October 15, 2023

BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) — Attorney General Jeff Landry, a Republican backed by former U.S. President Donald Trump, has won Louisiana’s gubernatorial election once morest a long list of rivals.

The result was an important victory for the Republican Party, which regained the governor’s mansion for the first time in eight years. Landry will replace outgoing Governor John Bel Edwards, who was unable to run for re-election due to term limits. Edwards is the only Democratic governor in the southern heartland of the United States.

“Today’s election says our state is united,” Landry said in his celebratory speech Saturday night. “It’s a wake-up call and it’s a message that everyone needs to hear loud and clear, that people in this state will expect more from our government from now on.”

By winning more than half of the vote, Landry avoided a runoff scheduled under the state’s primary system. The last times there were not two rounds in Louisiana gubernatorial elections were 2011 and 2007, when Bobby Jindal, a Republican, emerged victorious.

Landry, 52, has raised the profile of the attorney general position since taking office in 2016. He has used his position to advocate for conservative policies. More recently, she has drawn attention for her involvement and staunch defense of state laws that have sparked heated debates, such as the health care ban on gender reassignment surgeries for transgender youth, the state’s near-total ban on abortion, and It includes exceptions for rape or incest, and a law that restricts young people’s access to “sexually explicit material” in libraries, something that critics fear will target books with LGBTQ+ themes.

Landry has often clashed with Edwards on issues such as LGBTQ rights, state finances and the death penalty. He has also led the state into national fights on several occasions, such as President Joe Biden’s policies limiting oil and gas production and COVID-19 vaccination orders.

He has made it clear that one of his priorities as governor will be to combat crime in urban areas. The Republican has used a tough-on-crime message, calling for more “transparency” in the justice system and supporting the death penalty. Louisiana has the second-highest per capita murder rate in the country.