Conservative White Voters Hold Sway in Altered NOLA Electoral Landscape

[DeepModem Mom]

NYT: Conservative White Voters Hold Sway in an Altered New Orleans Electoral Landscape
By ADAM NOSSITER
Published: May 7, 2006

NEW ORLEANS, May 6 — The city's changed demographics made themselves felt all week as a tight race for mayor headed toward the May 20 runoff.

Black officials have run City Hall for decades, but with the population dispersal caused by Hurricane Katrina, white voters — especially conservatives — hold the keys to the drab 1950's building downtown. Both the incumbent, Mayor C. Ray Nagin, and his challenger, Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu, need this group, and both are now flirting with it, flaunting endorsements from conservative white also-rans in the April 22 primary.

But the electoral dance has to be delicate in a city with long memories and short fuses. Hurricane season is bearing down, last year's catastrophe is ever present, and decades' worth of decline has not gone away. The challenges: do not scare a traumatized electorate, but do not lull it either; and distance yourself from prior black mayors — deemed corrupt by whites — but not too much.

This week Mr. Nagin, who is black, scored an endorsement from a conservative white Republican lawyer, Rob Couhig, who got 10 percent in the primary, but he also showed up at a tribute to the city's first black mayor, Ernest N. "Dutch" Morial. Mr. Nagin talked up a new hurricane plan, but suggested off-handedly that he might pull the trigger far more quickly on a mandatory evacuation in the event of another hurricane....

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Mr. Landrieu fired back with endorsements from a raft of local law-enforcement officials, some not even from New Orleans, and denounced the continued shuttering of the flood-damaged criminal courts building....

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/07/us/07orleans.html

[CrazyOrangeCat]

1. What a sad mess . . .

It didn't have to happen like this.

[bobbieinok]

2. fed govt enabled Iraqis in US to vote in Iraq election BUT couldn't/

wouldn't let NOLA evacuees vote in NOLA election......wonder why? :sarcasm:

[skipos]

3. Nagin is more conservative than Landrieu. I hope Landrieu wins

but it is a bummer that so many people aren't able to vote.