After Huey Long was assassinated in September 1935, the Long organization was left without a leader and without a candidate for the 1936 gubernatorial election. During a period of backroom maneuvering, Longite leaders chose the relatively minor Leche as a compromise candidate. The prominent leaders were New Orleans mayor Robert Maestri, outgoing governor Oscar K. Allen, James A. Noe, Seymour Weiss, and Abe Shushan. Despite his relative obscurity, Leche beat the anti-Long candidate Cleveland Dear, a U.S. representative from Alexandria, with the aid of the still-powerful Long machine. Leche polled 67 percent of the primary vote, and the anti-Long forces seemed beyond recovery. Outgoing State Representative Mason Spencer of Madison, who had uncannily predicted Long's bloody death some five months before it happened, withdrew as a gubernatorial candidate to support Dear, but he still polled nearly two thousand votes because his exodus came too late to remove his name from the ballot. (In this period, most African Americans were still prevented from voting by state barriers to voter registration, so the only competitive politics took place within the Democratic party.)