Democrats celebrate victory in Louisiana governor’s race

The win marks the first Democratic statewide victory since 2008.

Voters might say there are finished with him, said a longtime political consultant in Louisiana.

But in the October primary, Vitter received 256,300 votes to slip into the runoff, about 17 percent behind Edwards, whose stronger showing surprised national and state Democrats, spurring them into action for the runoff. At right is his daughter Sarah Ellen Edwards.

Holden spent little on the race, building his campaign on grassroots support and his name recognition after years as mayor of Baton Rouge.

In an appeal in the last minute prior to the election today, Vitter is hoping that he can portray his opponents Democrat John Bel Edwards as soft on crime as well as Syrian terrorists that will help to overcome what the polls are now showing as a huge deficit.

Vitter’s emphasized Edward’s party affiliation and Obama’s high negatives in the state, saying Edwards was hiding a liberal agenda under a moderate’s talk. Edwards, by contrast, had the full backing of his party as the sole Democrat in the race.

“I will be honest with you”.

Rather than a race about the state’s deep financial troubles, the contest for governor largely became about Vitter, who has been in elected office, first as a state lawmaker and then in Congress, for more than 20 years.

Edwards responded with a TV ad in which he said he wants no more Syrian refugees to come to Louisiana.

Vitter, originally the frontrunner, suffered from questions about his character and could not recover from a prostitution scandal in 2007 that became a discussion point in the race.

Once the governor’s race was decided, Vitter announced to supporters in New Orleans that he would not seek reelection for the U.S. Senate in 2016.

Vitter won re-election in 2010, despite his own scandal, outpacing the field with 715,415 votes.

And when Vitter entered the race in January 2014 as the frontrunner, he was pulling in tremendous sums of campaign cash and firing up a dominant political machine that he’s used to get himself and his allies regularly elected to Louisiana offices.

Dardenne crossed party lines to endorse Edwards, while Angelle was conspicuously absent from the public eye following the primary to avoid pressure to endorse his fellow Republican Vitter.

Yet just last week, Vitter told supporters that same-sex marriage activists want their views “shoved down the throats of folks who have sincerely held religious views that marriage is between one man and one woman”. I will never embarrass you. And that was absolutely the single best day of my life, and the most powerful motivator I had for the rest of my life.