Breaking down the Louisiana vote

The New Orleans Times-Picayune hired a political consulting firm to analyze the vote in yesterday’s gubernatorial election. The resulting story focuses on racial patterns in the voting that suggest Bobby Jindal failed to achieve the abnormally large majority of white votes that is necessary for a Republican to win in a state like Louisiana.
According to the story, outside New Orleans Jindal won only 48 percent of the white vote. The “Bubbas for Bobby” didn’t exactly disappear on election day, but their numbers were insufficient to propel him to victory. Whether there might be a nonracial explanation for that fact, I don’t know.
The story points out that Jindal won 9 percent of the black vote, up from the usual 4 or 5 percent, but short of the 15 percent some had suggested was possible and that also would have delivered him the election. The Times Picayune story is “Support among white voters helped Blanco turn the tide.”
UPDATE: The RealClearPolitics analysis attributes Blanco’s come-from-behind win to an effective wave of attack ads by Blanco during the final week of the campaign. This sounds to me like a more plausible explanation than pure racism for the diminished white majority that Jindal won, but I don’t know if it can explain the New Orleans versus outstate difference in the white vote noted in the Times-Picayune story. Did Blanco’s ads target voters outside New Orleans?

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