Caldwell received 477,574 votes; Alexander 395,645 votes. Foti (previously the long-time sheriff of Orleans Parish) finished with 389,658. With only four weeks between the primary and the general election, the traditional Democratic political machine of sheriffs and district attorneys flocked to fellow Democrat Caldwell. Alexander was defeated in the second round of balloting when Foti’s base switched to Caldwell. In 2011, Caldwell switched his affiliation to the Republican Party and won a second term but was defeated in 2015 by Republican Jeff Landry.

Alexander was the unsuccessful Republican candidate in the October 22, 2011, primary for Caddo Parish tax assessor. He polled 16,255 votes (34.9 percent), while the incumbent Democrat, Charles Russell Henington, Jr. (born September 1957), received 30,310 votes (65.1 percent). Henington last faced opposition in 1999, when he won the assessor’s position by defeating an earlier Republican candidate, John W. Wessler, by a five-to-one margin. Henington’s father, Charles Henington, Sr. (1936-1986), and his step-grandfather, Albert Galloway Hammett, Sr. (1881–1974), previously served as the Caddo Parish assessor, having kept that office within the reach of one family for, through 2011, seventy-eight years. A. G. Hammett was the assessor from 1933 to 1964.

A first-time candidate for public office in 2007, Alexander finished second to James D. “Buddy” Caldwell, then a Democrat, in the nonpartisan blanket primary for state attorney general. Alexander outpolled incumbent Democrat Charles Foti of New Orleans for the right to enter the general election against Caldwell, a five-term district attorney from Tallulah in northeast Louisiana.

Alexander was chief of staff to former U.S. Representative Rodney Alexander of Louisiana’s 5th congressional district. The two are unrelated. In 2006, the Democrats in Washington, D.C., accused Royal Alexander and several others, including members of Congress, of having acted too slowly regarding the disclosure of the name of the congressional page who was sent inappropriate email messages by then U.S. Representative Mark Foley of Florida. (The page lived in Rodney Alexander’s House district.) Evidence showed that Royal Alexander reported the inappropriate email messages to the staff of House leadership upon his learning of the information. The matter quickly died after the 2006 congressional election, in which Democrats gained control of both houses of Congress.

Richard Royal Alexander, known as Royal Alexander (born February 18, 1966), is an attorney and politician in his native Shreveport, Louisiana, who in 2007 was the Republican-endorsed candidate for state attorney general.