Richard Fausset and Campbell Robertson

But Brady, 61, said she would probably be voting for the candidate, Eddie Rispone, regardless, as a demonstration of support for the president she admires.

“I’m trying to protect my man here,” said Brady, a hearing instruments specialist, hours before a rally Wednesday night in which President Donald Trump, stumping for Rispone, flashed his megawatt popularity in a state that he won by nearly 20 points in 2016.

Though Trump has readily injected himself in several high-profile races this year, the governor’s runoff in Louisiana next weekend is shaping up to be one of the purest tests of the president’s power and sway. But unlike other Trump-favored candidates in governor’s races in Kentucky and Mississippi, Rispone, a Baton Rouge construction magnate, is a political neophyte who had little name recognition until his campaign geared up a few months ago.

And Rispone has lassoed his fortunes to the president like few others: the candidate’s first two runoff ads, as noted by The Associated Press, showed Trump speaking at a rally, with no footage of Rispone at all.

Republicans are hoping that the Trump mystique will rub off and propel Rispone to victory in a tightly contested showdown with Gov. John Bel Edwards, a rare Southern Democratic governor who has nimbly surfed his state’s thoroughly Republican tides with his conservative stances on guns and abortion. It is an open question whether Edwards can stay upright under a last-minute Trumpian tsunami.

On Wednesday, the president arrived in Monroe, Louisiana, and told a crowd of thousands at the local civic center that their governor was, in fact, “a radical liberal Democrat.”

Rispone — who in affect and message resembles a bayou Ross Perot — was given a few minutes at the microphone, where he argued that Louisiana needed “an outsider, someone with serious business skills, someone that’s not beholden to special interests, someone that’s got backbone to go against the status quo — someone like Trump!”

With this message, along more than $10 million of his own money, Rispone scored a second-place finish in last month’s nonpartisan primary, coming out just ahead of another conservative Republican, Rep. Ralph Abraham. (Edwards won roughly 47% of the vote to Rispone’s 27%.)

But with Republican support now consolidating around Rispone, polls show his faceoff with Edwards to be essentially deadlocked.

Nationalizing the race makes sense for Rispone, given Edwards’ membership in a Democratic Party that is broadly unpopular in Louisiana. Edwards has so far overcome that mismatch with his custom-tailored cultural fit.

Raised in tiny Amite, Louisiana, Edwards, the son of a Tangipahoa sheriff, graduated from the U.S. Military Academy and served eight years as an active-duty Airborne Ranger. He is a good friend of Louisiana State University’s beloved football coach, Ed Orgeron, who met him at a south Louisiana duck hunting camp and appeared at a fundraiser earlier this year. It is a big name as far as allies go, but not the biggest, as Edwards has been forced to acknowledge.

“There’s a reason my opponent is calling in the president,” Edwards said at an event at a park in Monroe on Wednesday, a few hours before the Trump rally. “It’s because he doesn’t have a plan for the state of Louisiana.”

“Eddie knows he cannot win on the issues,” the governor added, as always careful to aim any criticism away from Trump and on to Washington. “He cannot win if this election is about Louisiana and what is best for our people.”

Rispone is a Baton Rouge native with his own bootstrapping Louisiana story to tell: In 1989 he and his brother founded ISC Constructors, a specialty contracting company that now boasts annual revenues of $350 million, according to the campaign.

Rispone has said he would follow the Trumpian model for economic growth, with a focus on cutting taxes and regulations, ideas with a natural constituency in a state that is dependent on the oil and gas industry and wary of big government.

This heavy emphasis on tax cuts is at the center of one of the few actual policy debates in the race. Rispone has argued it would unleash business growth, but Edwards has said it would return Louisiana to the days of slashed services and budget shortfalls brought on in part by the tax-cutting fervor of Bobby Jindal, the former governor whose fiscal troubles helped bring a Democrat like him into office in the first place.

Rispone’s critics have said his embrace of Trump is a fill-in for his lack of policy details beyond the general talk of cuts. This week, radio host Newell Normand, a former Jefferson Parish sheriff, blasted Rispone on his influential New Orleans radio talk show.

“Eddie Rispone’s strategy thus far is say nothing, reveal little, ride the coattails of Trump and, therefore wait to see if Trump can drag him across the finish line,” Normand said. “All the while Eddie Rispone has already sold us out — we’re actually now, in nationalizing this governor’s race, a pawn in Washington politics. I don’t know about you, but as a Republican, I find that very distasteful.”

With early voting already underway, Louisianans, like the rest of the country, are wondering exactly how much stroke the president still has. Trump held rallies in both Kentucky and Mississippi before this week’s governor’s contests in those states, with what appear to be mixed results: Matt Bevin, Kentucky’s Republican governor who had angered voters with his derisive comments about protesting teachers, came about 5,000 votes short of his Democratic rival, Attorney General Andy Beshear. Bevin has not conceded and a recanvass of votes is scheduled for next week. But Trump’s favored candidate in the Mississippi race, Lt. Gov. Tate Reeves, handily defeated a popular Democrat, Attorney General Jim Hood.

Presidential visits to Louisiana could accomplish several specific things for Rispone. The choice of Monroe, far from Louisiana’s centers of power, was ideal to shore up support in a conservative part of the state where Rispone might nonetheless have some trouble. It is the home of Abraham, his primary opponent, who was the target of fierce surprise attacks by Rispone during the campaign.

“He’s got a lot of work to do because Ralph Abraham is almost a legend here,” said John Cooksey, an ophthalmologist in Monroe who represented the area in Congress as a Republican for three terms. Abraham has endorsed Rispone, but Cooksey was not sure that would be enough for some.

“If anyone in the world could improve Rispone’s position,” he said, “I think it’s Trump.”

Roy Fletcher, a Baton Rouge-based political consultant who is currently working for a political action committee that supports Edwards, said there were few minds to be changed at this point in the race. But a Trump rally can fire up otherwise halfhearted voters amid the usual fall distractions of football and hunting.

“It’s turned into a turnout race, pure and simple,” said Fletcher, who has worked for both Democrats and Republicans in past races. “They’re just locked in, and so the choice is not Eddie or John Bel. The choice is hunting or voting.”

Trump is a turnout tool that works both ways.

Some New Orleans residents have been receiving mailers from the state Democratic Party with a photo of civil-rights-era protesters marching over the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, urging them to vote early for Edwards. “With Trump in the White House, there is too much at stake not to vote in this election for governor,” it reads.

Both strategies appear to be working.

John Couvillon, a Louisiana-based pollster, said that early voting so far was nearly as high as it is during presidential years, fueled by a surge in Republican turnout as well as a rise in African American turnout. For now, the Edwards campaign can “justifiably feel good,” about the numbers, Couvillon said.

After the Trump rally, Couvillon found that while there was little effect statewide, early voting by white residents spiked immediately in the area around Monroe. “A Trump visit can’t hurt,” he said.

Trump plans to be in Bossier City, Louisiana, next Thursday, two days before the election.

This article originally appeared in

In Louisiana Governor's Race, a True Test of Trump's Sway

WEST MONROE, La. — Walking away from a T-shirt tent at a Republican rally earlier this week, her arms full of pro-Trump swag, Resa Brady acknowledged she knew little about the state’s Republican candidate for governor.

On a sweltering Tuesday afternoon in the small Delta city of Cleveland, Mississippi, Hood, 57, bragged to a crowd about his chummy relations with state legislators down in Jackson.

“A lot of Republicans come up,” Hood said, “and they put their arm on my shoulder and get real close: ‘Me and my family are for you. Don’t you tell it.’ ”

The anecdote, conveniently impossible to fact-check, riffs on the stark political reality that any Democrat is a long shot in a state that has not elected a Democratic governor this century. But that reality seems a little less stark than usual in 2019, as people in both parties acknowledge.

This year’s three elections for governor are all in states — Mississippi, Louisiana and Kentucky — that President Donald Trump won easily in 2016. And in all three, the Democratic candidate is unusually competitive.

In Louisiana, the Democrat, Gov. John Bel Edwards, is running for reelection, having already proven that a candidate tailored to a red-state electorate — even one with a “D” after his name — can win if the stars are aligned just so.

In Kentucky, Andy Beshear, the Democratic state attorney general, is running against incumbent Gov. Matt Bevin, who was found in a recent poll to be the least popular governor in the country.

The laws of political gravity still generally favor Republicans in these states, where Trump, guns and Sunday school are popular and the Democratic brand on immigration, abortion and taxes are not. Amelia Chassé Alcivar, a spokeswoman for the Republican Governors Association, called the Democratic presidential field “the millstone around the neck of each of these candidates”: In all three races, Trump could eventually fly in, rail against left-wing Democrats and help seal the deal for Republicans.

But races for governor can be unpredictable, often turning as much on personalities and local matters as tribal and political alliances. Two of the most popular governors in the country are Republicans in the navy blue redoubts of Massachusetts and Maryland.

And this year, Trump-country Democrats are hoping to pull off that sort of partisan switch-up by winning personality contests against Republicans who have struggled with likability, or by winning policy contests with the argument that government need not be so small as to be painful.

Republicans do not deny the risks.

“Without question, this is a real race,” Austin Barbour, a Republican strategist and nephew of former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, said of his home-state contest.

Barbour still believes that the Republican candidate, Lt. Gov. Tate Reeves, holds the upper hand. A former state treasurer, Reeves, 45, is skilled at wielding wonkish minutiae in defense of the pro-business, low-tax legacy of uninterrupted Republican leadership that began with the election of Haley Barbour in 2003. He notably opposes the expansion of Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. Hood champions the expansion.

Reeves was endorsed by the current governor, Phil Bryant, but other Republicans have bristled at what they describe as his highhanded leadership style. In last month’s primary runoff, 46% of the voters backed Reeves’ opponent, Bill Waller, who declined to endorse Reeves in the aftermath.

In Louisiana, Edwards, an even-keeled and notably nonspicy flavor of Louisiana politician, has benefited from a little proximity to gridiron glamour, appearing in a video with New Orleans Saints star Drew Brees, and at a fundraiser with the beloved Louisiana State University football coach Ed Orgeron. After a number of higher-profile Republicans chose not to challenge him, Edwards now finds himself facing two Republican contenders, Rep. Ralph Abraham and Eddie Rispone, a businessman who is casting himself as a Trumpian outsider.

It was Edwards, an anti-abortion West Point graduate, who set a template for winning a red-state personality contest with his 2015 race against Sen. David Vitter, who was burdened with a prostitution scandal. Edwards also constantly reminds voters that he helped close a $2 billion deficit he inherited from his Republican predecessor, Bobby Jindal, who had signed a “no tax” pledge.

Health care is a signature issue for Edwards, who expanded Medicaid soon after taking office in 2016. On Wednesday, he was at Baton Rouge General Medical Center, celebrating a planned expansion of a burn center, the kind of progress that he said was only possible after he and lawmakers were able to correct the deficit.

Edwards, 53, said that the Democrats running elsewhere might benefit from a similar “common sense” style. He added that it was common sense to not alienate Trump, particularly in a state in regular need of federal disaster relief.

“I make sure we have a good relationship with the folks in Washington, including the president,” he said. “I’ve been there to visit with him nine times over the course of the last three years.”

Republicans have knocked Edwards for raising taxes and have accused him of creating an unfriendly business climate. Abraham, a family medical practitioner, has also run an ad declaring that there are only “two genders,” perhaps foreshadowing an attack on Edwards’ efforts to expand LGBT rights.

Edwards’ supporters are hoping he can benefit from a Republican house divided. Under Louisiana’s “jungle primary” system, all of the candidates will be on one Oct. 12 ballot, with the top two vote-getters going on to a November runoff if no candidate gets at least 50% in the first round. Rispone, who has been running third in the polls, recently unveiled an ad raising questions about Abraham’s fealty to Trump.

In Mississippi, Hood will have his hands full cobbling together a coalition of African Americans, liberal white city dwellers and exurban moderates. His superpower is a full immunity to charges that he is anything close to a latte-sipping urban elite; his first TV ad shows him packing shell casings, fixing machinery next to an American flag, heading to church, sitting in his truck and riding a tractor.

The attorney general also boasts of the $3 billion he delivered to taxpayers by going after “big insurance and scam artists.” Indeed, as Hood toured the Delta on Tuesday, he mixed country-boy licks (he referred to one piece of legislation as “one of these goat-roping deals”) with an old-school populist tune.

“They tell you every time, ‘Don’t you worry, we’re going to give these tax cuts to these large corporations, and they will reinvest,’” said Hood, straddling a stool and addressing a room full of voters as he sweated through the top half of his collar. He added: “It never happens. It ain’t nothing but just corporate welfare, is what they’re doing.”

The next day, outside of Jackson, Reeves was touring a heavy machinery company, sporting thick glasses and pull-on work boots. He told reporters that businesses like this had benefited from a reduction in inventory taxes that Republicans championed. And he warned that Hood and his trial lawyer allies would undo a 2004 “tort reform” law restricting medical lawsuits, and allow frivolous suits that would increase health care costs.

In Kentucky, Bevin is running on his fiscal discipline and the state’s humming economy, but the race keeps coming back to the long list of people who say they have been insulted by him. This includes his fellow Republicans, members of his own administration, and, most notably, schoolteachers.

“I voted for Bevin,” said Mary Brewer, a retiree who was eating lunch on a recent afternoon in Lawrenceburg, Kentucky. “Then he started talking all this crap about the teachers.”

Turning people off, however, is not the same thing as turning them on to someone else. “There’s nobody to vote for,” Brewer said.

The earnest Beshear, 41, is more of a mainstream Democrat than the candidates in Louisiana and Mississippi. He is the son of Bevin’s Democratic predecessor in the governor’s office, Steve Beshear, and he is for abortion rights, not that he emphasizes this often on the trail. What he does focus on is Medicaid expansion, put in place by his father, and more than anything, public education.

Strategists in both parties see Beshear ahead by a margin somewhere in the single digits, an advantage that narrowed after a summer of Republican attack ads and the first of what many assume will be multiple Trump visits.

Bevin’s mission has been to remind voters that Beshear is a Democrat — that, in the words of Davis Paine, the governor’s campaign manager, Beshear’s views on various issues “make him the most liberal nominee for governor in Kentucky history.”

Beshear’s mission is to remind voters that the Republican in the race is Matt Bevin.

“For the last four years, teachers have been called names, they’ve been bullied,” Beshear said at an event in Frankfort, Kentucky, where he proposed a pay raise for teachers.

He pledged to unify Kentuckians, who, he insisted in an interview afterward, “have so much more in common with each other than we have with any national party platform.”

South of Frankfort sits Lawrenceburg, the seat of the majority-Democratic but socially conservative Anderson County. Support in the county swung from Steve Beshear in 2011 to Bevin in 2015.

“I’d say the majority of people in Anderson County think he’s done a fairly poor job,” Sandy Goodlett, a former Lawrenceburg mayor, said of Bevin.

“But,” he added, “that doesn’t mean they won’t vote for him.”

3 Democrats With a Shot in Trump Country, but 'Don't You Tell It'

CLEVELAND, Miss. — Jim Hood, the Mississippi state attorney general, is a ruddy-faced man with a deep drawl and a vintage country-music hairdo — an anti-abortion, deer-hunting Baptist from the northeast Mississippi hill country. He is also a Democratic candidate for governor.

<h1>ATLANTA — Nina Yeboah was a freshman at Georgia State University in 2004 when she heard about the pair of white fraternity brothers who had shown up at a “Straight Outta Compton” party in blackface.</h1>

Fifteen years later, she said, it still feels traumatic to talk about what would become a moment of embarrassment and pain on the Atlanta campus. As a student of color, said Yeboah, now a writer, “it kind of wakes you up to what racism is like in the community that you’re in.”

What first appeared as a grotesque act of racist clowning on the part of Gov. Ralph Northam of Virginia turned out not to be an aberration at his medical school in the early 1980s. A confession from Mark Herring, the state’s attorney general, revealed that blackface was common at other Virginia schools at the time as well.

The news of other blackface episodes — an ever-growing tally including yet more Virginia politicians as well as Florida officeholders — led a rush to old yearbooks by reporters and others across social media.

This past week has reinforced that blackface, with its roots in demeaning minstrel-show traditions that date to the 1830s, has never gone away. In fact, it surfaces on a regular basis across the country, beyond the South and beyond the Greek houses on college campuses. Over the past two decades, there have been at least a handful of incidents every year, in Wisconsin, Oklahoma, Texas, Pennsylvania, Minnesota and Alabama, involving judges, police officers, bank executives and credit union employees.

Just last year, a fraternity at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo was suspended after students dressed up as gang members, with one person in blackface. A candidate for the Illinois Senate apologized for dressing as a rapper in blackface at a Halloween party a decade earlier. And a student at the University of Arkansas posted on Snapchat an image of himself in blackface and the words “I hope this offends someone.”

“Black people in general have had to deal with a lot of these things that have happened,” said Dr. David Randolph Sr., an oncologist in Richmond, Virginia, who graduated from Northam’s medical school in 1983 and recalled going to a party in the early 2000s and seeing a white couple dressed in full blackface as Venus and Serena Williams. “Everybody except me and my wife kind of looked at them as a matter of course.”

The frantic apology that Randolph received from the couple underscores what seems obvious: Blackface now and from its beginnings has been known to be offensive, “the filthy scum of white society,” as Frederick Douglass called it in 1848. That did not hamper its popularity. For more than a century it was in the mainstream of American pop culture, in Broadway plays and in Bing Crosby movies, before receding as the civil rights movement ascended.

But blackface has lingered, withdrawing into certain white settings cordoned off from public view.

College fraternities and sororities — among the most segregated institutions in modern American life — became a common setting for the behavior.

Before the scandal in the Virginia Capitol, universities had already begun to look deeply at the racism strewn across past yearbooks. At the University of Virginia, a commission that had been examining the institution’s past found copious examples of blackface, racist cartoons and racist stories in fake “slave dialects” in the early 20th century. Similarly vile things have been found in yearbooks at the University of Richmond.

Minstrel acts were a common part of campus life at many schools into the 1950s. As late as 1958, a sorority at the University of Alabama staged a blackface re-enactment of an event two years earlier when Autherine Lucy became the first African-American student to attend the school, before she was expelled. But with the rise of the civil rights movement, things changed.

“It is much more private by the time you get to the ‘70s and ‘80s, even the mid-60s,” said Anthony James, the division chairman of humanities and fine arts at Coastal Carolina Community College.

Starting as an undergraduate at the University of North Carolina in the late 1980s, James, who is white, studied hundreds of Southern college yearbooks, prompted in part by seeing a 1979 UNC yearbook photograph of a student dressed in blackface jokingly re-enacting a Ku Klux Klan lynching.

He found that blackface had become much rarer by the 1960s, and when it did show up, it was in photographs of private fraternity parties rather than at campuswide public events like minstrel shows. The episodes portrayed, like that 1979 lynching scene, also seemed to be growing uglier.

With few public photos, it is hard to say how rare — or how common — blackface became in this era. Cleophus Thomas Jr., the first black student government president at the University of Alabama, doesn’t remember any episodes involving blackface when he was on campus in the mid-1970s. He recalled plenty of Confederate pageantry but assumed that more explicitly racist theater, if it even happened, took place behind closed doors, with “no one there to see them but the bartenders and the valets.”

In New Orleans in 1987, on the other hand, dozens of members of a fraternity that had already been expelled from Tulane University marched in blackface in a parade in broad daylight, and as late as 1997, members of that same fraternity at Loyola University invited students to celebrate Martin Luther King’s Birthday “with fried chicken from Popeye’s, watermelon and a ‘forty.'”

“It wasn’t really a shock,” said Ryan Holmes, who is black and who went with 10 other students in protest to that party in 1997. Now an associate vice president for student affairs and dean of students at the University of Miami, Holmes said that things at many schools had not changed as much as people may want to believe. “It’s gone inside,” he said, “but it exposes itself every once in a while.”

By the late 1980s and 1990s on most campuses, blackface had finally become so taboo as to disappear completely from yearbook pages. When instances of blackface did become public — at an Illinois university in 1988, a high school in Missouri in 1990, a fraternity in Georgia in 1997 — condemnation followed as well as suspensions, firings and elaborate apologies, at least when people felt the need to apologize.

To this day, many white people have bristled at the notion that blackface is inherently racist, arguing that it is a tribute to the person being imitated or, as Robert Michel, the Republican from Illinois who served as House minority leader, said in a 1988 interview, “just a part of life” that “was fun.”

In 2008, Mel Kuhn, then the mayor of Arkansas City, Kansas, appeared with a darkened face as part of a charity drag show. His character was inspired, he said, by movies like “Big Momma’s House”; The Associated Press reported that the character’s name was “a vulgar reference to female genitalia.”

Kuhn apologized publicly shortly after the performance after meeting with the NAACP, but he sounded a defiant note this week. “There was no insult intended,” he said, adding: “You’ve got to stop this PC nonsense, where if I don’t say something perfectly correct, people just get disjointed.”

Thomas Venker, 70, a retired lawyer who is white, was a member of the Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity at Georgia State University in Atlanta in the late 1960s and early ‘70s. He said the fraternity in those days held a yearly “Soul Review” rush party that featured white members in blackface pretending to be groups like the Temptations and the Four Tops.

“This was because we loved these entertainers,” he said. “The black fraternities would look at our photo album book and laugh at our pictures, and thought it was funny that we would do that, and loved it.”

But in 2004, Venker’s old fraternity prompted outrage on campus when two of its members showed up in blackface to the “Straight Outta Compton” party, the same event that pained Yeboah and many other black students. The fraternity was temporarily suspended from campus.

Venker filed a federal lawsuit on the fraternity’s behalf, and eventually an arrangement was reached with the Black Student Alliance, of which Yeboah was a member, and which had also been suspended after promulgating a flier associating the fraternity with the Klan.

All these years later, Venker still defends the 2004 episode much like he does the “Soul Review” parties. These were homages to black performers, he says, and “totally innocent.”

Eric Lott, an expert on blackface minstrelsy and a cultural historian at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, who is white, called the practice “indefensible,” given its roots in dehumanizing attitudes “rooted in the traffic in black bodies and slavery.”

And yet, despite the pain and the punishment, some white people seem inescapably drawn to it. “It’s just one of the ways, theatrically and in everyday life, that white Americans appear to handle their relationship to the color line,” Lott said. “And I’m not sure how you deal with that.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="a4c33ac6-781a-4847-83bf-cdeb4da85752" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/08/us/northam-blackface-virginia.html">The New York Times</a>.

Beyond college campuses and public scandals, a racist tradition lingers

Fifteen years later, she said, it still feels traumatic to talk about what would become a moment of embarrassment and pain on the Atlanta campus.

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Richard Fausset and Campbell Robertson

Articles written by the author

In Louisiana Governor's Race, a True Test of Trump's Sway

3 Democrats With a Shot in Trump Country, but 'Don't You Tell It'

Beyond college campuses and public scandals, a racist tradition lingers