Earlier this month, the election of independent Marshall Simien, Jr. to the Lake Charles mayoralty marked a curious outlier to recent success that Republicans and white candidates generally have had in Louisiana’s largest cities, and may flash a warning signal to them.
Simien defeated two-term incumbent Republican Nic Hunter in the May 3 runoff. While Hunter’s proportion of the vote barely increased from what he gathered in the Mar. 29 general election, Simien’s essentially corralled support from all others, making up more than an 18-percentage point gap. Hunter is white while Simien, who among other elected and appointed positions in government served a couple of terms on the City Council prior to a previous mayoral run in 2017, is black.
Until May, Republicans had hit their high-water mark in executive control of the ten most populated cities (in a trio of cases, consolidated with the parish) in the state. While New Orleans had a Democrat as mayor, all of Baton Rouge, Shreveport, Lafayette, St. George (newly a city with an elected mayor as of March), Lake Charles, Kenner and Bossier City – second through eighth in population – had Republican chief executives. Monroe had an independent and Alexandria a Democrat.
Somewhat related and interestingly, as of that time all of these cities, save New Orleans, had white mayors. This was the case even as Baton Rouge, Shreveport, Monroe, and Alexandria had majority black populations (Baton Rouge’s included parish residents not in other cities), all of whom have taken office within the past five years.
And Lake Charles, which had been the case as well in 2021 when Hunter easily won reelection and 2017 when Simien – running as a Democrat – barely missed the runoff and Hunter defeated another well-known area black politician in the runoff, Democrat state Rep. Wilford Carter, Sr. (then a retired judge). As is typical in Louisiana major cities, whites disproportionately register to vote compared to blacks (except in Orleans, where they tend to be more at parity), and in Lake Charles for the most recent elections white slightly outnumbered blacks in the electorate.
But the problem for Hunter was the timing especially of this contest. In recent years, voter dynamics have shifted where higher-stimulus contests disproportionately have turned out Republicans, and the Mar. 29 ballot had only statewide constitutional amendments on them besides local contests. This would cut turnout to nearly half of what it had been only months earlier for the presidential election. Worse, Democrats mobilized more effectively than Republicans in opposition of the amendments.
Hunter, and Lake Charles under his watch, had much going for him. After hitting a population high of around 78,000 in the 1970s, numbers slowly deteriorated so that it was around 71,000 by 2010. But by completion of Hunter’s first three years in office, it jumped to over 84,000 and induced an upswing in tax revenues. The city also under his leadership developed the strongest balance sheet of the state’s major cities, with a debt load substantially below all others even with the fastest population growth. (Contrast this with Bossier City, whose debt over the previous two decades spiraled out of control to end up several times per capita of Lake Charles’, even though it hardly grew in population.) Its property tax rate was at the bottom end of the state’s major cities and its sales tax rate was in line with those cities’ rates.
So, even though Hunter had perhaps the best growth record of mayor or a large city in the state, demography and outside issues worked against him. Simien, despite the label he ran under this time as a ploy to pick up unaware non-leftists – make no mistake, he espoused solidly liberal issue preferences some contrary to Hunter’s agenda that had brought development success and received a raft of endorsement from far left political figures and interest groups – was the Democrat in the race and black that would mobilize and attract disproportionately the majority black voters in the city.
In retrospect, Hunter lost the race when he didn’t win outright. Clearly differential turnout hurt him as white turnout barely exceeded black and Democrat turnout barely exceeded Republican, and the crucial group was white Democrats that in Louisiana have increasingly become supporters of leftist candidates (and will become more so now that closed primaries exist for federal and some state elections).
And, strangely, he may have been victim of his own successes, for unless an issue comes about that galvanizes a majority made complacent by economic success, they disproportionately tune out elections when they feel satisfied by conditions. By contrast, Simien rallied his black Democrat base by a redistributive pitch that majority black areas of the city had missed out on the city’s success. Runoff turnout hardly improved but highly disproportionately favored blacks, and even white Democrats turned out in higher proportions than did white Republicans.
In reviewing the white mayors who won in majority-black cities over the past five years, all prevailed in cities in decline with previous black mayors who had courted controversy in one form or another. Hunter’s position was different as the incumbent when the city became majority-black in population with no foil relative to previous recent city governance.
This may signal rough waters ahead for these mayors, in that they may have limits to the kind of turnarounds needed to convince voters of their reelections, if Hunter couldn’t do that with his considerable record. Then again, Monroe independent Friday Ellis improved on his electoral outcome with his reelection last year, so it’s not an impossible task. Shreveport and Alexandria election are first up to the plate next fall.
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