Black voter antipathy to Broome denies last term

And now Louisiana can say its second through eighth largest cities have Republican chief executives (and the ninth-largest has a non-Democrat; fifth largest will be St. George whose first elected mayor inevitably should come from the GOP), now that East Baton Rouge Parish has elected Republican Sid Edwards to boot out of office current Democrat Mayor-President Sharon Weston Broome – thanks to black voters.

Broome had a fight on her hands for a third term when she trailed Edwards by five percentage points in the general election, not even cracking 30 percent of the multi-candidate field. Incumbents showing that poorly are in trouble, and this weekend Edwards, a high school football coach of renown and school administrator but rookie politician, closed the deal with voters.

He did it because of turnout. The 331 precincts can be parsed by race of registrants to determine this, assigning these to “favorable” or “unfavorable” precincts for each candidate, where from Broome a favorable precinct was one with greater than 80 percent black registrants – overwhelmingly Democrats – and an unfavorable one was where more than 80 percent of registrants were white – a plurality if not a majority of Republican typically. For Edwards, the definitions for each would swap.

If taking just the average proportion of the vote received by each candidate in the 98 precincts with more than 80 percent black registrants and the 70 precincts with more than 80 white registrants, Broome not only would have led in the general election, basically swapping their proportions, but also she would have won the runoff again about swapping the actual results with 54 percent of the vote. In the runoff, she averaged 92 percent of the vote in favorable precincts, while Edwards managed only 82 percent in his favorable precincts, demonstrating the historical greater willingness of whites to cross over to vote for a black candidate than blacks crossing over to vote for a white candidate.

Yet an average vote share by precinct assigns equal weight to each precinct, and reviewing turnout numbers reveals that was anything but the case. In the general election, in the favorable precincts turnout was about the same – 33 percent in Broome’s, 33.5 in Edwards.’ Keep in mind that in the general election there was the presence of another strong black Democrat, former state Rep. Ted James who shared in Broome’s favorable precincts.

However, in the runoff, Broome’s favorable precincts sunk to 18.6 percent average turnout while Edwards’ dropped more modestly to an average of 28.4 percent – a 44 percent plunge for the incumbent while the challenger’s fell only 15 percent. That shows what made the difference: strong dislike of Broome’s candidacy among many black voters. Voters who had showed up in the general election mainly to vote for James as a black Democrat Broome alternative left without such an alternative on the runoff ballot simply stayed home, such was their antipathy to giving Broome a final four years in office.

Thus, for the win Edwards can thank loyal core voters, some of whom undoubtedly cast their vote for him out of dissatisfaction with Broome, and the greater number of voters fed up with Broome who would rather see a white Republican in office than four more years of her.