The Daily Kos Elections Morning Digest is compiled by David Nir, Jeff Singer, Stephen Wolf, Carolyn Fiddler, and Matt Booker, with additional contributions from David Jarman, Steve Singiser, Daniel Donner, James Lambert, David Beard, and Arjun Jaikumar.
Leading Off
●LA-Gov: Louisiana held its all-party primary on Saturday, and Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards was forced into a Nov. 16 runoff with wealthy Republican Eddie Rispone.
Campaign ActionEdwards took 47% of the vote, a few points short of the majority he needed to win outright, while Rispone edged GOP Rep. Ralph Abraham 27-24 for the second runoff spot. Altogether Rispone, Abraham, and Some Dude Republican Patrick "Live Wire" Landry racked up a combined 51.8% of the vote while Edwards and underfunded Democrat Omar Dantzler took 47.4%. (The balance went to independent Gary Landrieu.)
While Rispone began the race with little name recognition, he got his name out over the summer after he started bombarding the airwaves with TV ads. Polls initially showed Abraham with a big edge over Rispone, but Rispone decisively outspent the congressman during the lead-up to the primary.
Edwards will be in for a difficult five-week campaign against Rispone, who self-funded $11 million to his campaign during the first round of the race. The good news for the governor is that the few polls we’ve seen testing him in a no-longer hypothetical runoff with Rispone have given him a big lead. A Mason-Dixon poll from early October found Edwards leading 51-42, while a survey completed last week for the GOP firm JMC Analytics for the media company Nexstar had the Democrat up 48-39.
However, there are a few reasons to be pessimistic that Edwards will start out the second round with anything like a 9-point edge over Rispone. Both of those polls were taken during the last weeks of the primary while Rispone and Abraham were attacking one another, which could have led some of Abraham’s voters to say they wouldn’t support Rispone. Abraham endorsed Rispone on election night, though, so the GOP will be able to present a united front over the next month.