John Bel Edwards Wins Louisiana Gubernatorial Election

Voters’ rejection of Vitter was a stunning turn of events for the US senator, long a political powerhouse in the state.

Republican Senator David Vitter, who has survived more than a decade of stories about his relations with prostitutes, finally saw them catch up to him Saturday night, losing badly in the race for Louisiana governor.

At stake for Vitter is not just the governors race but, possibly, his political future: A decisive loss could imperil his chances of winning a third term in the Senate next year. Landry, a one-term former congressman from Acadiana who received the endorsement of the state Republican Party, framed his entire campaign as a referendum on Caldwell’s performance in office.

In the final days leading up to the election, Vitter sought to rally Republican voters who stayed home in the primary by drawing distinctions with Edwards and making Syrian refugee resettlement an issue in the state campaign.

Coming into this year’s governor election, Vitter seemed to be the odds-on favorite to succeed the deeply unpopular Jindal.

New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu said voters discovered what elected officials had known for years: Vitter is hard to work with.

Polls have closed in Louisiana’s runoff election, with a hotly-contested governor’s race at the top of the ballot. Caldwell had grabbed 35 percent of the vote in the first election to Landry’s 33 percent. He stockpiled cash for the campaign, dwarfing all competitors with his fundraising acumen.

The Edwards campaign hammered on the prostitution allegations relentlessly, capped by one of the hardest-hitting spots in recent political history.

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

Both Angelle and Dardenne alluded often to Vitter’s prostitution scandal, as did two outside groups that funded ad campaigns reminding voters of the affair and the questions left unanswered after his apology.

In speeches, he pledged: “I will be honest with you. I will never embarrass you”.

Vitter, 54, limped into Saturday’s runoff after finishing far behind Edwards, 49, in the primary, and became the standard-bearer for a Republican Party splintered by infighting. It comes as no surprise that David Vitter is distorting the facts and trying to use this tragedy to save his desperate campaign, Edwards says in the ad.

The prostitution scandal came back to life when American Zombie investigative blogger Jason Brad Berry posted video interviews he’d conducted with Wendy Ellis, the former New Orleans prostitute who had claimed in 2007 she’d slept with Vitter.