The Same Playbook
They came for ACORN in 2009. They’re running the same play right now. Today the mayor of New Orleans refused to let them win twice.
Helena Moreno endorsed Jamie Davis today.
Eleven days before the runoff. Middle of early voting.
The mayor of New Orleans — born in Veracruz, sworn in by Kamala Harris five months ago — put her name on the campaign of a Black farmer from Waterproof, in Tensas Parish, whose grandfather was a sharecropper on the same land Jamie now farms.
“Louisiana is at its strongest when we bring people together,” she said.
Jamie said it like a farmer: from the rows of Waterproof to the front porches of New Orleans.
He carried all 64 parishes on May 16. 26,000 votes out of Orleans Parish alone.
This is not a New Orleans mayor anointing a stranger. This is a New Orleans mayor catching up to her own voters.
She did the right thing.
Moreno made this move from a city under siege.
The city is broke. $125 million loan to repay. Vendors unpaid.
Landry sent state troopers in to sweep homeless encampments without telling her. He cut a deal with Trump to put National Guard troops on Bourbon Street. The legislature gutted three New Orleans criminal court judgeships and cancelled the elections to replace them. They tried to abolish the Orleans Parish Clerk of Criminal Court before Calvin Duncan could take office. Trump has publicly floated a federal takeover of the police department.
Many points of pressure on her city at once.
She endorsed Jamie Davis anyway.
Jamie Davis is not the establishment candidate. He is the establishment’s nightmare.
She did the thing the Democratic Party failed to do in 2009.
Pause here.
The mainstream media is not going to tell you what I’m about to tell you. They have already decided who counts. I’ll get to that.
If this work matters to you, become a paid subscriber. If you’re already free, upgrade. I’m asking directly. I keep doing this because readers pay for it. The math is that simple.
In 2008, ACORN and our affiliated organizations registered close to three million voters.
I know. I was there.
Three million. Disproportionately poor. Disproportionately Black and Brown. Disproportionately, first-time voters.
Obama won. He had a House and a Senate. He passed the Affordable Care Act.
The Republican Party watched the math change in front of them.
So they came for us.
I remember the day they came for the computers.
November 2009. ACORN’s national headquarters on Canal Street in New Orleans. Louisiana Attorney General Buddy Caldwell — a Democrat at the time — sent his investigators in with a search warrant. They walked out with dozens of computers, hard drives, and boxes of documents.
I watched it happen.
We were the largest organization of low- and moderate-income families in the country. Built one folding table and one clipboard at a time. We had just registered three million voters for an election that put a Democrat in the White House.
And I watched it get taken apart.
I have not forgotten the depression of that day.
The attack came from every direction at once.
Hundreds of blogs were spinning manufactured scandals.
Fox News and other cable networks were running fake news 24 hours a day for months.
James O’Keefe in a pimp costume with a hidden camera. Edited videos that fell apart on inspection but worked perfectly as television.
State AG investigations whose only purpose was to seize records and generate headlines. Caldwell publicly claimed embezzlement of $5 million. The actual figure was less than a fifth of that. No criminal charges were ever filed. The statute of limitations had already run, as Caldwell himself acknowledged.
The case was never the case. The headlines were the case.
This is not dissimilar to what Trump’s Justice Department is doing right now.
You don’t need evidence. You don’t need due process. You don’t need a conviction. You need the law as a weapon, the media as the amplifier, and the silence of the people who should defend you.
That last part is the part nobody talks about.
Congress passed an appropriations rider prohibiting any federal funding for ACORN.
A federal judge in Brooklyn ruled it was a bill of attainder — Congress had named a specific organization and declared it guilty without trial, which the Constitution explicitly forbids. The Second Circuit overturned the ruling. By then the organization was already gone.
Most of the House Democratic caucus voted to defund us.
That’s the part nobody tells you.
Politics were different then. The Democrats were sensitive. ACORN had spent decades organizing low-income families to challenge banks, landlords, and city halls — and a lot of those city halls were run by Democrats. We were not loyal to the party. We were loyal to the people we organized.
We challenged power.
Power, sometimes, did not give up easily.
So when the right came for ACORN, the Democratic Party got out of the way.
The organization that built the coalition that elected the president was dismantled by the party of the president it had elected.
That’s why history matters right now because of what happened in Ohio this week.
June 11, 2026. FBI agents raided the Cleveland office of the Ohio Organizing Collaborative.
Founded in 2007. Voter registration in Ohio. Exactly the kind of organization ACORN was.
Over a hundred agents. Computers seized. Hard drives taken. Agents went to the staffers’ homes and interrogated them.
January 2026. The FBI raided the Fulton County, Georgia, elections center.
This isn’t a coincidence. This is a schedule.
Voter registration is not voter fraud. Urban voting is not voter fraud. Black voting is not voter fraud.
Replace “ACORN” with “Ohio Organizing Collaborative” in the 2009 script. It reads the same word-for-word.
But 2026 is bigger than 2009.
In 2009 they came for the organizations.
In 2026 they’re also coming for the laws.
April 29. The Supreme Court ruled in Louisiana v. Callais that Louisiana’s congressional map — the one with two majority-Black districts the Robinson plaintiffs spent four years winning in federal court — was unconstitutional.
Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the law Lyndon Johnson signed in 1965 after people bled on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, was gutted in all but name.
April 30. Landry suspended the U.S. House primary elections. Over 100,000 absentee ballots had already been mailed. Ballots already cast went into boxes that would never be opened.
State Senator Jay Morris of West Monroe carried the bill that replaced the two-Black-district map. The new map dissolves Cleo Fields’s District 6. The delegation moves from 4R–2D to 5R–1D.
The same Jay Morris carried Senate Bill 217, which reduces New Orleans Criminal District Court from twelve judges to nine — and cancels the elections to fill the abolished seats.
One legislator. Two acts of democratic subtraction. One session.
May 4. Two Black women in Baton Rouge filed paperwork.
Marian Gbaiwon and Katilyn Patricia Collins. They have started a movement called Louisiana Deserves Better.
Five days after Callais. Four days after Landry suspended the primaries.
They filed a recall petition against the Governor of Louisiana. They filed another against Attorney General Liz Murrill. They filed a third against the Mayor-President of East Baton Rouge.
Their principle: elected officials who interfere with elections face direct, legal, democratic consequences.
They have until November. They need 600,000 signatures statewide. The bar is high. It is rarely cleared by any effort.
That is not the point.
The point is the tables. Lake Charles. Shreveport. Baton Rouge. Lafayette. Alexandria. Bywater bakeries in New Orleans have lines down the block. Louisiana is organizing against one-party rule.
The point is the massive number of volunteers on a Saturday morning at folding tables around the state, telling voters why a governor who suspends elections deserves to be recalled.
The point is that two Black women in Baton Rouge looked at the most powerful governor Louisiana has had in fifty years and said: not without a fight.
That is what the people running this project are afraid of.
That is why the FBI raided Cleveland on Thursday.
That is why Buddy Caldwell raided Canal Street in 2009.
That is why six justices gutted Section 2.
The project for several decades has been to stop regular people — and especially Black people in the South — from building political power.
We are not going to let them.
This is what makes Helena Moreno’s endorsement today different.
In 2009 the Democrats let ACORN burn because we challenged the wrong people.
Jamie won the primary by talking to people the party usually writes off — Black and white, rural and urban, working-class. He refuses to play the consultant games that has produced the candidates Louisiana Democrats keep losing with.
He is a threat to the same structure that abandoned us.
Moreno could have stayed neutral. She could have waited for the runoff to settle. She did not need to spend political capital in June.
She did it anyway.
She did it knowing what Landry may do to her city in retaliation. She did it knowing the homeless sweeps will continue. (And to be honest her administration really needs to come together with housing groups now and fight for a stronger housing system). She did it because she understood the math.
The math ACORN was registering when they came for the computers. The math Marian and Katilyn Patricia are organizing right now at folding tables across the state. The math Jamie Davis won 64 parishes with on May 16.
It’s the same math.
She stood with the challenger.
That is what the Democratic Party failed to do in 2009.
Let me tell you what mainstream media did with this story.
The mayor of the largest city in Louisiana endorsed a U.S. Senate candidate today. Eleven days before the runoff. Middle of early voting. Major political development.
NOLA.com did not cover it.
As of tonight, the front page of the state’s paper of record has not run the story. Not the news side. Not the opinion side. Not the politics page.
But here is what they did do.
Three weeks ago, the Times-Picayune editorial board endorsed Julia Letlow for the U.S. Senate seat. They wrote that Letlow “makes the best case that she’s prepared to make an immediate impact.”
They never sat down with Jamie Davis. They never engaged with his case. They never asked him a single question on the record about what he would do as a U.S. Senator.
The Democratic side of the race was simply not part of their evaluation.
In February, one of their political columnists wrote that the Democratic candidates “aren’t relevant enough — and might never be.”
Not relevant enough. Might never be.
This is the editorial position of the largest newspaper in Louisiana.
A Black Senate candidate from a state that is held by a white supermajority. A farmer. The only candidate who won all 64 parishes in the primary. The only person who has built a coalition that actually crosses the lines Louisiana has been gerrymandered along for a century.
Not relevant enough.
That’s not coverage. That’s a position. And the position aligns exactly with the project I’ve been describing.
This is why I am writing this. This is why you are reading it on Substack and not in the morning paper. This is why I am asking you to pay for it.
Thank you Helena Moreno.
Early voting runs through Saturday, June 20.
The runoff is June 27.
Ballot position #3, Democratic ticket, Jamie Davis.
If Jamie wins the runoff and the general, he becomes Louisiana’s first Black statewide elected official since Reconstruction. Not since Pinchback. Not since 1873. Not in 153 years.
A Black farmer from Tensas Parish. Whose grandfather was a sharecropper on the same land Jamie now farms 3,200 acres of. Sitting in the United States Senate.
That’s the math the people running this project have been working for eighteen years to prevent.
That’s why they came for ACORN.
That’s why they raided Cleveland.
That’s why they gutted Section 2.
That’s why a mayor who is supposed to be too pressured to act, acted.
That’s why NOLA.com isn’t going to tell you any of this.
Here is what you do.
If you live in Louisiana: vote. Ballot position #3. Jamie Davis. June 27.
If you live in East Baton Rouge: sign all three recall petitions.
If you live elsewhere in Louisiana: sign the Landry and Murrill recalls. Find your nearest signing location at louisianadeservesbetter.com.
If you live anywhere else: send money to Jamie’s campaign. Drive in if you can. Knock doors. Make calls. Send texts. Do what the Freedom Summer volunteers did in 1964 when Mississippi couldn’t do it alone. www.jamieforlouisiana.com
The people in power are counting on you to be too exhausted to show up.
That’s the design. The exhaustion is the product.
Don’t give them what they want.
And subscribe.
Not because I need it. Because writing that connects ACORN to the Ohio Organizing Collaborative to Louisiana v. Callais to a New Orleans mayor’s endorsement to two Black women in Baton Rouge with a folding table does not exist in the mainstream press anymore. NOLA.com is not going to do this for you. The Times-Picayune is not going to do this for you. They have already shown you what they think matters.
I am asking you for $8 a month, or $80 a year, or whatever you can pay if those numbers don’t work, to keep this work coming.
If you got this far, you know what’s at stake.
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In 2008 we registered three million voters.
This is what they were registered for.
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