Last
week, independent Friday
Ellis not only defeated 19-year incumbent Democrat Mayor Jamie Mayo,
but he did it without needing a runoff. And he did it as a white candidate in a
constituency with 63 percent black registration.
Ellis – military veteran, former city employee, small
business owner – at first would seem typical of the low-profile candidates who
almost exclusively challenged Mayo since his winning a special election in 2001
and whom Mayo usually brushed aside easily. But Mayo was more vulnerable this
year than most.
After his nearly two decades in office, the city
continued to decline in population and to see an exodus of economic
opportunity, symbolized by its most influential employer by far Fortune
500-listee CenturyLink gradually
exiting the city. Mayo, who is black, also alienated white voters with his odd
tribute to Louis Farrakhan, controversial for racist orations, in 2018.
Perhaps Mayo didn’t think he needed white support
to win in the current environment, and he was correct in the sense that failure
to drum up much of that wasn’t the main reason he lost. In the five precincts
with 95 percent or greater white registration (that aren’t split precincts;
keep in mind with roughly half of turnout coming through early voting reduces
the reliability of these data) he drew on average only 8 percent of the vote,
while Ellis picked an average of 90 percent in these.
The turnout skew by race magnified this advantage for
Ellis. District 1 has a large white majority and District 2 is swing in racial
composition, but had turnouts of about 50 and 40 percent, while the other three
majority-black districts combined didn’t crack 30 percent. Adding another 10
percent to each and Mayo almost would have caught Ellis and forced a runoff
(other minor candidates snagged 10 percent of the vote). Black apathy about Mayo
cost him more than lack of white enthusiasm for him.
But the real cause of his inability to force a runoff
he could have won came because Ellis picked up disproportionately more votes in
swing and black-majority precincts. In the three precincts with each having black
and white registrants of 40 percent, Ellis won convincingly two and barely
trailed in the other. And in the 13 precincts with at least 90 percent black registrants,
he averaged 15 percent of the vote while Mayo didn’t even average two-thirds.
A white challenger doesn’t pull those numbers against
a black incumbent unless there’s a lot of dissatisfaction. Clearly after nearly
two decades of Mayo at the city’s helm enough black voters not just rejected the
notion he could turn things around but also were willing to throw in their lot
with a white non-Democrat as the only other perceived credible candidate.
And that’s perhaps the major reason why this
victory will be difficult for Republicans to engineer elsewhere – even if they
follow Ellis’ model and don’t run as one. As it was, Ellis had everything
Republican about him except his label, which he cannily knew enough not to use
in his electoral environment.
A review
of his campaign finance documents shows a smattering of Republican activists
and past prolific donors both locally and across the state. GOP state Rep. Mike
Echols and the Louisiana Association of Business and Industry backed him from
the start. Most significantly, as a Republican his wife Ashley last year resoundingly
won the area’s Board of Elementary and Secondary Education seat, which
undoubtedly helped him in gathering campaign support (and in the span of less
than a year makes them go from political unknowns to the premier political
power couple in northeast Louisiana).
That built-in advantage doesn’t exist in the state’s
other urban areas with majority black populations: New Orleans, Shreveport, and
Alexandria. More importantly, only Alexandria doesn’t have term limits; the
two-term limit in New Orleans and Shreveport eliminates the possibility of
voters growing disappointed at an entrenched politician that opens the door for
an outsider to knock off an incumbent who stays past his political shelf life.
So, Republicans should savor the Ellis victory,
but not expect that it shows how to steal a usually sure Democrat office in
large Louisiana cities except in unusual circumstances.
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