BATON ROUGE (AP) — Republican candidate for governor David Vitter should send thank you notes to his former GOP rivals for the job, Scott Angelle and Jay Dardenne. The two men's combined refusal to exit the race ensured a split of the anti-Vitter vote that helped propel the U.S. senator to the runoff.
Now, Vitter's got to figure out how to get those men's voters to pick him in the Nov. 21 election — or at least stay home and not cast a ballot for his opponent, Democratic state Rep. John Bel Edwards.
It's an awkward transition to be sure, after months of Vitter and a pro-Vitter super PAC attacking Angelle and Dardenne and after months of those two one-time contenders trashing Vitter in debates and campaign commercials.
The pair accused Vitter of dodging the voters and distracting from the state's real policy debates by running misleading attack ads about issues that have nothing to do with the governor's office. They called Vitter's 2007 prostitution scandal a humiliation for the state that would continue to cast a shadow on Louisiana if he was elected.
On Election Day, Dardenne ran ad aimed at Vitter, in which he said: "We are better than this. We can avoid the disappointment, the embarrassment, the ridicule, the shame."
Angelle called Vitter "Sen. Pinocchio," accusing him of deceptive ads and a flip-flop on the Common Core education standards. He's said Vitter is not only "wrong on fornication," but also on "education, on medication, on transportation and on litigation."
And that's only a sampling of the harsh words exchanged leading up to the primary election earlier this month. In the last debate ahead of that election, Dardenne said voters should select one of the three men who participated. Vitter wasn't there.
Vitter, however, said he's actively reaching out to Angelle and Dardenne voters, describing the people who voted for the two Republicans as more ideologically similar to him than to a Democrat.
"Those voters are clearly more aligned with where I'm coming from than where John Bel Edwards is coming from," Vitter said.
Vitter ran a distant second to Edwards in the primary election, getting 23 percent of the vote compared to 40 percent for Edwards. But the dynamics of the election shift with a head-to-head matchup — and with all of Vitter's money, attacks and attention focused on Edwards.
A political action committee pushing an "Anybody But Vitter" campaign thought the words from Angelle and Dardenne were damaging enough that it decided to use them in its latest ad against Vitter.
The television spot from Gumbo PAC, which is partially financed by the Democratic Governors Association, lifts clips from prior gubernatorial debates. The ad shows Angelle saying a "stench" will cover the state if Vitter is elected and Dardenne describing the prostitution scandal as a "stain on Louisiana" and Vitter as "vicious."
To encourage voters to choose him on the November ballot, Vitter's trying to make the race a partisan one. His first ad since the primary election — and the ads launched by outside and national groups — seek to tie Edwards to President Barack Obama, who is unpopular in Louisiana.
"The bottom line on our record is I'm a conservative reformer. He's a pro-Obama liberal. That's on issue after issue after issue," Vitter said. He said Edwards' support of Obama in the presidential elections "clearly suggests how he'd lead the state."
But Vitter and Edwards only have striking policy contrasts on certain issues.
Positions on cleaning up the state's budget mess through a state tax structure rewrite and on addressing the state's transportation backlog are similar. Both men oppose Common Core. Both are anti-abortion and pro-gun.
Angelle and Dardenne voters looking for distinctions between their two choices in the runoff will have to dig deeper, into issues of Medicaid expansion, charter schools, vouchers, environmental lawsuits and union support, where the candidates have strong differences.
And they'll have to decide if the criticisms their favored first candidates, Angelle and Dardenne, lodged against Vitter will sway their vote on Nov. 21.
– by AP Reporter Melinda Deslatte
