Louisiana picks Democrat as next governor, rejecting Vitter

With a victory that defied political geography and near universal predictions from just months earlier, a previously little-known Democrat, State Rep. John Bel Edwards, soundly defeated U.S. Sen.

Republican Billy Nungesser will take over as Louisiana’s lieutenant governor in January, after defeating Democrat Kip Holden in the runoff election.

After his loss, Vitter immediately announced that he wouldn’t seek re-election to the U.S. Senate next year, creating a new competition for what had been a safe GOP seat.

In the October 24 election, Edwards garnered 40 percent of the vote to Vitter’s 23 percent.

The Democrat thanked his supporters in a tweet.

“I’ve lost one political campaign in my life…ironically, the one I’m most proud of”, Vitter said.

To be sure, Democrats didn’t expect to win the Louisiana governorship, considering Republicans now control every governorship and state legislature in the Deep South.

You could nearly have predicted the outcome of the race based on the candidates’ election night parties. Sen.

Edwards had declared his intention to run for the state’s top job in February 2013, when it seemed likely that increasingly-red Louisiana would put a Republican in the Governor’s Mansion.

Edwards painted the race as a referendum on Vitter’s character and suggested the USA senator didn’t measure up in such a competition.

Edwards led Vitter in polls approaching Saturday’s runoff, according to HuffPost Pollster, which aggregates publicly available polling data.

Edwards ran a brilliant campaign that neatly capitalized on Vitter’s weaknesses, especially his involvement in the D.C. Madam scandal that rocked Capitol Hill several years ago.

Holden spent little on the race, building his campaign on grassroots support and his name recognition after years as mayor of Baton Rouge. “We built up the party in the South, where that’s hard”.

“They had an unpopular governor and a flawed candidate and we had a great champion”, Peterson said.

“We’re not going to endorse or get involved in the governor’s race”.

In the final days of the campaign, with the November 13 Paris terrorist attacks fresh in voters’ minds, Vitter’s campaign released a series of television and radio advertisements and made recorded telephone calls to voters that linked Edwards to President Barack Obama’s decision to accept refugees from war- torn Syria into the U.S.

Edwards benefited from a primary in which he largely escaped attacks while the Republicans slammed each other.