NEW ORLEANS (AP) — In the final stretch from the political conventions to Election Day, Barack Obama didn’t come to Louisiana for one of his stadium-packed speeches. John McCain’s “Straight Talk” tour didn’t make it to Louisiana either.
Louisiana simply wasn’t a battleground, and candidates spent their time and money on bigger prizes — Pennsylvania, Florida, Missouri, Ohio. As for the pundits, they’ve said all along it looks like conservative-leaning Louisiana is going for Republican McCain. End of debate.
But Louisiana voters don’t seem to care. For them, the presidential race is as real as if the future of the nation depended on their vote.
The passion stood out in early voting, which ended Oct. 28. Record turnout numbers were reeled in: They just about doubled turnout for both the 2004 presidential contest and last year’s gubernatorial race.
“It’s history,” said Melvin DeTiege, a retired shipyard painter from New Orleans, as he helped his disabled sister vote early.
A 69-year-old Southern black man, DeTiege could hardly believe that a presidential showdown included the nation’s first black candidate. Even more remarkable, he said, were polls showing Obama in the lead to take the White House.
“It’s good to see that anyone can become president,” he said. “If he wins, that means people are changing — not having the racial thing mixed in there.”
Louisiana may be on the cusp of something extraordinary: Turning in the highest turnout ever in a state where political passions are ingrained in the landscape.
Not only that. If the right elements combine, analysts said, Louisiana could deliver one of the highest turnouts in U.S. history.
“You’ve got high black interest, high Republican interest and high interest by the so-called Wodo — what we term the ‘white-other race-Democrat-other party,'” said Greg Rigamer, a New Orleans-based election analyst. “It will be the highest in Louisiana history for sure.”
Elliott Stonecipher, a Shreveport-based political analyst, went even further.
“Certainly in what I consider modern electoral history of America — roughly the Eisenhower years, once politics went media over the past half century — we could have highest turnout ever, here and nationally,” Stonecipher said. He recently reviewed presidential election returns in Louisiana going back to 1900.
Take a look at the dynamics.
Typically, Louisiana’s participation in presidential elections outperforms the national average by up to 4 percent, Stonecipher said.
This election has the makings of a perfect Louisiana political trifecta: Race, war and religion.
Obama is black. McCain is white and a war veteran. And religion — from Joe Biden’s Roman Catholicism to Sarah Palin’s exuberance as a pro-lifer — is front-and-center.
“It’s a barn burner. There’s no doubt about it,” said Pearson Cross, the head of the political science department at the University of Louisiana-Lafayette.
Also, it’s an election that harkens back to historic crossroads in the state’s history: the 1991 gubernatorial faceoff between Edwin Edwards, the now-mprisoned four-term governor, and ex-Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke; the 1968 George Wallace presidential run; emancipation and Reconstruction.
In those elections, like this one, race was the dominant factor.
“Louisiana is a racist state,” said Raymond D. Strother, a Maryland-based political consultant and veteran of Louisiana politics. “Races there are always about race.”
Race was behind the high water mark for turnout when 79 percent of voters cast ballots for and against Duke and Edwards race in 1991.
“Blacks came out as every man, woman and child and voted against David Duke,” Cross said.
For Larry Powell, a history professor at Tulane University, interest for Obama among blacks resembles the post-Civil War era.
“It’s almost like the onset of Reconstruction,” Powell said. “The turnout rates are what you saw in the first flush of emancipation.”
Conversely, whites aren’t staying home in a state where whites outnumber blacks by 64 percent to 32 percent. That’s why political watchers in Louisiana — despite a recent poll suggesting otherwise — don’t see much trouble for McCain.
“Whites are going out to vote against Obama. It’s not about McCain. They don’t know him (Obama), they’re scared of him; he’s too liberal, he’s too anti-oil-and-gas, he’s going to raise my taxes,” said Bernie Pinsonat, a Baton Rouge-based political pollster, mimicking the concerns many whites have.
Coincidentally, if the outcome winds up being what the polls suggest they will be — Obama wins the nation, McCain wins Louisiana — Louisiana will find itself after Election Day in a position it hasn’t been in for 40 years: Not voting for the next president.
Back then, George Wallace won by plurality, obtaining 48 percent of the vote to Hubert Humphrey’s 28 percent and Richard Nixon’s 23.
It was vintage Louisiana politics, Strother said, where the state’s majority of whites voted out of racial fears.
“They would rather vote against a black guy and against their own welfare,” Strother said.
“George Wallace’s election there was about race.”
——Contact The Daily Reveille news staff at [email protected]