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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…
With less than a month before Louisiana Democrats choose their nominee for U.S. Senate, the party’s three candidates will share a debate stage April 21 in Baton Rouge in what is likely to be one of the clearest side-by-side tests of the race before voting begins. Nick Albares, Gary Crockett, and Jamie Davis are scheduled…
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…
State Sen. Royce Duplessis is pitching his Louisiana Voting Rights Act as a state-level backstop at a moment when he says the federal one can no longer be taken for granted. Duplessis’ Senate Bill 365 would create a Louisiana Voting Rights Act, prohibit voter suppression and vote dilution, and establish a Louisiana Voting Rights Commission…
The five Democrats running in Louisiana’s 5th Congressional District offered few real policy clashes at a forum Tuesday night. Instead, the sharper divide was over style, strategy and how forcefully Democrats should confront both a radicalized Republican Party and their own party’s failures in places like rural Louisiana. That made the Young Democrats of Livingston…
Hundreds of Baton Rouge residents turned out Saturday at A.Z. Young Park outside the State Capitol for the latest “No Kings” rally and march, part of a broader national day of action organized through the growing anti-Trump protest movement. The Baton Rouge event was organized by Indivisible Baton Rouge as part of the March 28…
Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Nick Albares said Thursday that his brother, David Albares, has died, and that he will temporarily step away from the campaign trail to be with his family. “On Tuesday, March 24, 2026 I learned my brother died,” Albares said in a statement. “My brother and I were very close and we…
The Louisiana Democratic State Central Committee on Saturday moved ahead with a long-debated endorsement meeting, formally backing candidates in the U.S. Senate race, all six congressional districts, and several statewide contests ahead of the party’s new closed-primary cycle. By the end of the day, the party had endorsed Jamie Davis for U.S. Senate; Lauren Jewett…
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…
The Recreation and Park Commission for the Parish of East Baton Rouge (or “BREC”)’s effort to declare multiple Baton Rouge parks “obsolete” and move them toward sale hit serious resistance this week after residents and local officials blasted the process as rushed, opaque, and disconnected from the communities most affected. The controversy centers on a…
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….
Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Nick Albares has picked up the sole endorsement of the Greater New Orleans AFL-CIO, adding organized labor support to his campaign as he works to build early momentum in Louisiana’s U.S. Senate race. The endorsement was announced Monday and gives Albares a notable regional labor backing as candidates continue jockeying for…
Tania Nyman, a veteran community advocate known for her fierce battles over local public schools and city governance, has officially launched her campaign for the Democratic nomination in Louisiana’s 5th Congressional District. Speaking to a crowd of supporters at the Mid City Ballroom in Baton Rouge, Nyman framed her candidacy as a necessary escalation of…
Republican Paul Sawyer won the special election for Louisiana House District 69 on Saturday, defeating Democrat Angela Roberts in a closely watched race that drew the highest turnout of any contest on the statewide ballot. Unofficial results from the Louisiana Secretary of State show Sawyer receiving 2,587 votes, or 53 percent, to Roberts’ 1,945 votes,…
As Louisiana’s 2026 legislative session begins, State Representative Mandie Landry does not sound like someone expecting a loud, dramatic showdown at every turn. That, in her view, may be part of the problem. In an interview with The Bayou Progressive, the New Orleans Democrat described the opening days of the session as oddly subdued —…
The Louisiana AFL-CIO has endorsed Democrat Lauren Jewett in Louisiana’s 1st Congressional District, giving the educator and union member a significant institutional boost as she emerges as her party’s presumptive nominee following the withdrawal of James “Jim” Long. The endorsement is an early but meaningful marker in the race to challenge Republican House Majority Leader…
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 push for massive data center construction in Louisiana, anchored by Meta’s staggering $27 billion facility in Richland, is being presented as a modern economic masterstroke. But as the details of the proposed subsidies emerge, it looks less like a “new frontier” and more like a high-tech version of the same lopsided deals that have…
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…
A special education teacher and union member is challenging Steve Scalise with a blunt promise: stop treating District 1 like an afterthought, and start “showing up.” Lauren Jewett talks like someone who’s spent a career dealing with the consequences of systems that don’t work. Not in theory — in real time, with real people, and…
