A Post-Election Addendum

Most of the 27,000 people who visited Secretary Dardenne’s website over the weekend were met with the same problem: Around 9:30PM CST, the site (basically) crashed. Reporters, supporters, and candidates scrambled to find out election returns, while the site seemed to be in permanent refresh mode. Interminently, the site behaved, and thankfully, we were able to deliver information, often 20 to 30 minutes before the mainstream media was let in.

Today, a friend called to remind me of an important fact left out of our post-election analysis: In Saturday’s gubernatorial election, Bobby Jindal actually received only 23,143 more votes than he did during the 2003 run-off election. Of course, the two elections were very different, and in last week’s election, voter turn-out was substantially lower than it was during the 2003 run-off election; the difference in turn-out was around 110,000 votes. But historically, high-profile and competitive run-off elections yield higher turn-outs, as it did in 2003 when approximately 45,000 more voters showed up to vote in the run-off election.

Incidentally, there were 55,000 more voters in the 2003 jungle than in the 2007 jungle, and though some Republicans would like to believe this is due to “fundamental demographic changes” which ostensibly occured as a result of the hurricanes, the truth is that those changes were not nearly as dramatic as they had hoped, despite the nefarious and (for the most part) unsuccessful efforts to purge tens of thousands of Democratic voters from the rolls.

Today, we learn from The Times-Picayune that the population of New Orleans is up to 86% of its pre-Katrina level; the massive diaspora for which some Republicans had wished simply did not happen, at least in the numbers they had so boldly asserted. As it turns out, when you study population growth in the surrounding parishes, you find that many New Orleanians simply moved right outside of the city. It is likely that thousands of others have found new homes in cities like Baton Rouge, Lafayette, and Alexandria.

According to American Community Survey, Rapides Parish grew by more than 7,000 people between the years 2005 and 2006, a remarkable surge only dwarfed by the population growth we experienced as a result of the Louisiana Manuevers during World War II, and many, if not most, of our 7,000 new residents are formerly from New Orleans.

Why is this important? Because, most likely, Rapides Parish is not the only place in Louisiana in which thousands of New Orleanians moved in the aftermath of Katrina. But because the American Community Survey only targets a handful of parishes and Census Bureau “estimates” only apply a pre-established factor to the number of housing units in a given area, it is likely that Louisiana will not get a full understanding of its total population until the actual Census is conducted in 2010.

However, it seems likely that, despite the lower turn-out in last Saturday’s election (an election that lacked a clear challenger), Louisiana is still a viable Democratic state. Although I know this assertion is likely to annoy a handful of conservatives, one only needs to consider the results of the Lieutenant Governor’s election in which Mitch Landrieu, a Democrat, actually carried more total votes and more parishes than Bobby Jindal (both elections can be considered comparable, because both lacked a strong opponent) or the results of the Senate and (likely) the House races, in which Democrats are poised to maintain control of both chambers.