It was the most fun I’ve had watching election results since 2008. John Bel Edwards was elected Gret Stet Goober without breaking a sweat. The same can’t be said of many of his supporters, but I expected this result. I did not, however, expect a 12 point win. The other big shocker of the evening was Bitter Vitter’s announcement that he was NOT running for re-election to the Senate in 2016. I did not see that coming ,but I have the feeling his wife insisted. Some of the NOLA twitter people are starting a Vitter divorce pool. Homey don’t play that.

I’m breaking this mighty effort in two because I started having premature Goober race withdrawals on Friday and, in the immortal words of Bryan Ferry, I simply Can’t Let Go. Additionally, and I know you’ll be shocked to hear this, I’ve been drinking Canadian Club like Don Fucking Draper tonight and while I’d like to teach the world how to sing, I might keel over in exuberant exhaustion. In short, I’ll stick to instant analysis for now.

It was clear by 8:15 that Edwards was headed for victory: he got 59% of the early vote. That came to around 20% of the total of votes cast. It’s now clear that the die was cast when Vitter crashed and burned to 23% in the primary. Despite all the mud he threw, he was toast before the runoff campaign really began. Plain white bread toast. Burnt toast.

Edwards once again exceeded expectations throughout the Gret Stet. He got an Obamaesque 87% of the vote in Orleans Parish and even won Vitter’s home parish of Jefferson 51-49. That was a real shocker. The moral of that story: don’t mess with Sheriff Newell Normand. In my precinct, Diaper Dave got a mere 12 votes out of some 243 cast. I’ve rarely been prouder of my hood.

The relentless anti-Obama message from Team Vitter clearly did not work. People simply did not believe that Blue Dog John Bel Edwards from Amite, La was an Obama liberal. I was also pleased that Edwards did not run away from the President, he merely drew distinctions on certain issues. There are some silly billies on social media who think that Team Edwards reinvented the political wheel. They did not. They went back to the future.  John Bel Edwards is the 2015 edition of the John Breaux, Bennett Johnston, Kathleen Blanco model Democrats who dominated Gret Stet politics pre-Katrina. It’s unclear if that model will work as well in future federal elections but we shall see.

Louisiana remains a red state in national elections BUT I think the racist fever of the Obama years has finally broken. The frenetic attacks on Governor-elect Edwards simply did not work. The spell is broken. It doesn’t mean the Democrats will win Louisiana in 20016 BUT it means we’ve returned to our normalish reddish, purplish hue. That was a very ishy sentence: ish you is or ish you ain’t my baby?

I’m running out of steam right now. It’s been a long day including an awful beatdown administered by Ole Miss to my beloved LSU Tigers. I am so pooped that this post is relatively pun free. I’ll bid you good night and I’ll wrap it up in more detail either tomorrow or Monday. I feel like I was run over by Thunderbird, which ain’t as fabulous as the song below by a certain blues rock band from Austin, Texas:

Wrap it up. I’ll take it.