Sixty Rayburn - Legislative Elections

Legislative Elections

In 1948, while Long won his first full-term as governor, Rayburn was also elected to the Louisiana House of Representatives. He left the lower chamber in 1951, when he won a special election to fill a vacancy in the Louisiana State Senate created by the resignation of H. H. Richardson.

In time, Rayburn's District 12 (so numbered in 1972) included Washington Parish and portions of St. Helena, St. Tammany, and Tangipahoa parishes. In 1983, he was placed in the same district as a colleague, W. E. "Bill" Dykes of St. Helena Parish, who was moved from adjacent District 11. Dykes did not run against the dominant Rayburn. Sixty Rayburn remained in the Senate until 1996, having been defeated in a tight election in 1995 by the Republican Phil Short (a realtor and a retired lieutenant colonel in the United States Marine Corps. Short, who was reared in Shreveport, polled 21,222 votes (51 percent) to Rayburn's 20,676 (49 percent). The Republicans targeted Rayburn and eleven other Democratic senators that year.

In his last successful election in 1991, Rayburn (24,326 votes or 65 percent) easily defeated Republican Gerald "Jerry" Creel, Sr. (8,424 or 22 percent), and Independent Roy L. Crawford, (4,701 or 13 percent). In 1987, Rayburn had defeated Roy Crawford, then running as a Democrat, 31,903 (75 percent) to 10,377 (25 percent).

Short resigned the District 12 seat three years later in 1999 to accept a position with the Marines and subsequently left Louisiana. Ironically, both senators who preceded and succeeded Rayburn served only three years of their term, resigned, and necessitated special elections. Rayburn's district appeared to have turned solidly Republican in the election of February 6, 1999, when the sole Democratic candidate, Stanley Middleton, polled only 9 percent of the vote. Short was hence succeeded by Democrat-turned-Republican Jerry Thomas, who won the seat outright in the first round of balloting with 51 percent of the vote. In the balloting for full term on October 23, 1999, Thomas defeated Middleton, his only opponent, 76-24 percent. Democrat, Ben Nevers, won the seat with 43 percent of the primary ballots, because the second-place candidate, Republican Richard Tanner, who trailed with 21 percent, withdrew from the general election when the arithmetic of the race indicated a likely Democratic takeover because more than 70 percent of the primary ballots had gone to Democratic candidates. Nevers was unopposed in 2007; so the Rayburn seat returned to its traditional Democratic moorings.