| Communities in Action
New Orleans, LA
Will the New Orleans mayoral race turn into an all-white showdown?
By Sue Sturgis | Institute for Southern Studies
January 10, 2010
This year will mark the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina -- a disaster that brought dramatic changes not only to the physical landscape of the Gulf Coast but also to the region's politics.
Some of those political changes are apparent in the current race for mayor of New Orleans, where it's becoming increasingly likely that the election could turn into a battle between two white candidates -- a scenario that the city's daily paper describes as "unthinkable" pre-Katrina.
African-Americans have held the mayor's office in New Orleans since 1978. While still majority African-American, the city has seen the portion of its population that's black decline from 66.7% before Katrina to 60.7% today.
The chance of an all-white March runoff following the Feb. 6 primary became more likely with Louisiana state Sen. Ed Murray's surprise announcement on Saturday that he was withdrawing from the race. The leading black candidate, Murray had been running a distant third in the polls behind Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu (left in photo) and businessman John Georges (right), both of whom are white and personally wealthy.
As the New Orleans Times-Picayune reports:
Trailing the lead candidates are three other major African-American candidates, all far less known than Murray, an 18-year veteran of the state Legislature. Management consultant Troy Henry and fair-housing advocate James Perry are making their first bid for elective office, while Nadine Ramsey, who won three terms on the local civil court bench without opposition, is facing voters for the first time.
On Sunday, Murray issued a statement saying he withdrew because polling data suggested it was likely that the general election would pit him against Landrieu -- a contest that Murray said would be expensive and require him to go into "substantial personal financial debt." But he also said that race was a factor in his decision:
A heated run-off election between Mitch and me would probably become extremely racially divisive whether either of us intended it or not. I am not prepared to get elected at any cost. Nor am I willing to add a racially divisive campaign to the already strained race relations in our city.
According to an analysis by Clancy DuBos, publisher of New Orleans' alt-weekly The Gambit, Murray's campaign team met last week to review poll numbers that showed Landrieu ahead by a large margin -- and with about 55% of the black vote:
The feeling among some of Murray's top advisers was that, while much of Landrieu's black support was rooted in a genuine sense of "buyers' remorse" after Ray Nagin's dismal performance over the past four years, a lot of that support was "soft" and could be peeled off Landrieu. It would require, however, that Murray attack Landrieu. It also would require Murray to raise another $400,000 to $700,000 to position himself to make a March 6 runoff.
Landrieu entered the race just last month after insisting he had no plans to run for the post for a third time. His most recent loss was in 2006 to current Mayor Ray Nagin, also a Democrat. If elected, Landrieu -- the brother of U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) -- would be the city's first white mayor since his father, Moon, left office 32 years ago.
A week after Mitch Landrieu entered the New Orleans mayoral race, Leslie Jacobs -- a white business executive and charter-school proponent -- withdrew. Jacobs said she made her decision after a poll commissioned by her campaign suggested she could not win against Landrieu, a fellow Democrat with an overlapping support base. The other white candidate still in the race is Rob Couhig, a businessman and longtime Louisiana Republican Party activist.
It will be interesting to see how Murray's withdrawal will affect the remaining African-American candidates. In DuBos' judgment, Henry has "great energy and fundraising potential" and will be likely be the choice of many of those looking specifically for a black alternative to Landrieu, but also thinks he looks and sounds like Nagin when he first ran in 2002. Ramsey, meanwhile, has been struggling to raise money.
Then there's the progressive grassroots candidate: Perry, an attorney and director of the nonprofit Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center, which has successfully challenged neighboring St. Bernard Parish's racially discriminatory housing policies adopted after Katrina. While he's running behind in the polls and does not have the backing of the city's black establishment, Perry -- the partner of Princeton politics and African American studies professor and MSNBC commentator Melissa Harris-Lacewell -- has performed impressively on the campaign trail and has gotten support from prominent African-Americans outside New Orleans.
Noted black scholar Henry Louis "Skip" Gates -- who after last year's headline-grabbing confrontation with a police officer at his Cambridge, Mass. home was invited to the White House to discuss race relations over beer -- recently helped co-host a campaign event for Perry, who he called an "inspiring leader." And Phoenix Suns basketball player Grant Hill, whose mother was raised in New Orleans, contributed the maximum amount to Perry's campaign and recently penned a fundraising appeal for the candidate, writing that elections are too often won by "deep-pocketed political power brokers and political insiders."
But promoting himself as the "outsider" candidate could end up hurting Perry with an electorate feeling burned by a mayor who also made much of his own political-outsider credentials. As The Gambit's DuBos observes:
Polls still show that, after eight years of "businessman" Ray Nagin, voters want someone who knows the political ropes.
Lt. Gov. Landrieu is an old political hand who certainly knows those ropes. But Perry, who is only in his early 30s, has proven that he's one to watch.
UPDATE: Perry issued a statement today titled "Let's be honest about race" that addressed Murray's decision to end his mayoral bid over the fear of a racially divisive campaign. Acknowledging that racial inequality still exists in New Orleans and that race has been used in the past to divide the city, Perry points out that he's the only candidate whose career has been dedicated to "fairness, justice, and common ground, not to politics, profit, and personal gain," and he pledged to "conduct a campaign and run a city government that will not use race as a wedge issue."
2009 © by the Institute for Southern Studies
