(Oct. 2) Reporter Tyler Bridges’ excellent Sept. 28 news obituary for longtime Louisiana politician Louis Lambert brought back a flood of memories. It also served as a reminder that tiny amounts of votes can change history in major ways.
Lambert served either in the state Senate or on the Public Service Commission for 30 of the 32 years between 1972 and 2004, leaving a record of old-style populism. For now, let’s leave to others any assessment of his lawmaking legacy. What remains most remembered about Lambert, and what is so vivid in my own mind, was his doubly-excruciatingly close race for governor in 1979.
In a race with six major and three minor candidates, Lambert appeared to have missed a general election runoff by 1,149 votes behind then-lieutenant governor Jimmy Fitzmorris, with then-U.S. Rep. Dave Treen, the race’s only Republican, another 14,000 — or 1% — further ahead in first place. Somehow, though, when the machines were opened, Lambert’s tiny deficit turned into a 2,506-vote margin ahead of Fitzmorris, putting Lambert in the runoff.
As Louisiana wasn’t exactly known for honest elections at the time, the switch in the vote count in Lambert’s favor led to a widespread belief that skulduggery was involved. Fair to Lambert or not, those suspicions haunted him in the runoff against Treen, who was vying to be the first Republican to win a statewide election in more than 100 years.
Voter registration and behavior back then stacked the odds heavily against Republicans. It took all those suspicions, plus the endorsements for Treen by all four of the other major candidates, plus a careful “ballot security” program on Treen’s behalf led by then-Democratic state Rep. Ben Bagert, plus a spirited statewide system of phone banks operated by Republican women, to push Treen past Lambert in the runoff by only 8,557 votes. The margin was just seven-tenths of 1%.
The closeness of the race led to perhaps the strangest, most somber “victory party” I’ve ever seen…. [The rest of this column is at this link.]
