higher GOP activation was clear a week ago, when early voting ended; for only the second time in Louisiana history, self-identified Republicans had made up more than 40 percent of the early vote.

Republicans had two missions, paid for by normal party operations and by a conservative PAC run by Attorney General Jeff Landry and Sen. Bill Cassidy. One: Drive up the GOP vote in rural Louisiana to finally flip state legislative districts that had been won by Trump but held for ages by Democrats. Two: Force Edwards into a runoff, a position no incumbent Democrat has been able to win from in 17 years. (In 2002, Sen. Mary Landrieu narrowly beat a Republican challenger, in a state that up to that point had never elected a Republican tothe Senate.)

The GOP succeeded at both tasks. There will be a runoff, and whoever wins it will face a Republican supermajority in the state Senate and a potential supermajority in the state House. Edwards ran far ahead of his ticket — no other Democrat on the statewide ballot cleared 40 percent — but as election analyst Ryan Matsumoto pointed out, Edwards trailed his 2015 numbers in all but two parishes, Orleans and Jefferson. That's the city of New Orleans and its suburbs, respectively, and those suburbs used to be far more conservative.

If there's a surprise, it is that Edwards, an antiabortion moderate who signed a restrictive “heartbeat” abortion bill, did so much better with suburban voters while gaining so little with rural whites. The Democrat actually won Calcasieu