And Now, We Have Richard Nelson In The LAGOV Race

We’ve mentioned this one a couple of times already, as he’s been pretty consistent about his intention to run, but state representative Richard Nelson is officially in where it comes to the 2023 Louisiana governor’s race.

Louisiana Representative Richard Nelson is the next person to announce a gubernatorial campaign.

Nelson is the Republican Representative for St. Tammany Parish and has been in office since 2019. He announced his campaign for the 2023 gubernatorial election Wednesday morning.

Read Nelson’s statement below:

State Representative Richard Nelson (R- Mandeville) announced his candidacy for Governor of Louisiana in the October 14, 2023 primary. Nelson is an engineer, attorney, and former diplomat who was elected to the House of Representatives in 2019. In the Legislature, he has been a vocal proponent for tax reform and elementary education. At 36, he is the youngest declared candidate currently in the race.

“Louisiana has everything going for it, but is held back by leaders who are stuck in the past,” Nelson declares in his announcement video. “If Louisiana were just average in the country, we’d all live 4 years longer and get a 33% raise. That’s what bad government is costing us: four years of our lives and a third of our income.”

Nelson grew up in Mandeville, where he was an Eagle Scout and valedictorian of Mandeville High. He graduated in the top of his class in both Biological Engineering and Law at LSU. Nelson served for seven years in the Foreign Service of the U.S. Department of State, living in Washington, D.C., Germany, and the Former Soviet Republic of Georgia. As a State Department Officer, engineer, and diplomat, he managed projects and programs protecting American embassies around the world from terrorism and espionage.

Nelson runs his own consulting firm, and he and his wife Ashley live in Mandeville with their three boys.

As a Representative, Nelson has championed major policy changes, most notably the elimination of the income tax and improving literacy for elementary students. He has been an advocate for keeping tax dollars in local communities rather than concentrating them in Baton Rouge. Nelson is also known for his bipartisanship and working for sound policy rather than political party. In running for Governor, he will forgo his ability to seek re-election to his current seat.

“This election we have a choice between career politicians or real solutions, big money or big ideas. I’m 36 years old. I’m not just in this for the next four years. I’m fighting for our next 40 years.”

Then there was the Facebook video that went with the announcement, which was…different.

What do we think of this? Well, our readers will notice we’ve been tepid at best toward all of these Republicans getting in. We see some problems with John Schroder’s chances to win, we see even bigger ones with Sharon Hewitt’s chances, and while we’re pretty favorable toward Garret Graves as a congressman we don’t think he’s without some problems, either.

The state party is getting behind Jeff Landry for a reason. He’s done more than anybody else to fight for the conservative cause, individual liberty, economic prosperity, smaller government and anti-wokeness over the past four years, and as such he’s more qualified than the rest of the gang running.

The problem with Nelson, who we’re disposed to like, by the way, is that he’s done the least on those subjects.

That isn’t an indictment of him; it’s just a fact. He’s a freshman state representative who’s managed a fairly paltry legislative record so far. Most freshman legislators have that problem, which is why they tend to run for re-election rather than statewide office. But not Nelson – he’s going to grab at the brass ring.

And while we’re good with the narrative he’s going to run with, which is that he’s not a career politician and all these other guys/gals are dinosaurs, the problem is that the Boy Wonder thing has been done and it’s not going to work. Bobby Jindal burned it for everybody else for a good while to come.

Now – Nelson has been talking about killing Louisiana’s state income tax and that’s a great platform to run on. The state income tax must be killed before Mississippi completes the elimination of its state income tax, which has already begun, or else Louisiana’s outmigration problem is going to get infinitely worse and we’ll become a basket case before anything can be done to fix it.

The problem being that all the other Republicans in the race are likely to tout that as well – or at least most of them will; if Graves runs he might stop short of it.

So Nelson’s big drawing point would then be nothing unique.

What else could he offer? Well, Nelson also brought a bill to legalize marijuana in the state. It didn’t really go anywhere, but that doesn’t mean it’s a dead-on-arrival idea with the populace at large. Legalizing weed, something Gary Chambers ran on for the Senate last year, would attract a certain political clientele, but how many of them are Republican voters we’re not sure. We’re not passionately opposed to the idea, as we’ve written, but the one problem we see that legalizing marijuana would almost surely create is there is no way you could pass a bill legalizing it without the state legislature then tightly regulating the grow licenses, such that those will be restricted to a small number of highly-connected, rich, and probably largely out-of-state concerns represented by the Usual Suspect contract lobbyists at the Capitol.

And it’ll become what most business in Louisiana becomes; an oligopoly mobbed up with state government. Try to make any changes to that reality and it’ll be like fighting the nursing home operators, trial lawyers or river pilots – only worse. Before you can legalize weed you’ve got to blow up the state’s tendency and preference for over-regulating every capitalistic endeavor with boards, commissions and bureaucracies, most of which are hideously corrupt.

Nelson didn’t really seem to get that, which betrayed a bit of naivete on his part. Frankly, that’s to be expected of a 36-year-old; it usually takes a few blows to the head before you see all the angles to issues like this and can deal with them effectively.

And that largely describes Bobby Jindal’s experience as Louisiana’s governor. Nelson would essentially be another bite at that apple.

He’s definitely a smart guy, and we like his ambition. He would be a departure from John Bel Edwards in healthy ways, to be sure. But this is the longest of long shots – we don’t even need to get into the campaign finance aspect of all of this, which is utterly hopeless for him – and that’s not an unjust reality. Nelson isn’t ready to be governor yet.