At RealClearPolitics Sean Trende presents an interesting historical case study of Louisiana politics, harnessing this to an explanation of the challenges Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu faces in her re-election campaign there:
But the real problem Landrieu has is that her 2002 and 2008 coalitions seem nearly impossible to reassemble. The 2002 runoff coalition suffers from the fact that the “normal†Democratic coalition is still down from 2002. Consider: In 2000, the population of Orleans Parish was 484,674. In 2010 it was 343,829. So, there has been a huge drop-off of adults. If we assume that 40 percent of these adults would vote, this translates to 57,000 fewer voters.
Assume further that Democrats had a 60-point edge in this group (Obama received 80 percent in Orleans Parish in 2012). That’s about 34,000 net democratic voters lost from 2002. Landrieu won her 2002 runoff by 42,000 votes, so she would have no room for erosion in the rural areas of the state. Of course, there are also other counties outside of Orleans that lost population, but they tend to be from the more Democratic portions of the state.
Landrieu could also try for the 2008 coalition, but the problem there is generating sufficient turnout. Consider: If we take Landrieu’s vote shares from 2008 (losing whites 29-65; winning blacks 96-2) and apply these numbers to the 2010 electorate (71 percent white, 24 percent black), Landrieu would still lose, albeit narrowly.
But the biggest problem – and this applies to both the 2002 and 2008 coalitions – is that it just isn’t clear that Landrieu can re-create her earlier performances among whites against a non-problematic Republican candidate.
As the late Mayor Daley once said, the one thing that is certain is that somebody’s going to win. In the only poll that really matters, the one that takes place in the voting booths on November 4 (and, increasingly, on the absentee ballots cast beforehand), the better candidate will prevail and that will be judged through the eyes of Louisianans, something I can’t speculate on. Still, the history is interesting.
Two things stood out to me in the maps. One is how much more successful the Democrats, most particularly Landrieu, have been in winning rural parishes. A lot of this appears to be due to the presence of rural Blacks, but not always. A lot of that blue in 2008 is in low-density areas that in other parts of the country vote Republican.
The other is that Lafayette, the center of Cajun country, very French, very Catholic, has trended Republican for a long time (perhaps 50 years). The description of a Catholic South might be too simplistic.
I spent my formative years in Orleans Parish. While it’s been a long time since I lived there, I still have family ties in New Orleans.
I feel a bit sorry for Landrieu because she really is a moderate but is getting caught up in the anti-incumbent and (somewhat) anti-Democrat wave.
On the other hand, my sense is that the attacks on her which characterize her as having become a creature of Washington DC seem to have been effective, and may have merit. My sense is that she served LA well during the immediate post-Katrina years but wants to rest on her laurels now. It may be time for her to go.
The main thing is though that I don’t think this is all (and perhaps not even mainly) demographics, especially not racial. Whites in NO are not strongly Republican, in my experience and will vote D as long as it is a moderate D. After all, this is the birthplace of the Blue Dogs.