Recent speculation
offers up attorney Tony Clayton, long-time appointee of Gov. Bobby
Jindal on the Southern University Board of Supervisors during which
time he has served as its chairman, and Lt. Gen. (ret.) Russel Honore,
famed in the past for crisis leadership during the hurricane disasters of
about a decade past and more recently working to lead on pro-, even
extremist, environmental concerns. On the part of Democrats, this continued
chatter even after the state
party officially endorsed state Rep. John Bel Edwards connotes
uneasiness that Edwards, whose polling
and demographic numbers give him little chance to win, can serve as an adequate
placeholder to gather funds and support down-ballot candidates.
However, it
also could signal machinations on the part of some Republican interests.
While Edwards’ polling numbers have fallen below expectations, Sen. David Vitter’s have exceeded these,
leaving the other two Republican candidates, Lt. Gov. Jay Dardenne and Public Service
Commissioner Scott Angelle, at
risk for not advancing to a runoff. The thinking goes that if a black face
could enter the contest, this would peel off the majority of the black vote
that Edwards should be expected to receive otherwise, and this split would
ace both Edwards and the black candidate out of the runoff to allow another
Republican to join Vitter.
But just
putting out there any black candidate does not automatically attract a
horde of black voters for them. The most likely to vote for such a candidate
solely on the basis of party affiliation and race, the lowest interest and
lowest information voters, are those in greatest need of assistance for
mobilization. In this instance, that comes from two sources, black Democrat
officeholders and their party apparatus.
And in the
larger scheme of things, little of their support would appear to go the way
of Honore and especially Clayton. In the latter’s case, his self-proclaimed
conservative tendencies combined with his appointment by the conservative
Republican Jindal would make both party and black elected leaders at best remain
silent about his candidacy. Compound this with his controversial tenure on
Southern’s board, concerning the hiring
and retention of system and campus officials, incorporating Grambling
State University into it, and in handing out scholarship
awards, means that the black community already would be split
concerning his candidacy on these kinds of largely nonpolitical issues
alone.
Honore would
have a better chance of becoming a significant candidate as much because of
his semi-radical environmentalist credentials that would attract affluent
white liberals and lower-information younger whites, which presumably he
would peel from Edwards, as his race. He might also, given his military
background intersecting with his overseeing military rescue operations
right after the hurricane disasters, also beggar some Republican votes that
somewhat offsets his Democrat-disruptive potential, but his real handicap,
as previously
mentioned, is that he has little political policy background besides
his one-note environmentalism and also is wholly outside the political structure
of Democrats and their leaders, as opposed to Edwards who firmly resides in
it.
In short, a
good chunk of the black vote in Louisiana takes cues from black Democrat
leaders, and they are unlikely to condone either candidacy. Indeed, they
have gone all in with Edwards at the state level – at least up until now,
for there remains the simmering tension within the party of a history of almost
exclusively supporting white candidates for the most important offices and
being an organization run for white candidates, when now the majority of
its registrants are black. If they wanted to show who was boss, black
leaders could turn on a dime, rally support for a meaningful black
candidate like Clayton or Honore, and keep Edwards out of the runoff. Or,
as a whole, they may consider
tactical voting the wiser move and issue the marching orders to vote
for a black Democrat through their political allies and organizations at
the local level.
Whether they
would want to is another matter, and that at this time seems improbable.
Without their support for whatever reasons, while certainly the odds of an
all-GOP runoff for governor increase, it’s a longshot that a black Democrat
candidate sufficiently could split the vote to produce this outcome.
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