Many Black voters refused to cast ballot for GOP contenders

31st October 2011   ·   0 Comments

By Christopher Tidmore
Contributing Writer

The question of whether African-American voters would play the kingmakers in statewide elections – deciding the victor in contests between two white Republicans – was settled by the time the polls closed on October 22, 2011. When faced with GOP-only races, many Black voters stayed home or simply skipped that line on their electronic ballots.

The October 22 primary had the lowest statewide turnout of any state election since 1975. Just over one million of Louisiana’s 2.8 million registered voters appeared at the polls. Perhaps even more striking were the turnout differentials between predominantly White conservative parishes and mostly African-American ones.

GOP St. Tammany enjoyed a 30 percent turnout, slightly below the overall state numbers, where 46,307 voters cast their ballots in the Governor’s race. Contrast that with Democratic New Orleans which saw only a 21.6 percent turnout. In a parish with a population of over 100,000 more people than live in St. Tammany post-Katrina, there were only 49,987 Orleanians who voted in the Gubernatorial contest.

In other words, the parishes had virtually the same number of voters despite the higher (and larger African-American) population south of Lake Pontchartrain.

However, there is a more fascinating dichotomy in the voting patterns for those who actually turned out and went to the polls. Compelling evidence exists that African Americans voted in the governor’s race, as well as contests where there were Democratic contenders, but then, some Black voters, not all but many, simply chose to skip the races where only GOP contenders faced one another.

That differential of voters who opted not to vote in every ballot opportunity on October 22 virtually equals the sum that Billy Nungesser and Jim Tucker would have needed to declare victory over their respective opponents.

This phenomena is, of course, not limited to African Americans. Loyalist Democrats of all races have been known to glaze over spaces on the ballot where their fellow party members were not present. And, voter participation, in general, did fall the further down the election day ballot one went.

Where 1,022,439 people voted the top election for governor, there were only 874,666 ballots cast for the last constitutional amendment at the bottom.

Still, there were exceptions to the rule that the lower one went, the fewer voters their were. The highly contested Lt. Governor’s and Secretary of State’s races had 948,978 and 890,242 ballots cast respectively. These were elections where millions of dollars were spent, and African-American leaders and publications like this one came out hard for Billy Nungesser and Jim Tucker over their fellow Republicans Jay Dardenne and Tom Schedler.

Nungesser and Tucker were at the top of the LIFE and BOLD ballots in Orleans and headed the voter lists of Black interest groups around the state. And Nungesser (and to a lesser extent Tucker) spent well over a million dollars in voter outreach and GOTV efforts in African-American communities around Louisiana, and particularly in the Crescent City.

In contrast, the race for Insurance Commissioner, lower on the ballot, had 965,216 voters. The three way Agriculture Commissioner’s race had 963,049 electors. Neither race was ever competitive, and both Jim Donelon and Mike Strain won easy victories spending a fraction of dollars collectively than Nungesser alone paid out of his own pocket in the Lt. Gubernatorial race. Yet, they still had more total voters casting ballots.

The sole difference is the two Commissioners’ contests had Democratic contenders. Consequently, studying the results, one can easily hypothesize that some Democrats just opted out of voting in the Lt. Gov and Sec. State races. Empirically, moreover, since African Americans constitute the majority of the active, loyalist Democratic electorate, one can conclude that many Black voters just skipped the chance to be kingmakers.

There is evidence of the reality of this choice to abstain in the all African-American races. For example, in the hotly contested, District 3 State Senate race, in a close race between two Black legislative incumbents, Cynthia Willard Lewis and J.P. Morrell, 139 people voted in the minority-majority New Orleans precinct 7-25A. In the same precinct, in the equally hot Lt. Governor’s race, 109 voted.

In Orleans precinct 9-25, there were 132 votes in the Senate race versus 113 in the Lt. Governor’s race

And the trend equally continued in African American-majority pre­cincts in St. Bernard and Jefferson. (Ironically, in Senate race, Cynthia Willard-Lewis won Orleans, but Morrell bested her in the suburbs to hash out a narrow victory over his fellow incumbent Senator.)

Add up the differentials statewide, and the gap between contests where African-American Democrats voted, and where they did not, and the total comes awfully close to Billy Nungesser’s nearly 50,000-vote loss to Jay Dardenne, and well surpasses Jim Tucker’s 9,000 vote loss to Tom Schedler.

If the Black electorate had voted in these GOP-on-GOP races, and they had followed the suggestions of the African-American media and political leadership, there is a reasonable likelihood that a different Lt. Governor-elect and Secretary of State would sit in office today. Both men would know that their margin of victories came from the Black community and therefore beholden somewhat to the interests of the minority electorate.

It is not as if Nungesser and Tucker did not perform well in white majority parishes, considering that they both ran against incumbents already in office.
Jim Tucker, the candidate from Algiers and Terrytown, actually beat Tom Schedler in North Louisiana and even in most of Cajun Country.

In Shreveport’s Caddo Parish, Schedler earned 47.06 percent or 18876 votes to Tucker’s 52.94 percent or 21,233 votes. The same occurred in the Monroe Parishes of Union and Ouachita, where the results were 45.18 percent and 2,669 versus 54.82 percent or 3,239 votes respectively in the former. In the latter, it was 45.43 percent and 13,594 versus 54.57 percent or 16,331 respectively.

Even in the most conservative Republican Parish in Acadiana, Lafayette, Schedler lost narrowly to Tucker in almost a reverse mirror of the statewide results with 49.87 percent or 20,284 votes to 50.13 percent or 20,393.

The difference was, Tom Schedler not only rode his mentor Jay Dardenne’s coattails to comfortable victory in metro Baton Rouge, he had a higher Caucasian turnout in his home parish of St. Tammany than Tucker managed amongst both Blacks and whites getting to the polls in his home bases of Orleans and Jefferson. In East Baton Rouge Parish, Schedler bested Tucker 59.47 percent or 45,486 votes to 40.53 percent or 30,998. In St. Tammany, Schedler earned 68.15 percent or 29,498 votes to Tucker’s 31.85 percent or 13,789 votes.

But it was not as if Tucker was uncompetitive on the Northshore outside of Schedler’s home parish. The former GOP House Speaker came close to tieing the interim Sec. State in Washington Parish with 47.09 percent or 5,226 votes to Schedler’s 52.91 percent or 5,872.

It was in his home parishes where Tucker’s margin of victory was smaller, that was the root cause of Tucker’s 9000 ballot loss to Schedler statewide.

Tucker emerged with 54.70 percent of the Jefferson Parish vote on election night, or 37,510 ballots to Schedler’s 45.30 percent or 31,066. In his home base of Orleans, the Speaker got 59.49 percent or 24,548 votes to the interim Sec. State’s 40.51 percent or 16716.

One could argue that Schedler made a better sale of holding support South of the Lake than was expected, but it is hard to read the results in total and not conclude that the decision of African-American voters to both stay home — and to skip the Sec. State line on the ballot, if they did vote — made the singular difference in the final result in this electoral contest.

Much the same can be said for the Lt. Gubernatorial race, where Billy Nungesser had a slightly better showing in the Nola metro (actually winning St. Tammany over Baton Rouge native Jay Dardenne), but did worse across the rest of the state by small degrees. Nungesser, who had done more to court the Black vote than almost any Republican in recent memory (2003’s Bobby Jindal included), in money and time, had little to show for his efforts.

No matter how hard a candidate works, the simple conclusion remains that African Americans remain resistant to voting Republican regardless of the circumstances

Too often, the modern GOP evokes memories of Dixiecrats to Black voters.

And, even a candidate in an all-Republican race — even one that works tirelessly for minority support — has a hard time getting an African-American vote when he is registered as a member of a political party that continues to be perceived as being anti-Black in the era of Obama.

“Black voters haven’t realized that they are the potential kingmakers in Louisiana politics,” explained political columnist and former LA Secretary of State Jim Brown, in an interview with The Louisiana Weekly.

He went on to explain to this newspaper, however, “They will figure it out. When they do decide to get involved in races where there are only Republican candidates, African-Americans will be the most sought after constituency in Louisiana.”

This article was originally published in the October 31, 2011 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper