Back in the 70s when things began to percolate, the joke was the Louisiana GOP “could hold their convention in a phone booth.”
The Civil War... whites associated the GOP with the War Of Northern Aggression.
Republicans were as rare as a hen’s tooth in the South for a long time.
If you wanted to go into politics, you had to run as a Democrat and you could count on winning easily.
Mary Landrieu is the end of the line for the Southern tradition of voting Democrat.