Party affiliation
Up until 2007,Guillory had been a registered Republican [7] and served on the Louisiana Republican state central committee. [8] He became a Democrat in 2007 when he first ran for the state House in the heavily Democratic District 40. [8] [9] [10] During the 2013 regular session of the Louisiana Legislature,Guillory switched his party affiliation back to Republican. [11] Officially,Guillory's party-switch occurred on May 31,when he was presented with the Frederick Douglass Award from the @Large Society.
Before Guillory's switch,the last Republican of African-American ethnicity in the Louisiana Senate had served during the Reconstruction era. [12] In accepting the award,Guillory compared himself to 19th-century abolitionist Frederick Douglass,a Republican who had supported Abraham Lincoln. [13]
Guillory's conservative political philosophy was indicated in his pre-2007 membership in the Republican Party,according to the Daily Kos , [14] Guillory explained his 2013 party switch in a 4-minute 17-second video widely circulated in state and national media outlets,including the radio programs of Rush Limbaugh,Sean Hannity,and Moon Griffon as well as by Neil Cavuto on Fox News. The video was viewed on YouTube within the first three days by nearly 500,000. Filmed in the rear of the Senate chamber,the video calls the Democrats "the party of Jim Crow" and depicts "the party of freedom and progress" as the Republicans. Guillory called his switch "not only right for me,but for all of my brothers and sisters in the black community" as he left the Democrats for the Republicans. [15]
Soon after re-joining the Republican Party,Guillory founded the Free at Last PAC,a political action committee dedicated to electing black conservatives to office.
2015 lieutenant gubernatorial campaign
Within days of Guillory's change of parties, Jim Shannon of KLTV-TV speculated that Guillory would become a candidate for lieutenant governor in the 2015 state elections, when Jay Dardenne stepped down to run unsuccessfully against Democrat John Bel Edwards and fellow Republican U.S. Senator David Vitter for the governorship vacated by the term-limited Bobby Jindal. [18] In the runoff on November 21, 2015, Edwards won the election over David Vitter with 56.1% of the vote, becoming the first Democratic governor elected in the Deep South since the end of Kathleen Blanco's term in 2008. [19]
Guillory ran last in the October 24 four-candidate primary, having finished with 85,460 votes (7.9 percent). Holden with 360,679 votes (33.3 percent) and Nungesser, who polled 324,654 (30 percent), meet in the November 21 runoff election. John Young ran a strong third with 313,183 votes (28.9 percent). [20] In the 2015 general election Nungesser prevailed, 628,864 votes (55.38 percent) to Holden's 506,578 (44.62 percent). [21] Edwards and Nungesser, of opposite parties, assumed office on January 11, 2016.
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