Jones primary performance points to runoff victory

Three lessons were learned from Saturday’s balloting in Shreveport:

1. White Republican former city attorney Jerry Jones is the man to beat in the general election runoff against black Democrat state Rep. Cedric Glover. Even as both candidates expressed wishes that race not be factor in their upcoming contest, the fact is that history shows at least 85 percent of whites will vote for a white Republican and over 90 percent of blacks will vote for a black Democrat. In terms of registered voters, white registration numbers outdistance those of blacks by over 1,500, and whites typically have turned out at a rate of about 2 percent higher than blacks, but Jones’ 39 percent exceeded those standards. Conveniently assigning Republican candidate votes to Jones and Democrat candidate votes to Glover except for those of white Democrat Liz Swaine, Jones has 46 percent of the vote, meaning all he would have to get is a third of Swaine’s vote to win in November. He probably will get better than half, so Glover will have to kick up high get-out-the-vote efforts in November; Glover has no chance to win unless he can dramatically increase black turnout. (The issue is not, as one observer speculated, black voters are getting disproportionately older and female, because, other characteristics equal, these people actually are more likely to vote -- it's that, in this particular contest, the white-black gap opened considerably beyond historical norms.)

2. This concern of Glover’s, low black voter mobilization relative to whites, turned out to be a blessing for City Councilman Monty Walford. In the white Democrat’s District B, precincts with large majorities of blacks turned out only at about a 25 percent rate, while those with large majorities of whites were around 40 percent. Given that he appeared to pick up some percentage of racial crossover votes as well, with 42 percent in the primary and likely to grab almost all of the only Republican primary candidate’s 15 percent, his runoff opponent black Democrat Sheva Sims will have to really stimulate her get-out-the-vote efforts even though the district has a black over white majority of over 200. (In fact, this racial turnout differential may have been the difference in the District E win of Republican Ron Webb who beat a Democrat opponent by fewer than 500 votes.)

3. In the city’s fastest growing City Council district, voters appear ripe for bringing on political newcomers. The seasoned, Republicans Caddo Commissioner Bob Brown and former holder of that District D seat Phil Serio, failed to beat out incumbent but making her first elective try for the job Democrat Cynthia Norton Robertson and the top finisher, neophyte politician and Republican businessman Bryan Wooley. Beating out all of these officials present and past, along with his GOP affiliation makes Wooley the strong favorite to boot the unelected Robertson out of office, simultaneously demonstrating that the rapidly-changing district wants new blood on the political scene. This bodes for a Republican mayor with a veto-proof partisan minority on the City Council.