Are Rispone’s attacks on Abraham losing the Governor's race for LA GOP in the primary?

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That is quite likely the eventuality we’re going to end up with. We didn’t believe it when those attacks aired last week (and continued with a furious regularity over the weekend, where the fratricide played out amid every commercial break in the college and pro football games on the tube, interspersed with Gumbo PAC’s “me too” attacks), but a new poll Eddie Rispone’s camp is touting makes it possible this thing really doesn’t make it to a runoff.

At least for now. Elections are dynamic things. We’ll get to that later.

Here’s the poll Rispone is touting…

JMC Analytics, which is headed up by our buddy John Couvillon, is the same polling firm responsible for the poll last week the Nexstar TV stations put out in advance of Thursday’s televised gubernatorial debate. One of two things are true about the fairly sizable swing in the numbers from the Nexstar poll, which had Edwards at 41, Abraham at 24 and Rispone at 16.

One possibility is Couvillon’s sampling and methodology are different depending on who’s paying him to do a given survey, which wouldn’t be great but could well be explainable if the check-writer had a strong opinion about who’s going to turn out (for example, we did a poll under the belief that Democrats won’t be more than 47 percent of the electorate this fall after seeing lots of other surveys in which they were 50 percent of the sample).

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But the other is that there’s a rapidly shifting electorate based on an attack ad Rispone his Ralph Abraham with and a debate Rispone appeared to have won, perhaps, but that not all that many people saw. In the space of a week Abraham dropped six points, Rispone jumped five and Edwards jumped five between two polls by the same pollster. That would be at least somewhat unusual.

We’ll remain agnostic about which interpretation is true, though what we will say is if it’s the latter it’s a reason why Rispone needs to take that ad with these attacks down immediately. The ad, as crappy as it is, will have accomplished its objective of knocking Abraham down to where Rispone could catch him, and the longer it’s on the air the more people will (1) become sick of it and (2) start questioning the claims made in it.

Because almost all of these attacks are bullshite.

The St. Jude thing is pure garbage, as we’ve explained. Abraham pledged to donate his congressional salary to charity and did, for his first term – some $300,000 worth. But Congressional rules barred him from making a profit on his medical clinic, which meant he wouldn’t have any money coming in if he continued giving his salary away, so he dropped that pledge. He still gave lots of money to charity, just not his whole salary. This was asked and answered when Gumbo PAC first vomited forth that attack, and for Rispone’s campaign to copy Gumbo PAC attacks isn’t a good look.

And it gets worse, because the ad also attacks Abraham for buying a half-million dollar plane with St. Jude’s money. Of course, it wasn’t St. Jude’s money, it was Abraham’s money, and the half-million dollar plane he bought replaced another plane he’d owned since 2013.

And what did Abraham do with that plane? Well, this…

So we’re attacking somebody for buying a plane with his own money that he uses to fly people to hospitals to get treatment. That’s the quality of our political discourse now.

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If he’s right, then what Rispone has done is to earn an extremely empty victory – he’s in second behind a runaway winner who gets a majority in the primary. Which is not something anyone will remember him fondly for. Just ask Scott Angelle, who Rispone will surely draw comparisons to. Or if Rispone does manage to get into a runoff, he’ll then be faced with the same problem David Vitter was faced with in 2015 – how do you get that 18 percent of the vote to line up behind you after you’ve unfairly trashed their candidate? Better get those knee pads out.

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I know Hayride gets some derision on this board but theres' some points here that merit discussion.

IMO, it's absolutely undeniable that Rispone's attack on Abraham is doing more harm than good and is helping Edwards. Especially when those attacks are complete bullshite and only reinforces JBE's narrative against Abraham.

If Rispone somehow makes a runoff, theres' a strong possibility enough North Louisiana voters will stay home or vote for Edwards after Rispone completely trashed their man.

Conservatives had just one goddamn job after 2015 and that's no conservative infighting amongst the candidates.

If Rispone wants to be remembered as a coon arse Ross Perot which is not a good thing at all, then we are all going to really suffer for it.