Losing Louisiana to the GOP

While the rest of America gets more Democratic, Katrina -- and George W. Bush -- may have turned the state bright red. Can John Breaux save the Democrats?

By Thomas F. Schaller

Read more: George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Louisiana, Politics, Mississippi, News, 2008 election

Feb. 20, 2007 | Last Friday, Feb. 16, brought word that former Democratic Sen. John Breaux may come out of retirement to run for Louisiana governor this fall. For state Democrats, the possibility that Breaux will run is both good news and bad news. The good news is that Breaux would be a formidable candidate. The bad news is that so dim are the reelection prospects of incumbent Democratic Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco -- and so dire are the fortunes of Louisiana Democrats in general -- that Breaux's candidacy is even under discussion.

Data from November polls compiled by SurveyUSA showed Blanco and Missouri Republican Matt Blunt tied as the fifth least popular governors in the country, with 19 percent net disapproval scores. The likely Republican nominee for Louisiana governor, Bobby Jindal, lost only narrowly to Blanco in 2003, and bounced back to win a congressional seat in 2004. He would be an even stronger candidate this time around. "Jindal is very dangerous to Blanco, especially if everyone perceives it as simply a rematch," says Wayne Parent, a political scientist at Louisiana State University and author of "Inside the Carnival: Unmasking Louisiana Politics." "The polls show him ahead big." Not surprisingly, state Republicans are licking their chops. "The GOP is very organized and aggressively fundraising," says a top Louisiana Democrat, who asked not to be named. "They will be well financed and looking to use a big gubernatorial win to catapult other GOP wins down ballot." Louisiana is, in short, perhaps the only state in the nation where George W. Bush's policies may end up creating a permanent Republican majority.

A key reason for the troubles facing Blanco and her party is the massive out-migration of New Orleans-area Democrats in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. The storm, and the administration's botched handling of it, literally drove Democrats out of Louisiana. Though a perfect estimate is impossible, analysts who follow the state closely project the net decline for Democrats in New Orleans Parish to be somewhere between 30,000 and 60,000 voters. In 2002, Blanco beat Jindal by 55,000 votes statewide, but nearly all of that margin came from the city. She won Orleans Parish by 50,000 votes. "It's doubtful that there are enough Democrats left to provide the wide margin of victory in Orleans Parish that Democrats have traditionally relied upon for victory in statewide elections," says Bob Mann, who served as former Sen. Breaux's state director and, later, Blanco's communications director. "That means candidates like Blanco will have to increase their margins elsewhere, in regions of the state that aren't as reliably Democratic. That could make for a very tough election season for almost any Democrat running statewide, but even tougher for someone with the governor's dismal poll numbers." It may also mean that Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu will be out of a job come November 2008.

It was not long ago that Louisiana, like a soothing balm applied to an injury, was the state that gave bruised and battered Democrats some small measure of post-election relief. In December 2002, a month after Republicans secured a sufficient number of U.S. Senate seats to forge a Jim Jeffords-defection-proof majority, Democrats were buoyed when Landrieu eked out a four-point runoff win to retain her Senate seat. A year later, just 11 days after Democrats lost the only two other gubernatorial races of the 2003 off-year cycle, in Kentucky and Mississippi, Blanco's victory over Jindal prevented a GOP sweep. (Among Louisiana's many political quirks is its "jungle primary" system. All candidates compete in an early general election, and if no one breaks 50 percent, there is a runoff. In practice, it means the leading Democrat and Republican often face each other in a second election in late November or early December.)

In fact, however, Louisiana was trending away from Democrats even before the hurricane. Bill Clinton carried the state in both 1992 and 1996. But Al Gore -- who spent little time there, despite the fact that his campaign manager, Donna Brazile, knows the state's politics better than almost anyone -- received just 45 percent of the vote in 2000. Four years later John Kerry slipped to 42 percent. So recently a swing state, Louisiana will be on neither party's 2008 target list.

If Louisiana once provided the Democrats' silver lining in cloudier moments, it is perhaps fitting that this most contrarian of states is now trending away from Democrats at the very moment they have regained majorities in both chambers of Congress, among governors and in the state legislatures. What's more, it is ironic that Hurricane Katrina -- the event that finally demolished the claims of governing competence long advanced by George W. Bush and national Republicans -- has accelerated the collapse of the state's Democrats.

As Gallup's latest survey of partisan self-identification reveals, largely because of Katrina Louisiana is the only state in which Democrats lost ground relative to Republicans since 2005, reclassifying it from a Democratic-leaning state to "competitive." And the news could get worse for Democrats. Demographers expect the post-Katrina exodus to cost Louisiana, which was already losing population before the hurricane, one House seat following the 2010 census and reapportionment. With Democrats presently holding just two of the delegation's seven seats, redistricting may cost them one of their two. They already lost one to a party switch and may lose another to the federal judicial system.

Just five years ago, Democrats had three representatives from Louisiana. Upstate Rep. Rodney Alexander was a Democrat until he left the party in 2002. He infuriated Breaux and other state Democrats by switching his affiliation to Republican and filing for reelection at the very last minute, thereby preventing Democrats from having a chance to respond.

Then came the sordid tale of African-American Rep. William Jefferson, of Louisiana's New Orleans-centered 2nd District, who is under federal investigation for bribery and was found with bundles of cash stowed in his freezer.

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