(This was a three-way conversation among columnists Quin Hillyer, Stephanie Grace, and Will Sutton, about why voters rejected all four constitutional amendments on the ballot last week. Print publication was April 3)
Sutton: This seems like a really huge moment in Louisiana politics. Do you recall a vote on anything else in Louisiana that was so lopsided?
Grace: There was an election in Orleans Parish in 2023 where 91% rejected a Sheriff’s Office millage. There was the creation of regional levee authorities after Katrina, which got 81% support statewide. Those are bigger numbers than we had this week, but still, we had 63-66% voting against the governor.
The common thread, to me, is trust in government. There was a lack of trust in these proposals. It came from a few different places. It was not hard for Democrats to capitalize on, because they’re angry anyway. They’re angry at Landry, they’re angry at Donald Trump. They feel like their government is doing all kinds of things that they can’t control. This was something they could weigh in on, and boy, did they.
I feel like Amendments 2 and 3 were really the ones that people talked about and were strongly opposed to, but the campaign to vote no on all four offered a powerful, easy message.
But the opposition wasn’t only from Democrats, so let’s talk about that.
Hillyer: I agree that most of this was driven by the two more high-profile amendments, juvenile justice and the tax overhaul. Voters, especially when they’re given this little time — and they really had almost no time to digest this — they tend to see what the high-profile things are and then lump everything together.
And the juvenile justice one was just a flat-out bad idea. I mean, it was to give legislators the ability to try juveniles as adults, without letting the public weigh in on what crimes should count. Most people do not think that children should be treated as full adults except in extreme situations, and you ended up with a ton of opposition.
