The Black Vote is Shifting
PoliticsLA.com’s Jeff Sadow on the inroads conservative Republican gubernatorial candidate Bobby Jindal is making into the black vote in Louisiana:
The New Orleans black political group BOLD sent a shot heard around the state last week by its gubernatorial endorsement of Bobby Jindal over [Democratic candidate] Kathleen Blanco, in a vote described by its president as not close. (Which caused some consternation for one of its top officers, state Rep. Karen Carter, also a state Democrat official.)Had this occurred in isolation, perhaps Democrats and black elected officials could have written it off as a fluke, maybe an idiosyncratic incident over a group’s perceived slight at the hands of the Blanco campaign. After all, a couple of other alphabet-soup groups have been with Blanco from the start, and others probably will follow.
But then the Baton Rouge-based CLOUT announced its backing of Jindal, followed by the endorsement of veteran Shreveport activist and former state Rep. C.O. Simpkins. Others may well follow here. The news is not that Jindal is going to pick up lots of endorsements from black political leaders (except those elected, who are all Democrats) and groups, but that he’ll pick up more than a trivial number. This does translate into votes, as anybody who haunts polling places in Orleans on election day can see the multitude of BOLD and other endorsement fliers carried to the polls.
Does this mean some type of epiphany has occurred within the black community meaning Republican candidates will compete effectively for the black vote? Not exactly, according to Southern Media Opinion Research, whose latest poll put the candidates in a statistical dead heat, for Jindal had just 11 percent of the black vote.
Still, this better than doubled his take from the primary and, if this proportion manifests itself on election day, puts the Blanco campaign into serious difficulty. The rule of thumb for getting a Democrat elected statewide is to take at least 90 percent of the black vote and 35 percent of the white vote. With the poll showing Blanco under 30 percent of the white vote, this campaign has problems.
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