Big weekend for improbable landslides in the southern climes.
In Louisiana, Governor Bobby Jindal won 66% of the vote in a 10-candidate field, giving him reelection with no need for a runoff. How big a landslide was it? His nearest competitor, Democrat Tara Hollis, got 18%.
Go back 10 years in Louisiana and ask a man on the street how likely it would be that in 2011 a 40-year-old Indian-American Republican would be winning his second term as governor with 66% of the vote.
Now go further south — all the way to Argentina — where Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner has won a second term as president, also getting over 50% of the vote to avoid a runoff. She wasn’t even supposed to be running this year: her husband, Nestor Kirchner, was president of Argentina from 2003-2007, and when Cristina Kirchner won election in 2007 it was widely seen as a tag-team affair that would set up her husband to run again this year.
But Nestor Kirchner died of a heart attack last year. (Even in Argentina, that takes you out of the running.) His wife proved to be more than a match for the reelection campaign. She’ll serve until 2015.