Louisiana Dem Cazayoux Nabs GOP Seat in Saturday House Special

By Greg Giroux, CQ Staff Sun May 4, 1:08 AM ET

Democratic state Rep. Don Cazayoux scored a nationally significant takeover victory in Saturday's election to fill the vacant and formerly Republican-held seat in Louisiana's 6th Congressional District. A Democrat who projects a conservative image, Cazayoux scored a close but clear victory over Republican Woody Jenkins, a former state House member.

Cazayoux's win gives the national Democratic Party a second stunning special election victory in a usually Republican-leaning district in less than two months. The first came on March 8 in Illinois' 14th District, in which Democrat Bill Foster, a scientist and businessman, scored a win over Republican dairy executive Jim Oberweis that was especially embarrassing for the GOP -- given that the seat had been vacated by the November 2007 resignation of longtime Republican Rep. J. Dennis Hastert, the former House Speaker.

Cazayoux (pronounced "KAZ-you") won by 49 percent to 46 percent, an unofficial margin over Jenkins of just less than 3,000 votes, with most of the remaining 5 percent going to Ashley Casey, a former Republican congressional and campaign media aide who was one of three independents in the race.

And Cazayoux pulled this off in a district, centered on the state capital of Baton Rouge, that gave President Bush 59 percent of the vote at the top of the Republican ticket in 2004 -- and where the Democrats in 2006 didn't even bother to field a challenger to Republican Richard H. Baker, who resigned in February after 21 years of House service to lobby for the hedge fund industry.

Republican officials, in the aftermath of Saturday's vote count, tried to salvage something positive from the outcome.

While hailing the simultaneous special election victory by Republican state Sen. Steve Scalise in the overwhelmingly Republican 1st District in and near New Orleans, the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) contended that Cazayoux was actually a strong favorite to win the 6th District seat, despite its usual Republican tilt.

The NRCC continued that it had cut deeply into the supposed lead held by Cazayoux by running ads that sought to tie him to more liberal Democratic leaders such as Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, the front-running candidate for the party's presidential nomination, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California.

"This should come as a warning shot to Democrats," the NRCC said in a post-election press release. "The elitist behavior of the Democratic front-runner and the liberal and extremist positions that he and his fellow Democrats in Congress have staked their claim to, do not appear to be as salient as they once hoped."

But the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), in the battle of dueling press releases, portrayed Cazayoux's win as a clear victory for the Democratic Party and a rebuke to Republican campaign tactics.

"For the second time this cycle, Republicans were reminded that 'all politics is local,'" said Maryland Rep. Chris Van Hollen, the DCCC chairman. Saying that "House Republicans tried to nationalize this election," Van Hollen stated that the GOP "used false and deceptive special interest smears and funneled nearly a million dollars into a district that Republicans held for more than three decades."

Van Hollen claimed that Cazayoux "won by focusing on the concerns of LA-06 voters -- good paying jobs, affordable health care, and better education."

When Cazayoux is sworn in, the Democrats' ranks in the House will grow to 235 to 199 Republicans after Scalise, the other new Louisiana member, is seated. As a result of the Democrats' two special election takeaways, the number of seats the Republicans would need to gain this fall to recapture a House majority has grown to at least 18.

The GOP is fighting to keep that number from growing to 19 in the May 13 special election runoff in Mississippi's 1st District, another longtime conservative Republican bastion that is at risk of slipping away from the party. With Democrat Travis Childers coming off an April 22 first-round primary in which he edged Republican rival Greg Davis by 3 points, and just barely missed winning the seat outright, the NRCC is employing similar tactics of trying to link Childers to Obama.

The vote-counting on Saturday night was suspenseful. Jenkins held a lead through most of the evening on the strength of his dominant showing in Livingston Parish, a staunchly conservative area east of Baton Rouge, and in some other suburbs near the state capital. Only after most precincts reported in Baton Rouge -- including dozens of predominantly black and overwhelmingly Democratic areas -- did Cazayoux surge ahead of Jenkins. (Please click here for the parish-by-parish returns).

Cazayoux mixed conservative views on social issues -- he opposes abortion and touted an "A" rating from the National Rifle Association -- with conventional Democratic Party positions on education and health care. He represents a conservative-leaning legislative district outside of Baton Rouge, and ran a well-funded campaign.

These were among the reasons that the DCCC originally recruited Cazayoux to challenge Baker when the incumbent appeared headed for another re-election bid -- and why Cazayoux was able to prevail in a district that had handily backed Bush in 2004 and Republican Bobby Jindal as he won the 2007 race for governor.

The DCCC spent at least $1.2 million on the race in "independent expenditures" that by law could not be coordinated with Cazayoux's campaign.

It was a relatively affordable investment for the DCCC, which has a much larger campaign treasury than the NRCC. The Republican campaign unit spent at least $438,000 in independent expenditures on the contest, though its pro-Jenkins and anti-Cazayoux spending was bolstered by the intervention of the conservative groups Freedom's Watch and Club for Growth, which joined in airing television ads critical of Cazayoux.

The thrust of the Republican campaign was that Cazayoux, despite his positioning as a conservative Democrat, would be captive to a left-leaning agenda promoted in the House by Pelosi. Republicans repeatedly invoked Pelosi's name during the Louisiana 6 campaign.

Pelosi, for her part, released a statement Saturday night that said Cazayoux's victory "proves once again that Americans across our country want real solutions and reject Republicans' negative attacks." Obama also released a statement congratulating Cazayoux, whose status as a new member of Congress also will make him a "superdelegate" to the Democratic National Convention this August.

In both the Louisiana and Illinois special elections, Democrats fielded strong candidates who were better-positioned than their Republican counterparts to run as political "outsiders" at a time when the voting public is dissatisfied with the job performance of its elected leaders.

Both Jenkins and Oberweis had high negative ratings, in part because they had run for office so many times that they acquired reputations as "has-beens" who found it difficult to rehabilitate their political images. A SurveyUSA poll, conducted for the Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call just ahead of Saturday's vote, pegged Jenkins' ratings as 36 percent favorable and 49 percent unfavorable.

Jenkins had plenty of baggage that hindered his campaign. Some business-oriented Republicans think he promotes his social-issue conservatism too stridently. A decade ago, he waged a long and unsuccessful legal challenge to his narrow loss as the Republican opponent to Democrat Mary L. Landrieu in the state's 1996 U.S. Senate race -- one of four statewide losses he has had in the past 30 years.

During the first-round Republican primary campaign for the 6th District special election, Paul Sawyer -- a former Baker chief of staff who also sought the seat -- noted that Jenkins' 1996 Senate campaign was fined by the Federal Election Commission for concealing a payment to a phone-bank operation linked to David Duke, the former Ku Klux Klan leader and one-time Louisiana officeholder.

Cazayoux will serve at least through the end of this year, filling the remainder of Baker's unexpired term. His victory Saturday also establishes him as the early front-runner to win a full two-year term in this November's regularly scheduled election.

The qualifying period is July 9-11 and the primary election is Sept. 6. While Cazayoux is virtually certain to be the Democratic nominee, it is uncertain whether Jenkins will pursue a rematch, and whether 6th District Republicans will again turn to him if he does.

Cazayoux, who looks younger than his 44 years, probably will amass one of the least liberal voting records among House Democrats, particularly on social issues. He does side with his party, though, in backing an override of President Bush's veto of an expansion of the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP).

He has a background in law enforcement: Cazayoux was a local prosecutor who has served eight years in the Louisiana state House, where he worked to protect children from Internet sexual predators. Cazayoux says he has "a record of building coalitions across party lines."

"Although I am a Democrat, I've always been able to work with Republicans very well in getting things done," Cazayoux told CQ Politics earlier this year.

A self-described "small-town lawyer," Cazayoux said that a good share of his legal work was devoted to helping rural residents navigate state and local bureaucracies, not unlike the casework that is a primary duty of member of Congress. "You do these things to help people, and it was just a natural progression to go toward a political office where you can actually, more substantially, help these people," Cazayoux said. "It's as much about constituent services in a small rural area as anything."

"If constituent service doesn't make you happy, if it doesn't fulfill you," he added, "then you ought not be in public office in a rural area, because that's really what's dominates your time."