In Louisiana, David Vitter Trailing His Democratic Rival Forward

Democrat John Bel Edwards of Amite was elected the next Louisiana Governor by collecting approximately 56 percent of the vote in a runoff election with Republican David Vitter of Metairie Saturday.

Republican U.S. Senator David Vitter has just lost his race to be the next governor of Louisiana.

The run-off election will let Edwards succeed the term-limited Gov. Bobby Jindal, who just dropped out of the presidential race.

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.

With his anti-abortion and pro-gun stances, his military resume and his talk of bipartisan leadership, Edwards has put together a campaign that has been leading in fundraising and polling in the runoff campaign.

Voters in deep-red state Louisiana head to the polls Saturday to select their next governor – and a little-known Democrat could end up coming out on top.

Vitter said Edwards was misrepresenting a record filled with votes supporting teacher unions and trial lawyers and opposing business interests and education reform efforts. But though the race tightened it remained principally a referendum on Vitter rather than an ideological contest – terrain that favored Edwards.

Vitter, who was seen as a prohibitive favorite earlier in the year, was also hurt by a bruising primary run against two prominent Republican opponents.

Vitter, who has one year left in his second Senate term, told supporters that before entering the governor’s race, he and his wife had decided that he would not seek another term in the Senate.

But last month’s nonpartisan primary, among Edwards, Vitter and two other Republicans, began to sizzle in its closing weeks.

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. The moral questions only grew when members of Vitter’s campaign were accused of secretly recording political opponents.

The lieutenant governor leads Louisiana’s Department of Culture, Recreation and Tourism and serves as the figurehead for the state’s $11 billion tourism industry. He benefited from a primary in which he largely escaped attacks while the Republicans slammed each other. He capitalized on voters’ apparent unease with Vitter and built a campaign on personal integrity.

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

In speeches, he pledged: “I will be honest with you”. Potentially helping Edwards heading into today is the fact that Louisiana voters have a largely negative view of outgoing Republican Governor Bobby Jindal. “I commit to you, we will be better”.

After winning re-election to his Senate seat in 2010, Vitter had been regarded nationally as one of those rare politicians able to survive an embarrassing sex scandal. “We’ve worked to rebuild and rebrand the party from the bottom up”, she said, “and focus on those policies where we can all agree”.