quote:
BATON ROUGE, La. — Louisiana gubernatorial candidate Eddie Rispone’s campaign manager said Wednesday that the Republican challenger lost because Democratic incumbent John Bel Edwards is a strong candidate and popular governor.

Bryan Reed defended the Rispone team’s strategy of trying to nationalize the race, linking Rispone to Donald Trump and repeatedly describing the moderate Edwards as a liberal similar to Democratic Party leaders in Washington. But Reed said polling showed Edwards maintained strong approval ratings, despite repeated GOP attacks.

“On Election Day, our exit poll had John Bel Edwards’ approval rating at 56%,” Reed said. “

This dude works in politics and is telling us that approval ratings mean the same as electoral polls and raw vote data. Clinton had better favorability numbers than Trump and she still lost.

In the first round in October, 52% of the state voted against John Bel Edwards in the primary, 53% if you count Dantzler's vote. What's more, JBE did not poll above 50.1% in any credible poll whatsoever and did not either at any point in the runoff cycle. JBE never got past 50.1% until the runoff on election day.

That's like a football team constantly trailing all game long and finally getting the lead on a game winning field goal. That means the loser had the upper hand on the other team all game long and lost it at the very last second.

Someone needs to tell Bryan Reed that Rispone lost to JBE because he took a complete unknown candidate and gave too many stupid and emotional people a reason to vote against him.

What's really frustrating is that Eddie Rispone had a great backstory of growing up dirt poor and how he came into his wealth by building his own company that now clears 350 million a year in annual revenue that also employs thousands of people. He's also a great philanthropist in Louisiana and has constantly done more to help people than John Bel Edwards ever has in his entire life.

That's a story that should've been the biggest part of his campaign and how he wanted to do the same for Louisiana. And with the millions Rispone was spending on TV ads, it would've been a smashing success and someone people in Louisiana wanted to vote for and going negative against Abraham would've never been needed.

But no, you made him go all in on the cringe worthy mini-Trump bullshite that turned out to be a big flop so bad that Rispone was forced to go negative against Ralph Abraham just for a spot in the runoff with bullshite ads that pissed people off and that was a disaster too as Edwards took advantage of that and spent millions reminding Abraham voters of that and got as many as 15% of Abraham voters in the runoff.

And that's why Eddie Rispone was a candidate without a message when y'all made sure he did not talk about issues that were relevant to life in Louisiana. I hate JBE but he had a story to tell even if it's a bullshite illusion and some off it's practically fear mongering and did everything he could to remind his voters what was at stake.

You ran a shite campaign that was completely tone deaf, constantly passed on solid messaging opportunities, based the candidacy on a mini-trump argument that was completely inappropriate for this race, insulted too many people on both sides of the aisle and refused to make the race about issues that were relevant to Louisiana life.