Interesting perspective on Don Cazayoux's campaign and victory in the heart of red-state Louisiana:

As Hullabaloo contributor dday notes here, the fact Cazayoux won despite a well financed attack from the Right linking him to Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama should make people realize that the bark of the vaunted Republican attack machine is far worse than its bite.

But I’d go a step further: Cazayoux ran as a very conservative Democrat—in part because he had to if he wanted to get elected in this district, and in part because I think that’s true to who he is as a politician: a social conservative with a dash of economic populism. But his ads were so concerned with establishing his family values bona fides—a lot of them were about Protecting Our Kids from Predators—that it really began to seem barely worth the effort turn out to vote, given the apparent similarities between the candidates. (This is not an uncommon feeling for a liberal in Louisiana.) In a perverse way, and even though at least one of them was factually inaccurate, the attack ads actually appealed to liberal voters indirectly in a way that Cazayoux could not afford to directly; they spread the message about Cazayoux’s liberal-moderate voting record and persuaded me that he was someone worth supporting. Because of my limited sample size (1) I am hesitant to make any sweeping pronouncements about whether or not this phenomenon was widespread, but I will say that there are worse things right now than being linked to the national Democratic party—like, say, being linked to the national Republican party—and that we may realize soon enough that low voter turnout is the only thing keeping the Red Stick a red district.