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At Southern University on Tuesday night, Louisiana’s three Democratic U.S. Senate candidates offered less of an ideological clash than three different arguments about what kind of Democrat can still compete statewide in a deeply red state. Nick Albares, Gary Crockett and Jamie Davis shared broad agreement on much of the Democratic policy baseline – protecting…
At the first stop of a new Democratic roadshow in Lafayette on Sunday, the candidates onstage did not spend much time debating where the party should stand. On most of the major questions — voting rights, abortion, health care, immigration, public education — they were broadly aligned. What the forum did reveal was something more…
The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday handed Chevron and the oil industry a major win in one of Louisiana’s most important environmental cases, wiping away the legal footing beneath a $745 million coastal damage verdict and moving a key part of the fight into federal court, where oil companies generally believe they have better odds….
For a party that has spent years struggling to build credible federal campaigns in Louisiana, the first-quarter fundraising reports offered something Democrats do not always get in this state: signs of life. Several Democratic candidates posted respectable numbers in reports covering Jan. 1 through March 31, enough to show that there is still donor interest,…
House Speaker Mike Johnson made it official Wednesday: when forced to choose between the political demands of Donald Trump and the moral warning of the head of the Catholic Church, Louisiana’s most powerful Republican chose Trump. Asked about the growing clash between the White House and Pope Leo XIV, Johnson did not try to calm…
When President Donald Trump threatened this week that “a whole civilization will die tonight” if Iran did not bend to his demands, the statement was so grotesque that it demanded more than the usual partisan reflex. It demanded a moral response. In Louisiana’s congressional delegation, two members supplied one. Congressman Cleo Fields treated Trump’s rhetoric…
For many Louisiana voters, Nick Albares is still an introduction. He is not a former statewide officeholder. He is not a longtime elected official with a built-in political base. And unlike some of the more familiar names in Louisiana Democratic politics, Albares comes out of the world of policy and nonprofit leadership more than the…
President Donald Trump’s proposed fiscal year 2027 budget is not law – yet. Congress still has to pass actual spending bills. But presidential budgets still matter because they show what the White House is trying to protect, what it is willing to cut, and who it expects to absorb the damage. This one is pretty…
Rev. Larry Foy is running for Congress with an argument Louisiana voters do not hear very often from a candidate shaped by the church: faith is not a detour from progressive politics. It is what brought him there. For Foy, a Democrat running in Louisiana’s 5th Congressional District, the through line from ministry to public…
Matt Gromlich says he is running for Congress because too many people in Louisiana’s 4th District have gotten used to a kind of representation that feels distant, performative, and largely absent from everyday life. A Shreveport educator now in his 14th year teaching, Gromlich is challenging House Speaker Mike Johnson as a Democrat in one…
Democratic congressional candidate Tania Nyman is not running as a generic issue-sheet progressive. In an interview with The Bayou Progressive, Nyman framed her candidacy in Louisiana’s 5th Congressional District as an extension of years of advocacy around public schools, fair maps, democratic accountability and the preservation of public institutions she argues are steadily being hollowed…
With Louisiana’s 5th Congressional District open for the first time in years, Democratic candidate Lindsay “Rubia” Garcia is trying to make the case that this is not the cycle for cautious politics. In an interview with The Bayou Progressive, Garcia described herself as a teacher, advocate, organizer, and newly minted lawyer who has spent years…
John Day is making an unusually direct case for his candidacy in Louisiana’s 3rd Congressional District: Democrats, he argues, do not need a symbolic opponent for U.S. Representative Clay Higgins. They need someone willing to campaign aggressively, talk plainly, and treat the race like it can actually be won. In an interview with The Bayou…
Gary Crockett is running for the U.S. Senate as a political outsider with a blunt argument: Louisiana does not need another talking head in Washington. It needs someone focused on bringing results home. In an interview with The Bayou Progressive, Crockett, a Democrat, framed his campaign around a mix of personal biography, economic frustration and…
At La Divina Italian Café in Baton Rouge, Democratic congressional candidate Jessee Fleenor made a simple argument for why he belongs in the race for Louisiana’s 5th Congressional District: the people in one of the state’s poorest and most rural districts do not need another polished lawyer or political climber pretending to understand their lives….
A newly revealed police report detailing a rape allegation against Louisiana Republican congressional candidate and state senator Blake Miguez is casting a dark cloud over a campaign that had just received a major boost from Donald Trump. The report, first obtained and published by The Atlantic, describes a 2007 incident in which Miguez’s former girlfriend…
The release of WalletHub’s 2026 report on the Best and Worst States for Women provides a stark, data-driven look at the reality of life in the Pelican State. While Women’s History Month typically serves as a time for commemorative reflections on progress, the empirical evidence suggests that for women in Louisiana, systemic barriers to economic…
Rev. Jesse Jackson died today in Chicago at the age of 84. If you’re looking for the neat version of American political history, Jackson is an easy footnote: two presidential runs, no nomination, no presidency. The kind of “historic” candidacy people praise after the fact precisely because it never has to win. That version is…
A federal judge has dismissed a 1967 school desegregation case involving the DeSoto Parish School Board, marking the second such closure in Louisiana in recent months as state and federal officials push to end long-standing court orders tied to civil rights-era litigation. On Monday, U.S. District Judge S. Maurice Hicks Jr. signed an order granting…
Louisianans have every right to cackle at the headline: our governor—of a state that can’t keep car insurance, homeowners insurance, or basic infrastructure from spiraling into chaos—is now a special envoy to Greenland. It reads like a deleted scene from a political satire. But here’s the problem with treating it like a meme: it isn’t…
Louisiana’s 2026 congressional elections will move forward under the state’s existing six-district map after the U.S. Supreme Court declined to rule by the end of 2025 on a high-stakes challenge to the boundaries. That delay effectively ends Republican lawmakers’ hopes of forcing another round of redistricting ahead of next year’s midterms — and preserves, at…
We’re living through one of those moments when the erosion of a freedom doesn’t quite hurt — at first. It’s quiet. Subtle. And that’s precisely why it matters so much. Just this week, ABC suspended Jimmy Kimmel Live! indefinitely after the comedian made controversial remarks about Charlie Kirk’s assassination. That decision followed swift threats from…
Charlie Kirk was shot and killed during a campus event at Utah Valley University on Wednesday. National outlets confirmed the killing and the chaotic scene on campus; the FBI is assisting local authorities. President Donald Trump announced Kirk’s death and said flags would be flown at half-staff. That’s the context — tragic, volatile, and nationally…
Charlie Kirk, a longtime ally of Donald Trump and co-founder of Turning Point USA, was fatally shot during a midday appearance at Utah Valley University in Orem on Wednesday. Cellphone video shows Kirk speaking beneath a “Prove Me Wrong” sign when a single shot rings out and he collapses as the crowd scrambles; he was…
