Back in the spring, the Louisiana Freedom Caucus PAC, an organization stood up to support the newly formed Freedom Caucus in the state Legislature, did a host of issue polling among likely voters in Louisiana.

I know this, even though the results of the poll haven’t been fully released to the public, because I happen to be the director of the Louisiana Freedom Caucus PAC.

I’m not a political consultant. I’m a blogger, a pundit, an author, and a podcaster. Working campaigns isn’t really my thing; it hasn’t been since I was a kid. I learned back then what the fastest and most secure ways were to put up yard signs, and I learned that phone banking is a very, very thankless occupation for a campaign volunteer. And I learned that political speeches can be some of the most painful things to have to listen to that God gave us ears to hear.

But I’ll chip in here and there to help a worthy candidate with messaging, write an occasional speech, and so on. It isn’t a profession, and I’m not sure I want to make it one.

On the other hand, when the opportunity came up to play a role in helping real conservatives capture seats in the notorious Factory of Sadness that is Louisiana’s state Legislature, I was happy to help. There are currently 71 Republicans out of 105 in the state House of Representatives and 27 Republicans out of 39 in the state Senate, but those are meaningless numbers.

Four years ago, some $7 million was spent by business trade groups and other center-right organizations to elect the most conservative/Republican Legislature in state history, and that was largely successful — as far as it went.  The GOP picked up a nice chunk of seats and, since that election, has picked up a few more in special elections and party flips to get to the current high-water mark. The problem is that all those Rs don’t amount to a hill of beans if the people sporting them on their political jerseys don’t treat the brand with respect.

The state Legislature in Louisiana is full of people who don’t give a damn about that R. The current House speaker, Clay Schexnayder, was elected by Democrats. He cut a deal across the aisle, with the help of a Democrat governor named John Bel Edwards, and was elected despite the opposition of nearly two-thirds of the Republicans in the House. Schexnayder has been careful not to upset his Democrat allies ever since, and yet the Republicans never mounted the coup d’etat most thought was inevitable.

Too many legislators were happy to go with the flow, and for the last eight years “the flow” has been dictated by Edwards, who lied his way into office claiming to be a “conservative” despite boasting a more left-wing voting record as a state representative than any member of the Louisiana Legislative Black Caucus.

Edwards raised more taxes than any governor in Louisiana history. He got a “Republican” Legislature to agree to do it in 2016 by threatening the end of college football at the state’s public universities if he didn’t get those tax increases. He’s all but dried up the state’s private economy in his two terms in office while doubling the state budget. He locked Louisiana down almost as heavily (and, in some respects, even more heavily) than New York or Connecticut during COVID.

The “Republican” Legislature did nothing about Edwards’ COVID lockdowns. State law allows for the dissolution of a gubernatorial emergency declaration via a petition signed by the majority of either house in the Legislature. It took months for Republicans in the House to finally get a majority behind such a petition. When it was submitted to Edwards, he openly flouted the law and went to court demanding that both houses sign it or else it couldn’t be constitutional. A craven state district judge sat on the case, while citizens begged their Republican senators to sign the petition and trump Edwards’ dilatory ace. They refused.

And while the South has experienced a renaissance of capital formation, in-migration, and economic growth over the past eight years, Louisiana has been mired in decline. Over Edwards’ time in office, almost 200,000 people have vanished in net out-migration, a number that would rate as the fourth-largest city in Louisiana were it a municipal population. Morale among Louisianans is at an all-time low.

Why? Because while other Southern states like Texas, Tennessee, and Florida have no state income tax and other Louisiana neighbors like Mississippi and Arkansas are now in the process of phasing theirs out, Louisiana maintains its own punishment of economic achievement — at the same time carrying on with one of, if not the, highest combined state and local sales tax burdens in America.

We’re an island of taxation in a sea of freedom among our neighbors, as Louisiana Freedom Caucus PAC board member Barry Hugghins is wont to say.

This is all very depressing stuff, and Louisianans are very much depressed by it.

But as we’ve interacted with people through polling, events, fundraising efforts, and candidate calls over the past several months, we’ve noted that along with that depression is a seething rage and a determination to do something about it.

There’s a red wave building in Louisiana.

When we polled those issues back in the spring, we expected that out of 20 of them we’d find a good solid four or five that we could reliably use to help candidates in various races.

Instead, we found 15.

For example, when we polled the abolition of the state income tax — and we polled it as aggressively as we could, explicitly asking respondents if they’d favor abolition without a replacement of the income tax’s revenue (meaning just cut the taxes and cut the budget to “pay” for it) — the results were striking.

Abolition polled at 64–25 favorable among likely voters. Among Republicans, it polled at 77–13 favorable.

That looked like a harbinger of something unusual going on.

And when we began talking to candidates, it felt different. Politicians, particularly at the state legislative level, are so often real-life copies of Kurt Russell’s character in the 1980 cult-classic Used Cars. They’ll shine anybody on to get elected. It isn’t that hard to smoke out the liars from the true believers, though, if you pay attention.

We’ve seen more true believers running this year than ever before. There are more people, for example, whose social media postings from well before becoming candidates indicate they’re authentic conservatives than Louisiana has ever seen.

And unlike the past, when those true believers were considered fringe candidates who couldn’t raise money, this new crop tends to be well-heeled, well-schooled in the issues, and well beyond the point of caring what’s said about them in the legacy media.

In my last column, I noted that the Republican Party at the highest levels — as in, its leadership on Capitol Hill — isn’t up to the task of an American revival. But at the grassroots level, things are different. There is a different kind of Republican percolating in local and state politics, and we’re seeing it in Louisiana.

We’re seeing it in a gubernatorial race in which a host of Republicans with reasonably good conservative credentials have dominated the state’s jungle primary so far, with one in particular — Attorney General Jeff Landry, who served a term as a tea party Republican in Congress from 2011–12 before redistricting caused him to lose in 2012 against fellow incumbent and John Boehner ally Charles Boustany — emerging as a runaway favorite. Two recent polls show Landry with a dominating lead against a field of seven major candidates and 16 in all, with 40 and 36 percent, respectively.

The latter poll — conducted by Democrat pollster Ron Faucheux for a left-leaning consortium of media outlets and interest groups, including the Urban League — had former Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development head Shawn Wilson, the sole major Democrat in the race, at just 26 percent. Wilson had barely raised more than a half-million dollars as of his last campaign finance report, while Landry was well over $9 million. Landry, in fact, has more money raised than the rest of the field combined.

And Landry is seen as the most aggressive, accomplished conservative politician in Louisiana. As attorney general, he’s sued the Biden administration some 39 times, the latest being an effort to enjoin the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management from a scheme to hamstring offshore oil production in the Gulf of Mexico for the supposed benefit of a minor species of whale that might or might not be endangered. Landry is a tiger on social issues, an aggressive conservative reformer, and a tireless campaigner. It’s working. There is even talk that he might get above 50 percent in the Oct. 14 jungle primary and close off the need for a runoff in November.

And if that happens, he’ll put those campaign chops to work in moving the Legislature to the right.

The candidates we’re talking to are cut from the same mold as Landry — ferociously conservative, furious at the direction of the country and the state, in zero mood to cut deals with Democrats and of the impression that no such deals will be necessary, openly disparaging of the legacy media, and fanatical about deep, transformative change away from the socialist-populist Huey Long model of government that has so badly retarded the state’s competitiveness.

That’s what that 200,000-person loss in net out-migration will do. Everyone in Louisiana, it seems, has lost a friend to the allure of Houston, Tampa, Nashville, Charleston, or other sunny, thriving locales. Everyone has stories of crime, of stupid bureaucracy, of petty corruption, of governmental incompetence.

And everyone is sick of losing.

When people have suffered enough, change comes. Current indications are that it’s coming in Louisiana. Maybe that’s an indication of a national trend on the horizon.