Jenny Beth continues her series on Louisiana by sitting down with an expert on Louisiana politics. Scott McKay is the Director of the Louisiana Freedom Caucus PAC and the publisher of thehayride.com and rvivr.com. In this episode, Scott talks about the great potential that the state of Louisiana has if the upcoming elections go the right way.
Jenny Beth continues her series on Louisiana by sitting down with an expert on Louisiana politics. Scott McKay is the Director of the Louisiana Freedom Caucus PAC and the publisher of thehayride.com and rvivr.com. In this episode, Scott talks about the great potential that the state of Louisiana has if the upcoming elections go the right way.
Websites:
Louisiana Freedom Caucus PAC
The Hayride
RVIVR
Twitter: @TheHayride @jennybethm
Scott McKay (00:00:00):
I really think this is going to be the best cycle that we've ever had, simply because people have just had it right. They're done. I mean, we've governed basically the same way for a hundred years and we're behind everybody, so it's got to change.
Narrator (00:00:13):
Keeping our republic is on the line and it requires Patriots with great passion, dedication, and eternal vigilance to preserve our freedoms. Jenny Beth Martin is the co-founder of Tea Party Patriots. She's an author, a filmmaker, and one of time magazine's most influential people in the world. But the title she's most proud of is Mom To Her Boy, girl Twins. She has been at the forefront fighting to protect America's core principles for more than a decade. Welcome to the Jenny Beth Show.
Jenny Beth Martin (00:00:46):
I'm Jenny Beth Martin, and this is the Jenny Beth Show. We are still in Louisiana and we are interviewing Scott McKay today. He's the publisher of hayride and reviver.com. He's a contributing editor to American Spectator. He's the director of the Louisiana Freedom Caucus Pac, and he's an author. He has one nonfiction book that is already out and one that is coming out, and he has written four novels. We've got a lot to talk about. I think it's going to be an exciting conversation. Scott, thanks so much for being with me today.
Scott McKay (00:01:18):
Thanks for having me. Jenny Beth,
Jenny Beth Martin (00:01:20):
So you like to write, I just found this out. You've got four novels and an upcoming nonfiction book coming out.
Scott McKay (00:01:27):
Yeah, it's like what I'm good at. I guess I wish I was good at other things, but I'm good at this. So this is what I do. Yeah, I started the Hayride here in Louisiana back in late 2009, and then started writing a column at the American Spectator in 2012. Last year we started reviver.com, which is a national political national political commentary site, and last year I wrote the Revivalist Manifesto, which was a book about how conservatism necessarily needs to change to respond to what the left has done over the last 15 years or so. And then in October of this year, I've got a book called Racism, revenge and Ruin Coming Out, which is all about Barack Obama and his effect on American politics, economics, and culture.
Jenny Beth Martin (00:02:22):
And we're still seeing that effect today, even though he's no longer in the White House.
Scott McKay (00:02:27):
Well, right physically,
Jenny Beth Martin (00:02:28):
At
Scott McKay (00:02:29):
Least not physically. Physically. There's some debate as to what role Kalorama actually plays in the governance of the country, and that's maybe something that historians will have to sort out for us because nobody really thinks that the nominal president is the functional president. So it's kind of a weird time in America right now.
Jenny Beth Martin (00:02:52):
It really is. Now in Louisiana, you've got elections coming up and is it a PAC or a Super pac?
Scott McKay (00:03:00):
It's a super pac. We're functioning as a pack in this.
Jenny Beth Martin (00:03:05):
So the PAC is new this year, and you've made a lot of endorsements.
Scott McKay (00:03:10):
We have. So there is the House Freedom Caucus in Washington has sort of established a farm system of state legislators that they've organized into freedom caucuses in all the different states, not all the states. I think it's 13 of 'em so far. Louisiana was the 11th. It's started up prior to this Spring's legislative session, and our PACS started up as a support organization for the Freedom Caucus. And so our goal is to grow the Freedom Caucus's membership, which obviously just because we endorse somebody who runs for the legislature doesn't mean that they're going to join the Freedom Caucus, but we set the table for it. And so our plan is win as many of these races as possible, hopefully to get the Freedom Caucus to the point where they can be big enough to be a controlling block within the Republican delegation of both houses of the legislature, and therefore be able to essentially make a deal on who the speaker and the Senate president are going to be.
(00:04:14):
So we'll have the right kind of leadership in our legislature. The problem Louisiana has is it's not that it isn't a red state. It is. I say it's a red state, but we're not good at it. And the reason is that the leadership in the legislature, particularly over the last eight years when you've had pretty significant Republican majorities are rhinos. In fact, that current house speaker was elected mostly with Democrat votes in the speaker's election. He had a few Republicans, he lost the vote within the Republican delegation, so he cut a deal with the Democrat governor and the legislative black caucus, and that was how he got the majority vote. And it has been a disaster
Jenny Beth Martin (00:04:59):
For the last, and he's going to be making deals with them and accountable to those who gave him the power more so than his own delegation, than his own conference or caucus. I mean,
Scott McKay (00:05:08):
I could tell you stories of how bad this is. The most entertaining one of the bunch was he gets his son-in-law to renovate the speaker's suite at the Pentagon Barracks, which is like the apartment, well, it's now an apartment complex next to the Capitol, but it's an old kind of historic building. And so he renovates the speaker suite using taxpayer dollars that get paid to his son-in-law, and then he's got this really nice reception area. So he throws the speaker's lunch every week at the same time that the delegation is supposed to meet, and therefore the delegation doesn't have a quorum. And for four years, they haven't been able to have a quorum to do a meeting because Clay Shak Schneider is the house speaker who's the guy that did the deal with the Democrats, like Sha Snider is making sure these guys can't meet so that they can't pass a resolution that condemns him for whatever he did the previous week. And for four years, it's been this utter disaster.
(00:06:12):
And of course, the state media doesn't really follow any of this stuff because they don't care what happens within the Republican party or any of that. And if they did, they would be on the opposite side of the majority of Republican voters. And so he gets away with all of this stuff, but it's been an utter disaster in terms of having a functional opposition to the Democrat governor who is so out of touch with the people of the state. It's not even funny. And of course all of this has happened because of internist scene warfare within the Republican party, which is pretty much taken over the state. I mean, other than the Governor, all the statewide people in Louisiana are Republicans. There's a super majority by party, not necessarily by ideological orientation, but by party in both the House and the Senate. There's a Republican majority on the Public Service Commission.
(00:07:05):
There are Republican. The congressional delegation is all Republicans except for the one black Democrat who has the sort of urban district in New Orleans. I mean, it's a totally Republican state. We just have this kind of weird situation at Governor where a Democrat's been able to sort of hold the line on a lot of the old pre Reagan status quo, which in a Louisiana context is basically like a Huey long populist socialist governance. We've got the biggest state, state public workforce of any state in the south by capita. And I mean we do lots of blue state things that people are just used to. We're desperate, desperate, desperate for some real reform of how the state governs itself because it's dysfunctional. We're at the bottom of everything, and this is a state where that should not be the case. We are sitting on natural resources that our neighbors, other than maybe Texas would look at and go, oh my God, these guys are just, it's an embarrassment of riches. We've got the Port of New Orleans and four other ports that are by tonnage among the top 15 in the country. We should be this massive, massive intermodal logistics and transportation hub. And we aren't largely because we don't take care of our infrastructure and our tax policy is all wrong to do something like that.
Jenny Beth Martin (00:08:35):
So businesses don't want to come.
Scott McKay (00:08:37):
No, you would never come. We have the highest state and local income or state and local sales tax burden of anybody in the country to go with a state income tax. So for example, Tennessee, who kills us economically, they have really high sales taxes, no state income tax. Basically Tennessee's a consumption tax state.
(00:09:04):
And that actually works really well economically because everybody understands, okay, this is the price of doing business, but you can do really well and you don't get punished for it. Well, here we do both and we don't do well, and we have a big inventory tax which wipes out anything that somebody might want. I mean, if you want to have a big port and warehouses and all of that kind of stuff, which provides lots of good jobs for the folks in your community, nope. We wipe that out with inventory taxes. And so nobody, car dealers in Shreveport store the cars in a lot in Marshall, Texas across the border.
Jenny Beth Martin (00:09:39):
Oh my goodness.
Scott McKay (00:09:40):
Because they don't want to pay the inventory tax. And these are the stupid things that you have because you embrace a Blue State governance, which you can't if you're in Illinois. Yeah, okay. Everybody around there is kind of back and forth blue and red. They're all purple states. Really. There's no tax haven other than maybe Indiana, but not really in the south. Everybody is a free market state. We have Texas next door. We can't afford to be a blue state.
Jenny Beth Martin (00:10:08):
No. If you want to compete with Texas and get people to move to Louisiana or stay in Louisiana instead of going to Texas, something has to change.
Scott McKay (00:10:17):
Yeah, absolutely. And so at least on the right, this is understood now, and I think this is going to be the election cycle where you're finally able to kind of break through this and get it done. But we're too late because Mississippi is phasing out their state income tax. Arkansas, Sarah Huck could be Sanders as the governor now, and she came in with all of the frontline cutting edge Republican policy proposals, and they're going to phase out their state income tax. Texas has already gotten rid of theirs, or I don't even know if they ever had it. Tennessee doesn't have it. Florida doesn't have it. And we're a paragon of Outmigration at this point because we're getting annihilated by all of our neighbors. And so there are a couple of restaurant chains that originated in Louisiana of recent vintage. One of them is raising Cane's, the fried chicken place, and another one is Walk-Ons, the sports bar chain.
(00:11:16):
Both of 'em started in Baton Rouge. People who are contemporaries of mine and the growth of their, they both have their corporate headquarters per se, is in Baton Rouge. But the growth in both of those businesses raising Canes is in Texas, walk-Ons is in Georgia because they didn't want to grow their business in Louisiana. And it's all because of tax policy. It's because of bad education, it's because of crime. It's because people don't want to move here. And it's public policy oriented. This is not a bad place to live. It's hot in the summer and it's humid. But other than that, it's great. I mean, the quality of life in Louisiana is really pretty good and people love to come visit here.
Jenny Beth Martin (00:12:01):
And if you're moving to Texas or Mississippi or Georgia or Florida, you're going to be hot in the summer everywhere around.
Scott McKay (00:12:08):
It doesn't dissuade people from moving
Jenny Beth Martin (00:12:10):
Elsewhere. Even if you're in Washington DC it's hot in the, it gets hot in the summer.
Scott McKay (00:12:14):
Exactly. And maybe than lots of places, but that's not a reason why people wouldn't want to move here. I mean, they're building things close to the Everglades in Florida, which is the same climate that we have. Exactly. That's not an excuse. It's all about public policy and the effect that it has on society. And we have been a very interesting Petri dish where that's concerned for the last basically a hundred years. And the transformative event was unlike other states in the south, we had Huey Long show up who essentially brute forced his way into being a transformative leader and created Louisiana as a sort of blue state socialist paradise. And we've been falling behind everybody else in the south ever since. And it's a Republican state, but it's all about having the audacity and the courage to actually go and rip out that form of governance and install something that looks like it was intended to be successful. And I think we may start to get that next year, but we've only taken baby steps in that direction thus far.
Jenny Beth Martin (00:13:32):
So with the endorsements you've made, what kind of people you've made? How many did you say? 30?
Scott McKay (00:13:39):
Right now it's 39.
Jenny Beth Martin (00:13:40):
39. So that is a lot of endorsements. We probably won't go through every single one, but what are you looking for when you're making endorsements? How are you deciding that?
Scott McKay (00:13:48):
Well, there's a strategic component of it. So sometimes you get in these races where you know that the favorite is really good, may not necessarily be a Freedom Caucus person, but will align with the Freedom Caucus and agrees with all the goals. And if they're the favorite, we want to get them close to the current members of the Freedom Caucus. That's some races, a lot of races. I mean actually we've been very fortunate because this cycle seems to be the cycle that people who, I guess they may have been sort of ordinary movement conservatives at one point, but have been, I don't want to say radicalized, but have started to see the light, Hey, we have to be a little bit more muscular form of conservative, seen a ton of those folks. And it's largely national politics that's driven it, but everybody knows what the problems are in Louisiana.
(00:14:48):
And what I'm noticing is, and these endorsements have been really pretty easy for us that we've talked to some candidates and we've done research in races and we've found people that we would've recruited to go run because they're real conservatives. They get it. They're willing to break some eggs to make an omelet, which is the number one thing that we were looking for is I call 'em good time, Charlie's, you get a lot of people in a state legislative context that what they really want to do is go to the cocktail party after the session ends and get romanced by lobbyists. And most of that ideological stuff is for the folks back home. But once I get to the Capitol, it's all about what deals I can make and feather my own nest and this kind of thing. We are finding people who are expressly hostile to that attitude and have been inspired by the people who are current members of the Freedom Caucus and some of the fights that they've taken on particularly in this past year to go and run. So of the 39 that we've made, I would say most of them really fit that Matt as hell are not going to take it anymore type mentality. And we are super excited about getting these guys elected and putting them in a position where either they're going to join the Freedom Caucus or if they, for whatever reason, don't actually do that, they'll ally with 'em
(00:16:14):
And caucus with 'em as the legislature comes into session next year. So between, it's sort of a mishmash of we want to do strategic things where we can move people we know are going to win close to the Freedom Caucus people that we absolutely both have a very good chance of winning that we can affect the race and are our kind of people. And we've even taken a poke at some folks that may not quite be favorites in their race, but endorsing them is a political statement. So for example, we've had three priorities in this. The first one is we want to get everybody who's currently in the Freedom Caucus either elected because a couple of 'em are house members running for Senate or reelected if they're running for reelection. Then the second thing was to identify people who could be potential freedom caucus additions as they get in. Then the third priority is to do some rhino hunting, which is the fun part. And the neat thing about this is we've actually uncovered several races where we can do priority two and priority three.
Jenny Beth Martin (00:17:17):
Oh, that's good. So
Scott McKay (00:17:18):
Those are the really fun ones,
Jenny Beth Martin (00:17:20):
Right?
Scott McKay (00:17:20):
Because there are people that have ours next, and this is not just Louisiana, and it's not just this cycle. There are people who put ours next to their name that have absolutely no business doing it. And so we've been able to identify some of those, and we're doing a lot of underground stuff. We're doing memes, we're kind of texting in districts and we're doing things that are not wasteful. And the deal is that our PAC's not consultant driven. Consultant driven means, well, I want commissions on TV
Jenny Beth Martin (00:17:55):
Buys.
Scott McKay (00:17:56):
And so you go and you throw a million dollars out there that really makes maybe a hundred thousand dollars worth of impact at best,
Jenny Beth Martin (00:18:03):
And explain how that benefits the ad buyer because there are people who may not understand that, who are listening right now.
Scott McKay (00:18:12):
Right. Okay, so let's say you buy a million dollars worth of TV ads, well, you just made yourself $150,000 because that's the commission that these guys get. And so most political consultants operate on the basis of whatever you do get paid, and obviously we have vendors, but I'm the director of the pack. I'm making the decisions, and so I don't need to take a commission. I'm already getting paid by
Jenny Beth Martin (00:18:42):
The pack. You're getting
Scott McKay (00:18:43):
Paid, so the media buys and all that kind of stuff when I'm doing 'em. And most of what we're doing right now is we're doing texts in districts with not standard campaign texting, which is very anodyne, and they got some 22 year old right out of college to dummy it up and then they send it out. The stuff that we are doing is actually designed to be shareable and viral because the theory is that we send this out to the chronic voters who are kind of influencers and super political and whatever, and they grab this and they go, great. So they copy it and they paste it into a Facebook message or a tweet and all of a sudden you spend 500 bucks and it plays like 5,000. And in a legislative context, it's much, much better to do it this way than to do some TV ad that plays to a whole market, only a little segment of which is that legislative district. That's what you do if you're trying to get paid. So we're hoping that we're going to make a very outsized impact on a lot of these races, and we're seeing evidence that we may now, the good news is is that a lot of our people will take credit for when they win, they're going to win anyway, but it's okay to come on for the big win, but there are going to be some races where we're going to be able to play an outsized influence in the race and get somebody really good elected.
Jenny Beth Martin (00:20:16):
That's really important. Where can people go to find the endorsements you've made?
Scott McKay (00:20:21):
LA Freedom caucus pac.org is our website. And also, well, we've reported all of it at the hayride as well, so if you go to the hayride.com, you can see it too.
Jenny Beth Martin (00:20:33):
And when you talked about that people are mad as hell and they're not going to take it anymore. It seems to me as I've been watching how Louisiana seem to work, you've got this Democrat governor, and you have this attitude among people in the state legislature that the way to get reelected is just to bring tax money home. Oh my God. So right on projects, and then they brag about it. Well, we got this bridge or that project or the band uniform or whatever, all it might be ignoring where the money is coming from, whether it's coming from the federal government or the state government, it's taxpayer money or it's borrowed money that has just been printed in Washington DC and it drives taxes up and it's driving the cost of goods up everywhere. So everyone's paying for it, whether you bring a little bit of this stuff home or not.
Scott McKay (00:21:33):
Well, and this is something that the Freedom Caucus in Louisiana really fought on, not successfully, they didn't have enough people, but from the standpoint of winning the argument, I think they did. So the state had a $2 billion surplus, and the plan was, well, let's take this money and let's pay down state debt. And the reason for that is that local school districts, for example, are paying debt service for, I guess it's pension funds. And if you pay that down, they're going to have money free that they can then give teachers a pay raise if they want. And therefore you actually can preserve the structure of how this stuff is supposed to work, which is school teachers, workforce school districts, which are local things. And so if they get a pay raise, it should come from a local government and not the state. And of course, the way this gets reported in the corporate media and all the rest is completely just bizarre. But the Freedom Caucus had an idea that said, look, we're going to use this money one time money, we have no idea. We're going to continue to have this kind of service.
Jenny Beth Martin (00:22:52):
Explain why it's one time money,
Scott McKay (00:22:54):
Federal dollars. Okay? They
Jenny Beth Martin (00:22:56):
Came from Covid that
Scott McKay (00:22:57):
Absolutely
Jenny Beth Martin (00:22:58):
The extra spending that it still hasn't been spent. It really should have been clawed back from Washington DC quite frankly.
Scott McKay (00:23:06):
Of course it should,
Jenny Beth Martin (00:23:08):
But it wasn't. And so instead of you've got a baseline here, is that correct? And now the baseline is higher, so everyone's going to expect that you're spending this surplus level from now on. How are you going to pay for that?
Scott McKay (00:23:22):
Well, I mean, I could give you the status quo answer. I could give you the Freedom Caucus.
Jenny Beth Martin (00:23:26):
Yeah, why won't The truth, which is probably the Freedom Caucus answer,
Scott McKay (00:23:30):
But the status quo answer is probably what we're going to need to raise taxes ultimately because we're going to hit a fiscal cliff.
(00:23:37):
So the Freedom Caucus answer is when Bobby Gendall left office eight years ago, the state budget was right around 2020 $6 billion and it's now 50 billion, which means we can get rid of all kinds of state spending and not feel it because Louisiana is in no better shape now than it was eight years ago. The other thing is they took this money and they said, okay, we're going to go drop this on projects in these districts. Here's the problem. This is all construction stuff. There's only so much construction industry out there, and you're doing all of these projects, these roads and these buildings and whatever else it is at the same time that the Biden administration has flooded all of the other states with infrastructure dollars. So there's only so many construction companies out there, alright? And so if you want to go and do a big road project in Louisiana, what you're going to find is there's not that many bidders for the project because all of these construction companies are at capacity. And then you're going to have a shortage of concrete, you're going to have a shortage of steel rebar, you're going to have a shortage of all these different things. All you're doing is creating a backlog of projects that are going to be years in the future. There was no reason to go spend that money now because you already had a backlog
(00:25:06):
And it wasn't a question. So much of funding in the past, it's been a funding problem. Now it's a capacity problem. So I mean, from an economic standpoint, the answer was let's give tax relief. Let's get Louisiana in the game on this big southern population expansion that's going on, and let's have the private sector come in, rejuvenate the state economy, and then fuel a boom in tax dollars that then can be spent down the road the right way on infrastructure project's going to get done five, six years from now anyway, because that's when the construction industry can get around to it. Why not have the money generated that you've actually created by fueling the private sector with a tax cut? That's the Freedom Caucus answer. The Freedom Caucus answer is we're going to have to cut the state budget hard and nobody will feel it, right? The public sector will feel it, but the people won't because they're not getting value for their tax dollar anyway. In fact, we polled this back in the spring, and the first question we asked in the bull is, do you get value for your state tax dollar in Louisiana? 68% of likely voters said no. And then the legislature went to the capitol and threw a whole bunch more money into the public sector. And it's like, okay, well, I dunno why we think this poll because nobody's paying attention, at least nobody in the legislature's paying
Jenny Beth Martin (00:26:33):
Attention. I think it's this, well, I don't know, so you tell me if I'm right or not, but it seems to me that the Republicans and the legislature who are making the deals with the Democrats, and I understand when you've got power between two different parties, there are going to be deals that are made that I'm not going to like every deal. That's part of, I do get that, and bridges should definitely stay in the air if repairs should be done. So I'm not saying those kinds of things shouldn't happen, but what I think that if Republicans win, which I hope that a very conservative governor with a strong background and a history, we can talk about
Scott McKay (00:27:19):
That a little bit because that is hopeful. But yeah,
Jenny Beth Martin (00:27:22):
Fighting wins. I think that it is very important that they explain to the people that this conservative potential majority and in the governor's mansion or however it is done here, that they explained to the people, instead of growing the government, we are going to grow the economy. And in growing the economy, it's going to make it where everyone has a much bigger pie to eat out of. And I think that in this state that's lost right now because you haven't seen that happen. And I say that thinking during Ronald Reagan's term, that's what happened. He grew the economy, but then I was just a kid. I was in high school when he was president in elementary school. So throughout this tea party movement, I've been like cut spending, cut spending, cut spending, cut spending, because I couldn't even imagine growing the economy because I hadn't seen that massive economic growth in my adult lifetime. And then Trump became president and he did grow the economy, and I was like, oh, that's actually what they mean. I've experienced it. Now I understand what the philosophical cut taxes, people would say, cut taxes is more important than cutting spending. And I'm like, cut spending. But I think you need both, and I've never seen both happen.
Scott McKay (00:28:44):
Well, the thing is that if you cut taxes, what you're really doing more than anything else is you're keeping spending level
Jenny Beth Martin (00:28:51):
Because
Scott McKay (00:28:52):
As a percentage of the economy, it becomes smaller.
Jenny Beth Martin (00:28:56):
And having that kind of growth here in the state, I don't think your state has experienced that. Not in a long time.
Scott McKay (00:29:01):
Well, in fact, it's worse than that. So you and I are about the same age. So I was a kid in the eighties when Reagan was president. The 1980s in Louisiana were a lost decade.
Jenny Beth Martin (00:29:19):
Wow.
Scott McKay (00:29:21):
Because the state's economy much more so than now, but the state's economy was directly tied to the price of oil and gas. So Reagan opens up production elsewhere, and the price of oil drops from it was like 75, $80 in 1970 to $15. And so all the offshore oil platforms and everything else in Louisiana, I mean it all just shut down because I mean, you had a glut of oil on the market. So we didn't have an economy. And the worst thing, and this kind of may sound counterintuitive, but it's true. The worst thing that can happen to you is a good economy that you don't participate in
(00:30:08):
Because all your people leave a bad economy like the Obama economy. It wasn't so bad in Louisiana because nobody could go anywhere. Nashville had a crappy economy just like New Orleans. But when Nashville's got a great economy and Dallas has one and Tampa has one, and Houston people leave, and then you've lost the human capital that would result in businesses starting up and growing and so forth. And so now you have a labor shortage of really high quality skilled people who can create wealth. And so we had this massive brain drain in Louisiana throughout the eighties. Everybody moved to Texas and Florida and Tennessee where tax policy was such that they could take off and really grow. And so an economic boom in Louisiana, we haven't had one since the seventies, and that was solely fueled by OPEC and all of that stuff, driving the price of oil through the sky so that everybody made money in Louisiana in the 1970s.
(00:31:11):
And the problem is, is that people in Louisiana look at that and they go, well, Edwin Edwards was a great governor, and this guy was a kleptocrat. He was one of the worst governors you can imagine. And I mean, he stuck his hooks in every legitimate business in the state. But people like, well, yeah, but things were good. And so he got elected twice. I mean, this guy was the thing that wouldn't leave politically, and he gets reelected in, he served his two terms from 71 through 1980, then he got reelected in 83 when the state's economy went down the tubes and there was happened to be a Republican governor in office at the time, and then promptly gets indicted, manages to beat the rep, but his four years in office were a complete disaster. But then he came back in 1991, and that was the famous Edwin Edwards versus David Duke.
Jenny Beth Martin (00:32:07):
Oh yeah.
Scott McKay (00:32:08):
Jungle primary election, which we can talk a little bit about if you want. And then from 91 to 95 was another disaster. And ultimately he got indicted and convicted after that. And people still think the guy was a good governor because they remember the last time Louisiana's economy actually boomed was when he was in office. He had nothing to do with it. It was simply the price of oil that turned everything into gold in Louisiana for a short period of time. We've never had, probably since the Civil War, we've never had a really robust private sector economy in this state. And so people don't even know what it looks like.
(00:32:48):
They know what it looks like when they go on vacation to Florida, but that's not exactly a reference that, well, maybe we can do what they do. And so your challenge is to have people who intrinsically understand this stuff and are courageous enough to put it into policy when they know they're going to get beaten to death by the newspapers and the TV stations. And the worst of it is, is that you can't really sell it to the voters per se. You can talk about these amorphous things, but when you start talking about real reform from a policy standpoint on an economic or size and scope of government type of thing, what you get is that's just campaign promises politicians make. Bobby Al talked about all of these things, and he found it very, very difficult to get a lot of 'em done largely. He didn't have a legislature as good as what we're going to have or really as good as we have now, as much as I denigrated, I mean, he actually had more Democrats than Republicans in the legislature when he
Jenny Beth Martin (00:33:57):
Was there,
Scott McKay (00:33:58):
So he couldn't pass the big things, but what he did pass didn't really work. And so it was one of the reasons that John Bell Edwards was able to get elected in 2015 is because they thought Bobby Jendell had failed. And they're like, oh, that's all that think tank policy stuff, and none of that works. And so the way you win in elections in Louisiana is you're pro God and you're pro guns and and the social red state stuff, and because this is counterintuitive, but your average Joe six pack voter does not think that the state government in Louisiana is capable of providing a tax climate that businesses would be interested in locating here or is not capable of providing a competent department of transportation and development that keeps the roads up to the same level that Texas does or any of these other kind of core to maybe slightly beyond core functions of government. But they do think, okay, one thing that you idiots over there can do is to keep these crazy doctors from mutilating kids who are confused, right?
Jenny Beth Martin (00:35:13):
Can
Scott McKay (00:35:13):
You stop these people from cutting the genitals off of confused kids? And it's like, well, that seems like something that the state government can do, so I'll focus on that.
(00:35:22):
Right? The big joke has always been if LS U'S football team is good, then most people will just kind of leave politics alone. And it's an interesting thing that every four years L S U seems to have a really, really good football team. Like in 2019, they won the national championship and John Bell Edwards was up for reelection, and it actually might've played a part in him winning reelection by 40,000 votes. People thought the state wasn't really doing that bad. The flagship university's football team is great. Joe Burrow was the quarterback. And when Burrow won the Heisman, John Bell Edwards went to New York to show up at the ceremony, which was so crass and off the rails ridiculous. Joe Burrow didn't know John Bell Edwards. I mean this whole thing was
(00:36:06):
Idiotic, but he was there glomming onto the Heisman winner. And it's one of these things because nobody thinks that state government's capable of doing anything right in this state. And you'd say, well, that's really cynical. It's like, yeah, but that's what the evidence shows, right? They've been awful for decades and show absolutely no propensity to make any change. I mean, we have a Department of Children and Family services that has a record of placing kids with child molesters, and it's like, okay, maybe we should devolve some of this down to the locals and see if they can do a better job,
Jenny Beth Martin (00:36:48):
Protect the kids. I mean the very least don't harm children it. And that's probably why they're like, just stop with a mutilation and no molestation and let's take care of our children.
Scott McKay (00:37:01):
These are
Jenny Beth Martin (00:37:01):
Basic things that society needs.
Scott McKay (00:37:03):
It's not that hard,
Jenny Beth Martin (00:37:04):
And we
Scott McKay (00:37:04):
Don't really want to hear excuses about this. If you can't change tax policy, at least do this right? But D C F S in Louisiana is such a joke. And I mean, I'm just using this as an example because there's lots of state agencies that I could tell these stories about. The last big major tax increase push, that was John Bell Edwards' first term, when they jacked the state sales tax up, and I mean it was hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars worth of tax increases. They actually sent the woman who ran Department of Children and Family Services in Louisiana to tell a sob story about how the fleet of cars that D C F S has is aging, and if there aren't tax increases, they're not going to have money to fix these cars. And so the cars will, and I'm not kidding, this actually happened. She said, our fleet of cars will break down this summer and we will have kids with heat stroke in the backseat that we're trying to transfer to foster homes. She actually went in front of the press and told this SOB story,
Jenny Beth Martin (00:38:11):
All of the cars would automatically break down. Of course
Scott McKay (00:38:14):
This was going to happen if you didn't submit to a half cent state sales tax increase. And of course, John Bell Edwards said they were going to get rid of college football in this state if they didn't get a tax increase as well because the universities wouldn't be accredited anymore because they'd lose funding. All of this was ridiculous. And this was all to justify tax increases, not to support the size of government that was already there. It was to support the growth of government. And like I said, the state budget has doubled in eight years as a result of the tax increases and also free money from the Biden administration. But I mean, it's a runaway incompetent state government that, and how hard it is to, once the momentum for that growth has taken off, it's really hard to reign it in and it's going to take people who are willing to get called names to fix it. And so those are the folks that we've been trying to find
Jenny Beth Martin (00:39:16):
People who are willing to fight and withstand the name calling and say, no, you're wrong. This is what I'm doing.
Scott McKay (00:39:22):
And
Jenny Beth Martin (00:39:22):
Also at this point, pretty much everyone who has spoken out and been conservative or even quasi conservative gets names thrown at them at this point. We've all been called such bad names that it's sort of just like, okay, when the Tea Party movement first started, people weren't used to it and hadn't had those attacks themselves. And now they're like, oh, they're not actually all those. You're not the devil we thought you were.
Scott McKay (00:39:46):
It loses its luster after time because people start, oh yeah, okay. You said when Trump came along and they called him all these names like you called Mitt Romney, that
(00:40:00):
We know that this is not credible. And so I think that there's a certain degree of we've been through this war long enough that the weapons they use against us are not as potent as they used to be. And that's a good thing, obviously, even though it's very unpleasant to put up with. And in the context of these legislative races, you're asking these people to take this on for $16,800 a year and you can't raise it. A couple of times it's been put it like we should give the legislators a raise because maybe we'll get better people. And that's a non-starter. You can't sell it. And I'm actually not opposed to it because at $70,000 a year, I think I probably can get maybe more middle class folks in because typically a lot of these people, you get trial lawyers, they work six months of the year and make plenty of money. And then, well, I mean, they're going to go hunting elk in the Yukon, or I'll go to the legislative session. So I'll go to the legislative session
Jenny Beth Martin (00:41:09):
And
Scott McKay (00:41:09):
I'll make trial lawyer policy.
Jenny Beth Martin (00:41:11):
A lot of people who can step away from a part-time job, I mean from a full-time job to go do this for a short period of time and then go back into their work because your legislature isn't full time. Right.
Scott McKay (00:41:23):
Well, and one of the things that Edwards did was he would call special session after special session after special session. So if you're a chiropractor and you've got a small office and you get elected the legislature, it's like, okay, well, I'm doing my service and that's a couple months a year and I can work around that. Oh no, right? We're going to do a special legislative session in February, and then we'll have another one in March, and then the regular session goes from April to June, and then we're going to do a special session after that. And this guy's broke. So basically it's okay, what gets me out of here? Oh, well, we're going to do criminal justice reform and here are all these bills. And it's like, fine, because I got to get home and I got to get back to my business, which is collapsing.
(00:42:07):
So that was a lot of the stuff that he did. It was just, and then the other thing is that the legislature doesn't have the staff, the governor does. So when you get into a budget situation, it's a game of hide the ball. And so the legislators are trying to figure out where all this money is being spent. They know that there's waste, right? Let's squeeze the waste out, and then we can do a tax cut and we can do all these other things, but they don't have the staff to go through the budget in anything remotely close to the timely fashion that needs to be done so that they get into the legislative session, say, okay, these are the cuts. We've saved X amount of dollars, and this is the way it works because the governor brings the budget
(00:42:50):
And it's designed as a rubber stamp process. And so this thing just gets ratcheted up and up and up and up. And before you know it, over eight years, you've doubled the size of the budget. So fixing that is a herculean task that's going to require people who are willing to, who knows, death threats or whatever else, when you start saying, okay, we're going to cut some jobs at state, we're going to cut salaries, we're going to do all these different things because we're spending way more money than we ever should, and it has to come back into line. Or else we can't rescue the private sector before it leaves to go to Texas and Tennessee and Florida and now Mississippi and Arkansas.
Jenny Beth Martin (00:43:34):
So when it comes to the governor's race, you've got a really good, you've candidate who the party has endorsed, and it seems like everyone has come around. Is that correct?
Scott McKay (00:43:47):
This is interesting because compare it to four years ago where you had a congressman who was in a lot of respects, a good candidate, but in other respects was not, and then you had a longtime donor to the party and conservative causes, this was an industrial contractor, were the two candidates, and everybody else stayed out largely because you're running against the Democrat incumbent and the guy's going to have all kind of money, and there's a big challenge. And everybody thought that Senator John Kennedy was going to get into the governor's race, and he flirted with it very heavily, but he decided not to run. And so you kind of went at it with about half a field this year. You actually have a great field. But Jeff Landry, who's the attorney general, is a classic example of a politician who does all the work. I mean, this guy is a very, very good, the best retail politician Louisiana has had since Ed Edward Edwards came along.
(00:44:57):
And he is a very good sort of strategic tactical operator. And I'll give you an example of this, and it's actually something that some people within the conservative movement have been in the state have been a little reticent about. But the history of gubernatorial races in Louisiana is if you antagonize the trial lawyers, because this is the most over lawyered state in America. I mean, if you guys have been driving around the highways and you notice the billboards, I mean, other places have businesses that advertise on billboards. We don't have that. We have, if you get hurt, you're going to get a payday call 4, 4 4 4 4, 4 4, 4 4. I mean, this is what Louisiana is.
Jenny Beth Martin (00:45:45):
I've seen that in Phoenix also, by the way.
Scott McKay (00:45:48):
I
Jenny Beth Martin (00:45:48):
Think even the same number maybe, but yeah. Yeah. Well,
Scott McKay (00:45:51):
I mean 4, 4, 4, 4, 4 4 is the best phone number you could possibly have if you're a trial lawyer. And so those numbers are all held by trial lawyers. Anyway, so these guys are massive, massive, massive funders of election campaigns. And one of the kind of genius things that Jindal did or his team did when he got elected in 2007 and 2011 after losing in 2003 and learning their lesson, was that he made his peace with them. A lot of these guys make a lot of money. I mean, they're not total democrats. I mean, they're actually nationally, most of them probably are Trump voters. I mean, they don't want to pay a lot of taxes, but they're a special interest. And so Democrat politics is special interest politics and to trial lawyers, which is why our car insurance rates are the highest in America and why our business insurance rates are through the sky and all the rest of it. So anyway, Jen dah made his peace with him, Hey, I'm not going to mess with any of your stuff. So David Viter, who was the Republican, not nominee, we don't have nominees, we have a jungle primary, but he was the leading Republican candidate, absolutely declared war from the very beginning on the trial lawyers. And they spent $11 million on pack ads talking about hookers,
(00:47:18):
Which has nothing to do with trial lawyers. And I remember getting in these discussions back in 2015, and it was these erstwhile Republican plaintiff lawyers, oh, David Viter is so disgusting and this and that and the other. And it's like, wait a minute, wait a minute. You're in your third marriage and you cheated on your first two wives. You're in no position to complain about whatever it is that Viter did, right? You're not a paragon of virtue. And of course, the answer was one of his first things is We're going to do massive tort reform and fix all this stuff. Well, you can't say, well, I don't like Viter because he's for tort reform. Like, yeah, but we agree with viter and not you. So the answer is hookers. And so they went all out on hookers, and it was enough, particularly when you had two other Republicans in the race who were also talking about hookers. They had nothing else to say. And it was the hooker's election. And John Bell Edwards skated into the thing. Eddie Risi, the first thing his campaign did was bought billboards on I 10 between Lafayette and Baton Rouge saying, I bought this billboard. So some trial lawyer couldn't, which was a shot across the back.
(00:48:26):
And before you knew it, they had spent $12 million on TV ads across the state, not talking about tort reform or how much Eddie Risi hates trial lawyers. It was all about some business deal that went wrong or that Eddie Risi was going to take away food stamps or whatever else. And so they buried him. So Landry comes along, he says, you know what? I'm going to do what Jindal did. I'm going to not talk about the tort reform piece. I'm not going to talk about any of this other stuff. I'm going to talk about crime. I'm going to talk about education, I'm going to talk about the economy. I'm going to talk about this other stuff. And so he's left it alone and he's taken like $700,000 worth of donations from trial lawyers out of the $12 million he's raised, and they're not really playing in the race, which they didn't play.
(00:49:15):
I mean, in 27 when JAL ran for reelection, there was no plaintiff attorney money. And the Democrats ended up running a fifth grade teacher from Haynesville who raised and spent maybe 15 or $20,000 in the entire campaign. They literally did not contest the race at all because there was no source of money for them to do it. So Landry has largely taken a page from that book, and it's the reason why the top Democrat in the race is the old secretary of transportation and development whose campaign is like laughable. This is the campaign that you dream about as a Republican to run against somebody like this. Because his entire campaign thing is because he was a secretary of I'm a bridge builder. And the thing is, he's built no bridges. It's his job to be a bridge builder, but he does a bad job. And for example, if you guys flew into the airport in New Orleans, they built this airport, they started building it in 2011, the airport was finished in 2019. The access road to the airport does not have flyover ramps from I 10, which is like a mile away. And so you have to get off at an exit and go through two traffic lights to get into the airport.
(00:50:41):
Meanwhile, there are these flyover ramps that are not finished, which have been kind of not finished for years. He didn't finish these things before he resigned his position to go run for governor. And it's like you say, you're a bridge builder, and yet you can't even build flyover ramps much less a bridge. And of course, we're supposed to get a bridge south of downtown Baton Rouge across the Mississippi River, and nothing has happened on that bridge. Like nothing the entire time this guy's been the Secretary of Transportation and development in Louisiana, they've made no real progress on building a bridge in Baton Rouge. So this whole, in other words, Hey, let me run on something I'm manifestly not qualified to run on, and that's all I have to talk about. So Landry has caught a massive break there, some of which he's created by doing things that from an ideological perspective may not be great, but from a political perspective are super smart.
(00:51:39):
And then there are other Republicans in the race who are pretty qualified. John Schroeder's, the state treasurer, and he'd certainly be an acceptable Republican governor if he won. Stephen Waba, who was Al's chief of staff and has been the president of the Louisiana Association of Business and Industry for the past decade is actually a really good candidate. But he's a rookie in terms of running for elective office. And he got in the race late. Sharon Hewitt is the chair of the Republican delegation in the Senate and has done a lot of legislative stuff and would probably be a pretty good candidate, but she just can't get any headway and really, and then there's an old Democrat trial lawyer named Hunter Lundy who's running as a independent Christian conservative, and all he can do, he basically sounds like R F K Jr. Talking about toxic tort cases and all this kind of stuff.
(00:52:38):
It's like spending his own money and it's like, okay, you're going to get the white Democrats, and that's it. So he actually has hurt Sean Wilson rather than hurt Landry, despite the fact that he's running as a Christian conservative, which is kind of sort of landry's. So this thing has set up really perfectly well for Landry to just walk away with it because all of the other Republicans are kind of playing crabs in a bucket, beating each other up rather than being able to lay much of a finger on Landry. And so he's at 40% in the polls in the primary. And really the question isn't whether he wins. The question is whether he can win in October rather than have to go to a runoff.
(00:53:25):
And one of the Republicans that wasn't really getting any traction, Richard Nelson, who was a state rep just recently dropped out and endorsed Landry. And so the question is, will one of these other ones drop out and will that momentum start maybe moving him closer to 50? I don't know that it's likely, but it's possible. And it doesn't really matter because if he gets in a runoff with Wilson, it's a minimum 60 40 race because Democrats are very unlikely to show up for the runoff. And no, I mean, Wilson, I don't even think Wilson's raised a million dollars so far.
Jenny Beth Martin (00:54:02):
Wow.
Scott McKay (00:54:03):
It's because there's no source of money. The National Democrat money is not there. They know that they're not going to win this, and they're pouring all of their money this year into Kentucky where they're trying to defend Andy Beshear and a little bit into Mississippi, which is weird because they've got no chance to win in Mississippi. They're trying to beat Tate Reeves over there, but there's actually more money being spent on that race than this race. And one wonders, maybe it's not a racial thing, Sean Wilson is black, and how come the Democrats are not funding the black guy? I dunno. Anyway, so there's this, and it really sets up well for Landry to win with a mandate, which is a big deal
(00:54:44):
Because the polling that we've done, the voters in this state are very ready for a hard right turn. Now, how well that's defined among the electorate, I'm not completely sure. I know that they're not all that fired up. We did a criminal justice reform package with Edwards that hasn't produced great results. The people who backed the criminal justice reform package swear up and down that it has nothing to do with the massive crime rate that we've had spring up in the state over the last three or four years. And maybe they're right, but the optics are not real good. And so Landry's talking about getting tough on crime again, and that's played really well. It's spilled over in the Attorney General's race where all the candidates are talking about going hard against crime. And then everybody knows that the economy in the state is all messed up.
(00:55:39):
There hasn't been a lot of specifics offered as to how to fix that, but everybody knows that taxes need to come down. Everybody knows that regulations need to be softened or done away with. And so there's a lot of momentum for those kinds of things. And I think they're going to matter. I mean, I really think this is going to be the best cycle that we've ever had, simply because people have just had it. Right. They're done. I mean, we've governed basically the same way for a hundred years and we're behind everybody. So it's got to change. I don't know if that's a hopeful lesson for blue states or what, but people here we know we shouldn't be losing. And we are. And they want to fix it.
Jenny Beth Martin (00:56:22):
Right? Well, and it has to be fixed. It needs to be fixed. The people here deserve for it to be fixed.
Scott McKay (00:56:31):
Right. Well, I mean, look, you deserve based on how you vote.
Jenny Beth Martin (00:56:35):
That's true.
Scott McKay (00:56:35):
And I think maybe that's started to sink in. I mean, we have deserved the last eight years we put a Democrat in the governor's mansion,
(00:56:44):
And you deserve to suffer when you do something stupid like that. But the other thing is, everybody sees what Texas is doing and everybody sees what I mean. Everybody goes to Florida for vacation and they look around and they're like, this place is a forest of construction cranes. We don't have anywhere near this going on in the city I live in. And how come? And eventually you say, well, you're going to have to emulate what they do. It's not like they're different people. It's the same folks. All my relatives live here, they're not smarter than me. They must be doing something. And so I think there's a hunger for making the kind of policies that those states have made and the fact that Mississippi has started to embrace all this stuff. And Louisiana always used to make fun of Mississippi, thank God for Mississippi. Or we'd be 50.
Jenny Beth Martin (00:57:35):
Georgia did too, right?
Scott McKay (00:57:36):
Well, guess what? Mississippi is actually, the Gulf coast of Mississippi is booming right now,
(00:57:43):
And everybody in Louisiana sees it right next door. And it's like, wait a minute. We can't have these guys beat us. And of course, to look at Tate Reeves, you would not think that this guy is on the cutting edge. He looks like the kind of guy you'd see at a tailgate party at Ole Miss. But they do good things, even though there's a kind of rhino machine that basically runs the state, they're still making really good conservative policy over there. Talk to conservatives in Mississippi and they're complaining, well, it's not moving fast enough. And I'm like, I don't want to hear your problems. I'm in Louisiana and I really don't want to hear what your complaints about things. Same thing in Texas, because those guys scream up and down about Dad Phalen and all the rhinos in Texas. Look, send them here because it's better. I'll trade you any minute with the guys that we've had running our legislature. To me, I think the real reason for that is party primaries, because conservatives get elected and Republican primaries.
Jenny Beth Martin (00:58:47):
And to wrap up, just explain, I said a few minutes ago that the Republican party had endorsed Landry. That is a weird thing for a Republican party to do in a primary, because normally they stay neutral in primaries, but this street is like California. It's very different.
Scott McKay (00:59:07):
You can't, because you don't have any influence over who your people are in a jungle primary. And so the dynamics of this are all messed up. Landry something smart, he declared for governor early and then he went to work on the state central committee. There's like 230 members and they're elected. Okay. Their districts guess correspond to Senate districts, I think it is. And so the deal is you go and you make phone calls and you get a majority of the state central committee behind you, and then the party endorses you. There were other candidates in the race that complained, oh, this was done in kind of smoke-filled rooms. It's like, no, it was done on the phone. Everybody had the same access to it. It's just that he outworked 'em
(01:00:00):
And nobody really wanted to do it this way, but it was done because the party has no ability to affect a race otherwise. And the past two election cycles were utter disasters because the party had no say in who got in the race and then was stuck basically being neutral as Republicans beat each other up while there was a Democrat in the race that turned into the favorite. So you have to do something and that the same people complaining about how Landry went and got the party endorsement are the ones that are fighting the institution of party primaries that would make it so that you don't go get the party's endorsement. You just win the party's voters at the
Jenny Beth Martin (01:00:46):
Ballot in a primary, and then that nominee goes on to represent the party in the general election.
Scott McKay (01:00:53):
Whether the party chairman or the executive committee liked the guy or not,
Jenny Beth Martin (01:00:57):
He
Scott McKay (01:00:57):
Won the G O P primary. And so that's your guy. And so there is none of this intern scene stuff. It's, look, do we want a Republican in because this is the guy if that's the case. And so you have this whole dynamic here, and of course we have had some of the worst elections based on a jungle primary. I mean, I touched on the Edwin Edwards, David Duke race, and just to show you how bad a jungle primary can be, I'd like give you a quick rundown on that. So Buddy Romer at the time was the governor and he had been elected as a democrat. Romer kept talking about he wasn't going to run for reelection and hadn't changed his party registration at the time. So the state party went and endorsed Clyde Holloway, who was a congressman from the Alexandria area at the time, knowing that he wasn't, this was still sort of in the phone booth era where the state party people could be fit in the phone booth. The party wasn't really organized the way it's today. So they did this. David Duke gets in the race and puts an R next his name,
(01:02:11):
And nobody thought David Duke was a Republican. He'd never really done much of it. He had been a state rep, got elected in a freak election sort of as a protest vote against a rhino that he'd run against. And so he said all of the conservative things, but everybody knew that David Duke was a crappy messenger. Then Romer switches parties and he becomes a Republican. Meanwhile, Edwin Edwards was going to run, and everybody knew it. Everybody was so mad at Romer because first of all, he switches parties very late after he hadn't even done any work to get reelected and was talking about not running. So it was like this super weird deal. The party had already chosen a guy who was going to get 5% of the vote. So along Duke comes and everybody just knows Edwin Edwards is going to get elected again. And so you had this big protest vote, screw it.
(01:03:09):
I'm going to vote for Duke just to show how mad I am. I'm going to vote for this guy. No, everybody thought Duke, okay, Duke's going to be third, and this is going to be sort of a wake up call for these guys, and Romer will be second, and maybe Romer will beat Edwards in the runoff and learn some lessons from what he did or maybe not. And then there was nothing we could do about it. Anyway, duke ends up in the runoff. If you'd had a Republican primary, Romer would've won the primary going away, it wouldn't have been an issue. But Duke gets into the runoff and the state has this massive black eye and everybody has bumper stickers on their cars that vote for the crook. It's important. All this kind of stuff was like the most demoralizing thing ever. After this was over, they should have put in party primaries
Jenny Beth Martin (01:03:54):
Immediately
Scott McKay (01:03:55):
After. We will never have this again, because the responsible political party's not going to nominate a guy like that. Nope, nope. Because it benefited Edwards and he was not going to allow a party primary to go back in. And so now the justification is, well, it's cheaper to run elections if you just have a jungle, because if you put in party primaries, then maybe you have to do a runoff cycle in the party primaries, and that would cost us another four or $5 million. It's like, yeah, but your state budget is 50 billion.
Jenny Beth Martin (01:04:26):
Yeah, it small, 50 billion. It's
Scott McKay (01:04:28):
50 billion
Jenny Beth Martin (01:04:29):
Because
Scott McKay (01:04:30):
Of the product of what this thing is. So maybe let's not be pennywise and pound stupid. I think we're going to get this fixed. But the dynamics of our politics are bizarre as a result of this. And I think California maybe is beginning to find this out
Jenny Beth Martin (01:04:46):
By
Scott McKay (01:04:47):
Doing the jungle. I mean, when they've experimented with a jungle in Alaska, it's been a mess. And now they're even worse with the stupid rank choice voting they're doing up there. Thankfully, nobody's talking about that here.
Jenny Beth Martin (01:04:59):
Knock on wood.
Scott McKay (01:05:00):
Yeah, exactly. But I think we're going to get back to something more conventional, and again, bring us in line with the other southern states, or at least most of them, that I think will make a big difference in producing a better political class. And that's a little bit more, I don't necessarily want to say ideological, but understands the big picture more than, Hey, if I make this guy happy, he's going to donate money to my campaign, which is kind of how politics has worked around here for a long time. So hopefully, hopefully we've kind of hit rock bottom and we're going to come back up.
Jenny Beth Martin (01:05:37):
Well, I hope that that is correct, and it seems to me that there are a lot of opportunities in Louisiana if the voters will vote conservative.
Scott McKay (01:05:50):
We're almost like an Eastern Europe after the fall of the Soviet Union. It's like the John Bell, Edwards iron curtain has fallen. And so yeah, we do have an opportunity, and I think the voters have an appetite for actual reform. Trump is pretty popular here. This is a red state that doesn't govern itself that way. There's a lot of frustration. The three biggest cities in this state are all in decline, which is Louisiana is by no means unusual in that respect, and the folks are ready for something different. And along comes a conservative politician who I think is a better tactical and retail politician than the Republican party has produced in a really long time. So he's come along right when he needed to, and there is a lot of reason for optimism.
Jenny Beth Martin (01:06:50):
Well, I am optimistic about the future for Louisiana. I've met some of the candidates, some of the elected officials, and I'm looking forward to seeing how things pan out during the jungle primary and also during the runoff.
Scott McKay (01:07:03):
Yeah.
Jenny Beth Martin (01:07:03):
Thank you so much for spending time with me today, Scott. Yeah,
Scott McKay (01:07:06):
Thanks for having me, and thanks for coming down here and checking out what might be the most interesting election cycle we've had in Louisiana in a very long time.
Jenny Beth Martin (01:07:14):
I hope that it is. This is Scott McKee, who is interviewing with me, Jenny Beth Martin on the Jenny Beth Show. Again, he is the publisher of reviver.com and the Hayride, and he also is a contributing editor to American Spectator. And most importantly, right now, he's the director of the Louisiana Freedom Caucus pac. So be sure to check out their website, look at their endorsements, and let's watch what happens in Louisiana and hope we can make this red state truly red.
Narrator (01:07:46):
The Jenny Beth Show is hosted by Jenny Beth Martin, produced by Kevin Mohan and directed by Luke Livingston. The Jenny Beth Show is a production of Tea Party Patriots action. For more information, visit tea party patriots.org.