Louisiana Governor: Vitter’s Struggles Move this Race to Lean Democrat

To be honest, I am very surprised that the Louisiana governor’s race has become hotly contested. I didn’t expect that we would move it to the Toss Up as we did on October 26 just after the primary, and even more so now that we are calling Republican U.S. Sen. David Vitter the underdog, and moving the rating to Lean Democrat. This rating change says little about the overall politics of Louisiana or where the two political parties find themselves in the state. It does say a great deal about how much Sen. David Vitter’s situation has changed in the last few months. As a brief refresher, Vitter shocked the political world in 2004, but not by getting elected to the Senate because that wasn’t much of a surprise. It was that Vitter won the open-seat race outright, eliminating the need for a runoff. He defeated then-Democratic U.S. Rep. Chris John by 22 points, 51 percent to 29 percent, to become the first Republican elected to the Senate from Louisiana in well over a century. That same day, President George