Sen. Mary Landrieu says race hurts Obama in Louisiana. Fact or election gaffe?

Republicans took umbrage at Landrieu's remarks. Polls show the president is indeed very unpopular with whites in Louisiana.

|
Jonathan Bachman/Reuters
Sen. Mary Landrieu (D) of Louisiana speaks to voters during an early voting rally in Baton Rouge, La., on Oct. 20. To her left is her brother New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu.

Does President Obama’s race make him less popular in the South? Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu of Louisiana roiled Republicans on Thursday when she suggested that’s the case during a Thursday interview with NBC News.

The key moment came when NBC’s Chuck Todd asked Senator Landrieu, who is locked in a tight contest for reelection, why Obama’s approval ratings are so poor in her state. First she noted that his energy policies work against him in Louisiana, whose economy is dependent on gas and oil production. Then she brought up race.

“I’ll be very, very honest with you,” said Landrieu. “The South has not always been the friendliest place for African-Americans. It’s been a difficult time for the president to present himself in a very positive light as a leader.”

Republicans took umbrage. The state’s GOP chairman, Roger Villere, issued a statement saying that the implications of Landrieu’s words were “insulting to me and to every other Louisianian.” Lousiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, an Indian-American, called them “divisive” in a statement of his own.

Right-leaning pundits said Landrieu, who’s trailing Rep. Bill Cassidy (R) in the polls with only days to go, is getting desperate as she sees her chance to win a fourth term in office slipping away.

“There may be people who harbor racist and sexist prejudices in Louisiana, but there are such people in every state, and Louisiana has twice elected a person of color as governor and a woman as Senator three times in a row,” writes conservative Ed Morrissey at Hot Air.

Yes, that’s true. But it some ways Landrieu’s comments were banal, according to other commentators. From the late 1960s, into the ’80s and ’90s, the GOP’s southern strategy gave up on winning black votes and looked to benefit from the region’s racial polarization in other ways, writes Nia-Malika Henderson at The Fix at the Washington Post.

Then-RNC chairman Ken Mehlman said this directly in 2005 when he appeared at an NAACP event and apologized for the party’s past actions.

“The racial history of the South has played out at the ballot box. It exists. Landrieu isn’t breaking any new ground here. She is however breaking an unwritten rule in politics – it’s best not to talk about race, unless it’s about how far we’ve come,” writes Ms. Henderson.

Polls show Mr. Obama is indeed very unpopular with Louisiana whites.

According to a September CNN survey, Obama’s job approval among whites in the state is 17 percent. Among whites nationally, it’s about 32 percent, according to a recent Fox News poll.

But the president’s ratings among Louisiana African-Americans more closely mirror his national numbers.

Among non-whites in Louisiana, Obama’s job approval is 76 percent. Nationally, it’s 81 percent, according to the Fox survey.

There could be many reasons for this racial disparity, of course. The most obvious is that Louisiana whites are simply very conservative. Pollsters have found it almost impossible to accurately measure racial animus anywhere in America. There’s a strong social incentive to conceal racial feelings from inquisitive interviewers.

One preliminary effort to get around this involved a study that used derogatory Google searches to try and measure the votes Obama may have lost due to race.

Published in the October 2014 issue of the Journal of Public Economics, the study mined Google data to find uses of the “n” word by state. It estimated that Obama lost about four percentage points in the national vote in each of his presidential elections due to prejudice.

The state which had the highest rate of derogatory search using a racial expletive was West Virginia. Close behind, in second, was Louisiana.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to Sen. Mary Landrieu says race hurts Obama in Louisiana. Fact or election gaffe?
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/Decoder/2014/1031/Sen.-Mary-Landrieu-says-race-hurts-Obama-in-Louisiana.-Fact-or-election-gaffe
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe