Good morning, President Donald Trump has yet to concede and has gone to court to fight election results with the support of Republicans across the nation including Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry. Elections in Louisiana went smoothly and as expected. State officials are even talking about permanently adopting some of the emergency procedures – early voting and expanded access to mail ballots – that were required by U.S. District Judge Shelley Dick, of Baton Rouge. Seventy thousand more people registered to vote and about 120,000 more turned out to participate in the election. More people early voted than ever before – 986,428 total including 168,471 that were mailed. Remarkably few voters used the COVID-19 excuses to get an absentee mail ballot. The overwhelming majority were voters who already could have done so under state law: the disabled and people over 65 years. Two Republican incumbents received more votes than any candidate in the state’s history: President Donald Trump with 1,255,727 and U.S. Sen. Bill Cassidy with 1,228,869 in an election where 69.4% of the state’s 3 million registered voters participated. (Democratic candidate and President-elect Joe Biden received 75,690 more votes than Hillary Clinton did in 2016.) All five of the congressional incumbents were reelected easily. And in the race to replace retiring Congressman Ralph Abraham, R-Alto, two Republican candidates from Alexandria and Monroe will meet again in the Dec. 5 runoff election. While Republicans are filing lawsuits in battleground states where the margins between Joe Biden and Donald Trump are razor thin, Louisiana will have a different kind of partisan courtroom fight. The GOP-majority Louisiana House, represented by Attorney General Jeff Landry, and Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards go to state trial court in Baton Rouge on Thursday. Republicans want to force Edwards to end the restrictions put in place to lower the spread of the highly contagious and often deadly COVID-19 coronavirus. Overnight subtropical storm Theta formed southwest of the Azores, the 29th storm this year, officially making 2020 the busiest hurricane season in recorded history. The former record-holding year was 2005 when hurricanes Katrina and Rita came ashore in this state. Louisiana was hit by five named storms and received glancing blows from two others. It may not be over yet as Tropical Storm Eta meanders around the Gulf of Mexico at about nine miles per hour. Forecasters see Eta as not threatening the Gulf Coast with stormy weather until weekend when it is expected to weaken and come ashore as a Sunday kind of rainstorm. Though the state is again in the cone of probability, forecasters say the storm should come ashore somewhere in Florida and miss Louisiana, at last. As always, check throughout the day for the latest Louisiana political news at theadvocate.com/politics or NOLA.com/politics and on Twitter at @MarkBallardCNB, @tegbridges, @samkarlin, @WillSentell. Here are a dozen articles, commentaries and editorials that will catch you up for the week to come. – Mark Ballard |