By this time next week, we’ll know if independent Monroe Mayor Friday Ellis was a canary in the coal mine for Democrats or just lightning in a bottle.
In 2020, Ellis unexpectedly defeated Democrat former long-time Mayor Jamie Mayo and other candidates to win as a white candidate in a solidly black-majority electorate. However, that may have had more to do with Mayo, who is black, than anything else, whose sometimes odd actions made white voters increasingly suspicious of his leadership and black voters less enthusiastic about him.
On election day – which occurred in July rather than March because of Wuhan coronavirus pandemic restrictions and which might have affected turnout – Ellis won in a 63 percent black constituency. White voter turnout appeared substantially higher than black, although overall it was a healthy over 40 percent. Still, in precincts where blacks comprised at least 90 percent of the vote, Ellis picked up 15 percent while Mayo barely garnered two-thirds, demonstrating greater crossover appeal for white candidates than traditionally.
A rerun of sorts is on tap this time, with Mayo trying to get his old job back in a city now with a 67 percent black majority, against Ellis up for reelection and a stronger black Democrat alternative than in 2020 in the form of Democrat city School Board Member Betty Ward Cooper.
This time, Ellis has a record and the Democrats have tried pounding him on that, especially when it comes to crime. For years, across a variety of measuring gauges Monroe has been close, if not at the top, of medium-sized and above cities in violent crime, which hasn’t changed while Ellis has been in office. However, with 2022 as the latest data available, that rate has declined 12 percent since the year Ellis took office while statewide it has gone down just two percent.
At any rate, Ellis resoundingly nabbed the endorsement of the Monroe Police Union. Cooper hasn’t reported any spending, which may hamper her ability to present herself as a less-controversial black Democrat alternative to Mayo, who last month found himself accused by a black Democrat city councilor of threatening her, as well as has a record to defend that may still linger in the minds of a number of voters. To her restraining order he filed one, and a judge has ordered they both stay away from each other for two years, which might make working together as elected city officials interesting but perhaps not amusing to voters.
This seemingly-favorable confluence of events bucks an electorate less favorable to Ellis, in a contest which could confirm an ongoing trend in national politics. Over the past few years, non-white voters have shown more openness to supporting Republicans, and recent polling confirms their slipping support for Democrats. It’s possible that Ellis’ 2020 triumph was that tip of the spear in Louisiana of greater black voter comfort in voting for a white candidate, where in 2022 a white Republican in Shreveport and white Democrat in Alexandria were elected by electorates where blacks significantly outnumbered others.
If Ellis can do it again this weekend, it could prove he’s not a one-off, especially considering the other two cities have slightly smaller black majorities. And it might demonstrate how white candidates, even from the GOP, can win in jurisdictions with substantially more black voters than any other race.
That trend could be confirmed further with a victory in Caddo Parish in its overtime sheriff’s contest. In an evenly divided electorate by race, white Republican former Shreveport City Councilor John Nickelson stands a decent chance of triumphing over black Democrat former city chief administrative officer Henry Whitehorn.
Change or continuity in local election voting behavior? In Louisiana, the answer will start coming shortly.
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