Rejected!

It’s been a rough winter for Peninsula Pacific. First it narrowly lost a plebiscite in Richmond, Virginia. Then, on Saturday, it got body-slammed by voters in Louisiana‘s St. Tammany Parish, who turned out in droves to vote down a proposed casino in a landslide, with 63% balloting “nay.” Peninsula Pacific, owner of the Diamond Jacks license from Shreveport, had made a very “george” offer, including a $352 million casino and lots of upfront money for the community. But they ill-judged the dynamics of the Slidell area, where the mayor and leading local officials wanted nothing to do with Peninsula Pacific.

One person who saw this coming a mile off was Full House Resorts CEO Dan Lee, he of the Silver Slipper in Biloxi: “Full House-commissioned polling, he said, showed Diamond Jacks losing ‘by a very wide margin.’ He said the Slidell area is very conservative and heavily Republican, filled with people who had fled New Orleans ‘to get away from things like casinos.'” The real winner in all this is not Full House, however, but Churchill Downs, whose Fair Grounds track is the nearest gaming facility to Slidell. They just dodged a bullet.