By james art It’s hard to know where the Baton Rouge mayoral race stands right now.
What we do know is that it’s a three-way race between Sharon Weston Broome, Ted James and Sid Edwards. Broom and James are the two candidates with money and political names.
Edwards may be the candidate with the most primary votes.
That seems a little strange to say, given that the Republican vote in East Baton Rouge is basically 42-45 percent of the vote, with Democrats usually getting the rest.
But with James and Broom in a very competitive battle for the Democratic primary vote, Edwards should be a lock for a runoff spot.
And by now, with just one day left in the early voting period, you’d expect Edwards to have this in the bag.
As of Tuesday, 93,169 people had voted early in East Baton Rouge. Of these, 41,615 are Democrats, 33,605 are Republicans, and 17,949 are independents.
And of the 93,169, 53,996 were white, 34,862 were black, and 4,311 were something else.
Interestingly, out of 93,169, 55,197 of them are women against only 37,818 men.
If you’re Edwards, you have two keys to victory at this point.
First, you have to completely dominate those 33,605—the Republican voters—and you’ll certainly want to dominate those 53,996.
Broome will get very, very little from these people. James has focused his campaign on peeling them off to defeat Broome with them. That’s why Broome uncorked these tapes recorded by her campaign manager during several conversations with James that make him come off as a fraud and cynic of the worst kind. She would rather have a runoff with Edwards than James.
It’s the runoff Edwards wants, too. If Edwards gets a runoff with Broome, this election becomes a contest not of race, which Broome will no doubt try to make, or of gender, but rather of competence.
Most people in Baton Rouge understand that Broome has shown herself to be an absolute incompetent during her two terms as mayor. As a result, the city is in decline. Baton Rouge is dirty, there are homeless bums everywhere, crime is on the rise and parts of the city that used to be perfectly safe are not, there is a lot of rot and empty storefronts everywhere, and the establishment of St. George is so badly managed as to create impending disaster for the parish government.
It’s all Broome’s. People who voted for her twice know she’s a disaster.
Will that be enough to turn eight to 10 percent of the electorate away from her and into the Republican camp?
The Ted James camp says no. This is the message that quisling Republican politicians like Scott McKnight and Paula Davis have been spreading to the public.
Of course, as we noted, Ted James offers nothing different, either ideologically or in terms of skill set, than Broome. There is no reason for a white or Republican voter to support him except that he is not her.
Except he’s a she, politically.
Or even worse.
Indeed, while Sharon Broome is clearly an incompetent leader, she leads a stable home life and there is little hint of scandalous behavior on her part. You can’t say that about Ted James.
Edwards’ reputation is that he is a model citizen and a highly moral person. In this he is better than James and similar to Broome.
But he is not like Broome or James for a very basic reason. Sid Edwards is actually good at what he does.
He built a reputation as one of the top high school football coaches in the state. A few years ago, he won a national award for the best high school football coach in the country. He won several state championships at Redemptorist, a school that went bankrupt just a few years after he left. He built the program at Central High School and had it compete at a high level on a sustained basis.
What we do know about Sid Edwards is that he builds winning organizations. He did it at all his stops. He has a transferable skill set – successful coaches very often succeed in business and even politics. It is by no means pretentious to believe that a successful leader in his current place can be successful in something greater.
Can Sid Edwards rebuild the Baton Rouge Police Department into something effective at deterring and solving crimes? Well, he’s turned around male-dominated organizations and given them championship-level outfits several times before. Is he a better bet than Ted James, who has at various times uttered all the usual left-wing anti-cops, or Broome, who has actively destroyed the force?
It seems obvious.
Is Sid Edwards a politician? No. He’ll have to hire crooks. And then he would have to lead them. But he is a proven leader, albeit elsewhere.
We know Broome is not a good leader. She has proven it for eight years. As for James? Generally speaking, people without principles or moral fiber make terrible leaders, and these tapes that Broome’s people put out send a very strong sentiment in that direction where he is concerned.
We’re looking at these numbers from early voting and they look like they’re showing an Edwards-Broome runoff. Unless James’ efforts to make Snow White and Republican voters support him as some kind of “conservative Democrat” they can do business with when he has zero track record of any of this other than the word of the self-serving McKnights and Davises , pay each other, he seems headed for third place.
Regardless of the polls released by the James camp.
We’ll see. But Edwards has that kitty in the hole — a record and a reputation for actual competence — that might just play well enough with voters to propel him to a runoff in December.
Advertising
Advertising