jindal’s ability to influence an election.

When the new legislature convenes next spring, Jindal will have 24 Republicans in the 39 Senate seats and, depending on the outcome of the November runoffs, between 54 and 62 in the House.

That means he will have a majority in both houses—but significantly, not the super (two-thirds) majority needed for him to push through certain of the major proposals he has planned for his new term.

Easy to overlook, however, is the one area in which Jindal did score major victories—BESE.

Education is at the top of Jindal’s to-do list and to that end he contributed $5,000 each to five favored BESE candidates (The legislative candidates he backed got only $2,500 each). Three of those won, another lost, and the fifth, District 6 incumbent Chas Roemer, is in a surprise runoff with Democrat Donald Songy.

Jindal was successful in BESE District 5 where Jay Guillot of Ruston unseated incumbent Keith Guice of Monroe, thanks in part to an influx of Jindal cash and a vicious attack campaign by Guillot. Guillot, it should be noted is a principal in the Ruston engineering firm Hunt Guillot & Assoc. (HGA) that has contracts with the state totaling nearly $17 million. The firm, along with partner Trott Hunt, was a major contributor to Jindal’s campaign.

Guillot has said he will seek a ruling from the State Board of Ethics on whether or not he can serve on BESE and contract with the state. He had ample opportunity to seek such an opinion in the months leading up to the election, but did not avail himself of that opportunity.

Roemer has his own ethics issues because of his repeated votes on matters involving charter schools. His sister, Caroline Roemer Shirley, is executive director of the Louisiana Association of Public Charter Schools. She has already been directed by the ethics board not to participate in discussions of charter school matters coming before BESE because of her relationship with Chas Roemer. That, however, has not deterred him from voting on those same matters.

Republican Jim Garvey of Metairie, a Jindal endorsement, won the District 1 BESE seat as did another Jindal endorsement, Holly Boffy, a Republican from Youngsville, who easily won in District 7.

Ironically, Glenny Lee C. Buquet, the only Democrat whom Jindal backed financially for a BESE seat, lost to Republican Lottie Polozola Beebe.

If Roemer wins his runoff with Songy, Jindal will be all but unstoppable in his efforts to establish a statewide system of for-profit charter schools that will in all probability have selective enrollment of only the best and brightest students while at the same time providing a financial windfall for the charter operators.