The Tri-Parish Area
The city of New Orleans shares boundaries with the Parish of Orleans. Add a portion of the west bank of Jefferson Parish and you get LA-02. Because of the completeness of the failure of the Army Corps of Engineers (how these people can sleep at night is beyond me), Orleans Parish now has only half the population it did before the storm. Of the 220K people who no longer live in the city, approximately 150K are black and voted overwhelmingly Democrat. This is offset a bit by the remainder of the dispersed population, who are white and voted overwhelmingly Republican.
The main factor in predicting voting trends post-storm is determining where those displaced voters moved. Many of the white families from Lakeview did not leave the metro area; they simply moved to Jefferson or St. Tammany Parishes. Some blacks have done the same thing, but not in the same numbers as the white families. The difference is purely economics; many white families had the resources to immediately lease apartments or even buy new homes in the suburbs. Their jobs were in the CBD or Jefferson Parish and were by-and-large unaffected by the storm. Unlike the hourly wage earner from the Ninth Ward, these folks recovered faster.
But will they vote? Last year's mayoral election as well as the special election to fill the seat of state rep Peppi Bruneau of Lakeview would indicate that the white voters of Lakeview did not come out. Black voters came out for the mayor's race, but that's because a great deal of effort was made in terms of absentee balloting and other accomodations for displaced voters. As time goes on, it will be more and more difficult to justify extraordinary measures to attract black voters. Not to mention that the Republicans will weigh in heavily on this issue, much more so than they did in the mayor's race. They have a much more vested interest in the process for this cycle. The voters that are left are mostly white. They're either younger and progressive (Uptown and Algiers) country-club Republicans (Uptown), or the young/progressive/black/gay mix that is downtown, the Quarter, Faubourg Marigny, and Faubourg St. John.
St. Bernard Parish is a tale similar to the hardest-hit areas of Orleans. The population of the parish is no more than a quarter of what it was before the storm. Residents migrated north to St. Tammany or west to Jefferson.
The main issue with all these folks is the question of their "domicile," their primary residence. When someone moves from, say, Lakeview to Kenner, they'd change their driver's license and voter registration to reflect their new address. Because of insurance disputes, lawsuits, and the overwhelming desire to return/rebuild, the people in the areas destroyed by the Corps of Engineers still maintain their original domiciles. This makes voting a real challenge. Instead of going over to the neighborhood fire station or grammar school, these folks are going to have to drive in from 20 miles away in Kenner or 40 miles away in Covington (across the lake).
Jefferson Parish has long been the mainstay of white-flight suburbanites in the metro area. These folks were mostly Democrats until the Reagan years, when it became fashionable to switch parties. Since then, the Democratic party in Jefferson has been reduced to a couple of high-profile politicians and third-tier amateur activists. Republicans in Jefferson Parish are the folks Bobby Jindal is counting on as his LA-01 base for another statewide run. Jefferson Parish families are primarily Catholic, but there has been a marked increase in fundigelical activity here in the past decade. These people are overwhelmingly anti-abortion, racist, and homophobe. And they vote. They don't like libruls, Eebil Coloreds, and dirty fukkin' hippies, but they also don't like lying politicians and incumbents who don't earn their keep. The storm damage that hit the east bank of Jefferson Parish was also man-made. Most houses that flooded did so because the parish government failed to turn the drainage pumps back on after the immediate threat of the storm passed, causing water to back up from the canals into the streets, then into the houses. Since this is all flood-related damage, these folks can't get much out of their homeowners policies. That means they have to file claims against flood insurance, and flood insurance is primarily underwriiten by the federal government. The public face of flood insurance is FEMA. "Heckuva Job" Brownie didn't go over very well, even with these party loyalists. While they hate Democrats, they feel betrayed by BushCo, and Bobby Jindal is the face of BushCo in Jefferson Parish.
The north shore parish of St. Tammany is an odd mix. The eastern portion of the parish, comprising mainly of the city of Slidell, is a mix of rural white conservatives as well as blacks, military or government-employed families, and some progressives who moved to the 'burbs. The western part of the parish, mainly the cities of Covington and Mandeville, consist of Republicans who feel that Jefferson Parish isn't conservative enough for them. In the 1990s, David Duke moved his NAAWP operation to St. Tammany to tap this root of racism.
The parishes of St. Charles and St. John, just west of the original metro area, have been transitioning from a combination of rural areas and chemical plants along the Mississippi River to extended suburbs of the city. People moving to New Orleans from cities where a 30-60 minute commute was a fact of life often opt for communities such as St. Rose or LaPlace, or even Gramercy up in St. James Parish. Many residents looking for higher ground than the "Isle d'Orleans" have moved to these areas since the storm. They're the voters of LA-03 that didn't vote for Charlie Melancon. If it wasn't for the increase in residential development aimed at attracting New Orleanians in these parishes, they'd be better included in Central Louisiana. Still, there's enough of a gravitational pull from the city to draw these parishes partly into that orbit.
What does all this mean for the upcoming gubernatorial election? John Breaux can't count on the solid black bloc vote of Orleans Parish, but Bobby Jindal can't count on diluting that bloc with the white folks of Lakeview. LA-01 would have been solidly behind Jindal, had Blanco ran, but a Breaux candidacy harkens back to the more civilized political times of Reagan-Bush41, when the partisan rancor wasn't what it is now. As much as the people of LA-01 and the Republicans of LA-03 hate Democrats, they like Breaux personally. If Breaux can show these voters that he doesn't support Teh Gay, the Eebil Coloreds, and that he's not moving his house to San Francisco to live next to Nancy Pelosi, he may attract some of these folks.
Breaux never got much black support because he's viewed as just another white conservative. He's picked up black votes in his elections because the Republicans have done extremely stupid things, like "voter purge" attempts and running David Duke. The Louisiana GOP just can't help themselves, so who knows, maybe they'll attempt some sort of pre-emptive strike against blacks in the city that will galvanize black voters across the state. Combine that with the white progressive voters from the city and the Cajuns of Southeast/Southwest Louisiana and it's a strong base.
Jindal's big fear is that his base will stay home now that the focus of their hatred, a female Democrat, is no longer in the race. Instead of blaming everything on Blanco, Jindal becomes the face of post-storm politics. If Breaux can force ownership of FEMA onto the Republican Jindal, even his Jefferson Parish base might become discouraged. It's too much to hope that these folks would actually vote for Breaux, but staying away on election day might be just as good.
Comments are closed on this story.