Too many of Louisiana’s faithful swear devotion to God, then vote like they just dragged themselves off a redneck dive-bar floor, with help from an equally wobbly stool, the morning after the monthly KKK meeting. The pickup they drive to the polls has a Choose Life sticker on the bumper.

Because around here, you’re pro-life until the baby needs lunch.

How do you extol the virtues of Jesus and vote for the party of cruelty? I’m no theologian, so maybe someone can help me make sense of it.

I wrote those lines before the polls closed on Tuesday, anxious and in my usual Election Day funk, wondering yet again why good people vote for bad candidates. I wrote them before the rest of America spoke, loudly and distinctly. Right before Democrats took the House and the Senate in one of the most lopsided midterms in memory, flipping Senate seats in places that were supposed to be beyond Democratic reach. Iowa, Ohio, Maine, North Carolina, and South Carolina. Kansas, which hadn’t elected a Democratic senator in nearly a hundred years, went royal blue.

And in Texas, Brother James Talarico spared no rod on child-of-God Ken Paxton.

By Wednesday morning the president was walking away from the scene of the wreck, and the vice president was walking away from the president by blaming the loss on Trump’s war of choice in Iran.

Here in Louisiana, we watched that blue wave from the top of the levee, wishing it was us.

Despite all that, we here in the bayou state still have something to be thankful for. Our MAGA survivors will be heading back to D.C. with a lot less to work with. Mike Johnson kept his seat but is about to lose his gavel. Steve Scalise is already angling to lead the minority (say it twice because minority sounds nice). Clay Higgins keeps his seat and his theatrics, but the theatrics will play out from the back bench. And Julia Letlow arrives by the skin of her teeth to a Senate where her party no longer sets the agenda. They can still vote no. They can’t do much else. The levers of power are in new hands.

Letlow’s arrival, though, is the part Louisiana Repubs would rather you not look at too closely. She won by about 26,000 votes out of nearly 1.47 million cast, roughly 51% to 49%, according to unofficial returns. This is a state where Dems haven’t won a Senate race since 2008, and national handicappers didn’t start sniffing at an upset until the final weeks. Turnout was about 49%. Half the state stayed home, and the supposedly bulletproof red state came within two points of sending a Democrat to the Senate.

That near miss belongs to my own party as much as anyone’s, so before I go after the Republicans, Democrats, it’s your turn in the confessional. The Louisiana Democratic Party, and the national party that treats this state as a lost cause, have grown far too comfortable with moral victories. Close counts. Respectable showings by sacrificial lambs. The race where we “made them spend money.” We’ve celebrated so many almost-wins that I’m not sure anyone in the room still believes an actual win is possible.

A Democrat nearly took a Senate seat in Louisiana on Tuesday, and the only public polls of the race were ones Jamie Davis’s own campaign paid for, the last of which showed a dead heat. Imagine what that race looks like with a fully functional state party behind it, registering voters in every parish, knocking on doors from Shreveport to Slidell, and dragging that 49% turnout up where it belongs. Imagine if the state party had tapped into that high-volume Resist energy that’s been marching in the streets and waving signs for two years without a state party member in sight. Then imagine that state party giving the national party a reason to invest. And to believe. If we’d shown them a real operation, maybe they’d have shown up with real money.

It’s time to wash the big L off our foreheads and get in the game. To fight like it matters, because it does. People’s healthcare matters. Hungry kids matter. Public schools matter. Rising utility costs matter. Stopping the cruelty and the graft matters. Our state party needs to stop sittin’ around waiting on the world to change so winning gets easier.

I hope Jeff Landry counts 26,000 sheep tonight before he finds sleep. Landry put his weight behind Letlow right alongside Trump, and a super PAC backed by the governor buried John Fleming in negative ads during the runoff to clear her path. His hand-picked candidate then limped across the finish line in one of the reddest states in America. Landry built his political machine on the idea that standing as close to Donald Trump and his Nerd Reich as possible was all the platform he’d ever need, and that strategy just failed across most of the country.

Republicans who hung on to their president’s coattails with their greedy little fingers just learned that coattails only carry you along if the man in the coat is going somewhere. Landry faces voters again in October 2027 and so does our Legislature, the one that loves to pass whatever he slides across the desk. A political future pinned to Trump is no longer a viable plan.

And while we’re at it, Senator John Kennedy could stand to learn the same lesson. Kennedy has made a second career as the folksy stand-up comedian, delivering corn pone one-liners in a Sunday-school drawl, lobbing punchlines at whatever camera is closest. Lately he’s been taking his act on the road and musing aloud about running for president in 2028. Can you even imagine?

Louisianans don’t need another colloquialism about a pig or a possum, and they don’t need their senator auditioning for New Hampshire. If he’s serious, perhaps he should first try to do the actual work of the Senate. Solve just one problem. Pick one, any will do.

Every politician in this state should be sticking a wet finger in the air this week. The wind is shifting. It shifted in Kansas. It shifted in Texas. It’s swirling in Mississippi where they are still scratching heads and counting votes. It came within two points of shifting here.

And to the faithful who fill the pews every Sunday, the Gospel didn’t change on Tuesday, just our awareness of what could have been, and what could yet be.