It’s official :
Attorney General Buddy Caldwell plans to switch from a Democrat to Republican this week, becoming the latest high-profile Louisiana defection to the GOP, people with knowledge of the situation told The Associated Press on Tuesday.
Caldwell, who is up for re-election this year, is the only statewide elected official left who’s a Democrat.
That’s not quite right: Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., will become the last Democrat elected statewide. But her 2008 re-election points to just how bad it is for state Democrats. She faced another party switcher, Treasurer John Kennedy (no relation), who ran a lackluster campaign and, in the Fall,
never came close to her in polls
. The final Rasmussen survey gave her a 10-point lead. She
only won by 4 points
, as Barack Obama was losing the state by the biggest margin of any Democratic presidential candidate since Walter Mondale.
There are a lot of factors responsible for this. The loss of many African-American voters in the wake of Hurricane Katrina is only a small factor. In 2004,
of the people who showed up on election day were black; in 2008, that rose to 29 percent, propelled by Barack Obama. So you can see why Caldwell joined the anti-“Obamacare” lawsuit, and why he’s switched parties.
