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You are here: Home / Election Year / local races 2019/2020 / ICYMI Open Thread: Geaux, Louisianans!

ICYMI Open Thread: Geaux, Louisianans!

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It was such a surprise, the Grey Lady was caught off-balance, and had to hastily edit its pre-written story:

Reader Interactions

45Comments

  1. 1.

    dmsilev

    WaPo “Breaking News”:

    Trump said Monday that he will “strongly consider” taking up an offer by Pelosi to testify in writing as part of the impeachment inquiry.
    “Even though I did nothing wrong, and don’t like giving credibility to this No Due Process Hoax, I like the idea & will, in order to get Congress focused again, strongly consider it!” Trump said in tweets in which he also disparaged Pelosi as “Nevous Nancy” and “crazy.”
    Pelosi made the suggestion during an interview that aired Sunday on CBS News’s “Face the Nation, arguing that if Trump is innocent he should come forward.
    “The president could come right before the committee and talk, speak all the truth that he wants if he wants,” she said.

    No, it almost definitely won’t happen, but still fascinating that he feels the need to even make the suggestion.

  2. 2.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    The Courtier’s reply is thick with the Right these days.  We really should have a contest for the most absurd explanation of why a Trump defeat is really a defeat for the Democrats.

  4. 4.

    Gin & Tonic

    Have any of these local races where Trump has gone all-in with the brownshirt rallies resulted in a victory for him?

  5. 5.

    Amir Khalid

    @dmsilev:

    Trump should be encouraged to do this. With a bit of luck, he’ll inadvertently confess — in writing! — to something really really bad.

     

  6. 6.

    MattF

    I’m still irked by the mainstream line that this was a ‘narrow’ win. Close, polarized, yes— but 40,000 votes isn’t narrow, IMO.

  8. 8.

    schrodingers_cat

    Giggle sisters of PBS, Tamara Keith and Amy Walter will both-sides-it somehow. I just know it.

  10. 10.

    JMG

    Presidents do not have coattails in elections where they’re not on the ballot. Obama, who was popular, didn’t, so Trump, who’s not popular sure doesn’t. What is interesting to me is that the Republican candidates in Ky. and La. were obvious mini-Trumps, either by nature or design, and that they too weren’t popular. A lesson perhaps more for downballot GOP candidates than for Trump.

  11. 11.

    206inKY

    It’s horseshit to claim these races should have been blowouts—they were eked out by grinding gotv operations in red states. But having a moderate candidate helped enormously. I can’t express how many Beshear voters, during canvassing, thought Trump is a tool and planned to vote for anybody over him except the socialists. We flipped the suburbs, but that reflects a backlash to Trump, not a bunch of white homeowners suddenly becoming liberals. A moderate like Klobucher at the top and a fiercely nationalized message in suburbs, yoking every local leader to Trump, would carry the Senate and many state houses too.

  12. 12.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @dmsilev:

      Notice, he’s not taking her up on her challenge. Written answers is not the same as coming before the committee and testifying.

    A coward to the end.

  14. 14.

    Betty Cracker

    Mitchell, in the tweet up top: “In both cases Trump made what should have been a blowout for Dems close.”

     

    Kentucky and Louisiana. He’s talking about a Dem “blowout” in Kentucky and Louisiana, which I’m pretty sure hasn’t happened since Dixiecrats converted to Republicans. Good lord, the self-delusion that requires…

  15. 15.

    Starfish

    @206inKY: The “Midwest nice” that people keep trying to sell comes off as “out of touch white people villainizing people of color and people who live on the coasts” to sell us centrism in the land of “Mitch McConnell stole a Supreme Court seat and won’t let bills come to the floor.”

     

  16. 16.

    MJS

    @OzarkHillbilly: I believe Nancy did indicate that his testimony could be written answers to questions. He’ll lie regardless, but he shouldn’t be offered the ability to provide written answers. The offer should be a closed session with a transcript, at best.

     

  17. 17.

    rikyrah

    PLEASE don’t overlook this: This fall was the first election where tens of thousands of Louisianans on parole & probation were eligible to vote. (Bipartisan law passed last year.)
    The SoS didn’t do nearly enough to reach out. But @FIPVOTENOLA did tremendous outreach work.

    — Taniel (@Taniel) November 17, 2019

    This is why I refuse to give up on Florida. Yeah, poll tax aside…

    ONE MILLION, FOUR HUNDRED THOUSAND PEOPLE WHO COULDN’T VOTE IN 2016 CAN IN 2020.

    Sure, some, hell, a lot of those will register and vote for the muthaphuckas who never wanted them to have their voting rights restored.

    But, then, there are a lot that WON’T vote for them. We just have to make sure that they get registered.

  18. 18.

    azelie

    I live in Louisiana and am around people who analyze and comment on politics. We all thought this race was lost and weren’t sure how we were going to deal with what would happen in a Rispone administration (shudder). The conventional wisdom here was that JBE had to win outright in the general election, since it would be hard to conceive of Abraham voters switching to Edwards. But between impressive GOTV operations and Shit Midas’s intervention, we get a check on the worst of Republican programs for redistricting and for sacrificing education and healthcare in the interest of cutting taxes.

  19. 19.

    Gin & Tonic

    @206inKY:

    A moderate like Klobucher at the top and a fiercely nationalized message in suburbs, yoking every local leader to Trump, would carry the Senate and many state houses too.

    On Friday after work I went to an impromptu “let’s have a couple of beers” with about a half-dozen people from work. These are all typical middle-aged, white, suburban homeowners with 2.3 kids and a riding lawn mower, here in a completely blue state. I know they are informed – they knew who Bill Taylor and Marie Yovanovitch are – but we have a pretty strict, although de facto no-politics-in-the-office policy, so I don’t know their party preference. To a person, they were lamenting how each party’s candidates are extreme, and how they wished for a moderate centirst to vote for.

    I was polite, drank my beer and went home without offending anyone.

  20. 20.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @MJS:

      Either way I would not accept answers written and vetted by his lawyers as sworn testimony. He can come before the committee with his lawyers and consult with them as much as he wants, but they are not going to able to do word for word comparisons with the testimony of others who came before.

  22. 22.

    Miss Bianca

    oops, French language pedantry here: Wouldn’t that be, “Gueax, Louisiana?”

     

    French is much more of a stickler about how certainly consonants affect certain vowel sounds than English is.

     

     

  23. 23.

    ThresherK

    @rikyrah: Huzzah.

     

    Voter suppression is the last of the symptoms of the over-policed, over-arrested syndrome by which “Law and order (without justice)” affects some groups of folks in this country.

     

  27. 27.

    206inKY

    @Starfish: Sure, but the premise of the thread here is that these elections in KY and LA mean something.

     

    I’m not sure how I’m “villainizing people of color” by sharing my thoughts from months of knocking on doors for Beshear. Adding my two cents doesn’t mean I don’t value opinions from people on the coasts. Are these wins great news as long as we keep in mind that the people who made it happen are wrong about how to win elections here? Also: there are lots of POC in Kentucky and Louisiana. Polls still show black voters leaning heavily Biden. I think Biden would be a big mistake and support Klobucher instead.

     

  28. 28.

    Steve in the ATL

    @Miss Bianca: the whole thing is stupid. “-eau” (singular) and “-eaux” (plural) are noun endings, not verb endings, so there is no way to make it correct.

    When I was in New Orleans I saw a “Bistreaux”.  Just one. They could have left off the “x” and I might have eaten there.

     

  29. 29.

    Richard Guhl

    The level of thumb-sucking the righties have to engage in to comfort themselves for the losses in deep red states is a sight to behold.

  32. 32.

    AliceBlue

    As a Georgian, it’s frustrating to me that Kentucky and Louisiana can elect Democratic governors (re-elect in Louisiana’s case) but Georgia always falls short.

  33. 33.

    Ceci n est pas mon nym

    @AliceBlue: I think Stacey Abrams’ experience showed that Georgia has a more effective vote-suppression operation at the moment.

     

    I don’t think it will last forever. Possibly not even till 2020. Each of the last three elections has felt more hopeful than the last to me.

  35. 35.

    schrodingers_cat

    Having only lived on the east coast, I have no idea of this supposed Mid West nice is supposed to be. Judging from the presidential candidates its seems to be smiling while making passive aggressive attacks.

    Also who died and decided that the sparsely populated Mid West is the “heartland”.

  36. 36.

    CCL

    @Gin & Tonic:

    On Friday after work I went to an impromptu “let’s have a couple of beers” with about a half-dozen people from work. These are all typical middle-aged, white, suburban homeowners with 2.3 kids and a riding lawn mower, here in a completely blue state. I know they are informed – they knew who Bill Taylor and Marie Yovanovitch are –/snip/ To a person, they were lamenting how each party’s candidates are extreme, and how they wished for a moderate centirst to vote for.

    This ^ . I am hearing it from my colleagues as well.

    Delurking to test commenting

  38. 38.

    satby

    @schrodingers_cat: the West is sparsely populated. The Midwest is not and includes Chicago, St. Louis, Detroit, Milwaukee, Minneapolis -St.Paul, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus… And that’s just the bigger cities.

     

  39. 39.

    J R in WV

    @Steve in the ATL:

     

    @Miss Bianca: the whole thing is stupid. “-eau” (singular) and “-eaux” (plural) are noun endings, not verb endings, so there is no way to make it correct.

    When I was in New Orleans I saw a “Bistreaux”.  Just one. They could have left off the “x” and I might have eaten there.

    See, you’re wrong here, because you’re using the rules for French, which is not what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about Louisiana Creole French, which is not the same as what is spoken in France, EU.

     

    Even in Pascagoula, MS we heard a ton of Creole jokes on the radio out of NOLA. My favorite was a long Hairy Dog story about a hound named Fideaux, I’m sorry I don’t remember the name of the great comedian who told the story in very well done Creole/English.

     

  41. 41.

    Amir Khalid

    @Steve in the ATL:

    I just looked it up. The French spelling of “bistro” is exactly the same as the English. We shouldn’t take “Geaux” too seriously, any more than we do “Targèt” (tar-zhey).

     

    Yes, I know: who am I to tut-tut others about pedantry?

  44. 44.

    J R in WV

    @satby:

     

    the West is sparsely populated. The Midwest is not

     

     

    We drove from Denver home via St. Louis not too long ago, and used the “old” federal highways instead of the interstates. It was really empty, most all the little farm towns were gone, empty, perhaps a Post Office and a rickety bar, but mostly not even a street light. Sure there are big cities spread around.

     

    But the countryside was 90% empty of people as far as driving through could show. As empty as the west anyways…

     

    Now, Ohio, KY, they have a lot of rural people, but Kansas, not so much.

  45. 45.

    satby

    @J R in WV: adding up the combined population figures of Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, New Mexico, Nevada, and Utah all together you get 11,685,175 people. Illinois alone has 12,741,080.*

    I stand by my initial statement.

    *As of the last census, which is probably pretty outdated, but that’s the official count we have to work with.

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