Return to Normalcy? Recent Elections in New Orleans

Since flooding in the wake of Hurricane Katrina devastated the city of New Orleans, a number of elections took place in the city under unusual circumstances, with voting centers being provided outside the city limits. The state elections in the fall of 2007 were the first contests to take place largely under “normal” voting arrangements, with displaced voters casting ballots either by voting early at the offices of the Orleans Parish Board of Elections or via absentee ballot. This return to normalcy, coupled with the lack of a high-salience, potentially racially-divisive contest at the top of the ballot, provided an opportunity to determine the composition of the city’s likely persistent electorate. In this paper, I examine four recent electoral contests in Orleans Parish: the 2007 gubernatorial contest (October 2007), two at-large runoff elections for a city council seat and judgeship (both held in November 2007), and the 2008 Democratic presidential preference primary (February 2008). In all four contests, substantial differences between black and white voting behavior were evident, although the degree of racial bloc voting differed substantially between contests. Furthermore, in the three general election contests studied, African Americans made up between 47.8% and 50.6% of the voting population, suggesting that New Orleans’ status as a “majority-minority” jurisdiction remains in doubt. The degree of racial polarization in voting in the New Orleans area has been of academic interest in the past. Notably, Liu (2001) and Liu and Vanderleeuw (2001) found (using King’s ecological inference method) that white voters’ proclivity to vote for black candidates in the city was apparently not influenced by “racial threat”; in other words, white voters were no less likely to support black candidates if they lived in precincts and neighborhoods that had higher concentrations of black voters; similarly, in combination with the recent elections in Memphis, Tennessee, Vanderleeuw, Liu and Marsh (2004) and Liu (2006) identify the emergence of a “new trend of biracial coalitions” emerging in urban settings. Yet New Orleans and its surrounding suburbs have also served as the backdrop for other contests that have not been so racially harmonious. Giles and Buckner (1993) examined voting in the 1990 U.S. Senate contest between David Duke and Bennett Johnston and found persistent evidence in support of the racial threat theory, although their findings have been called into question (see Voss 1996a; Giles and Buckner 1996; Voss 1996b). More recently, the biracial coalition that backed the election of Ray Nagin as mayor of New Orleans in 2002 fractured in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, with most whites opting to support white chal-