Did Racism beat Jindal?
December 5, 2003
Analysts don’t like it. Pollsters aren’t keen on it. Strategic mistakes, they say, were the key to Bobby Jindal’s loss to Kathleen Blanco in the Louisiana governor’s race.Since the election, it’s been a great unmentionable. Yet the word “race” may apply to the face-off between Blanco and Jindal in more ways than one. Jindal’s ethnicity — the fact that he looked and sounded so different — wasn’t supposed to matter in the governor’s race. The candidate himself said it time and again.
But it could have been critical in Jindal’s defeat. Here’s the nasty paradox: racism, an aid to so many Republican triumphs across the South, may have saved the Democrats on Nov. 15. And Jindal, the candidate who quickly staked out a French-bashing, super-patriot position, may have lost because he was found insufficiently American.
It can’t be proved. The evidence is anecdotal — disturbing comments from voters, Jindal’s rapid polling drop and suggestive vote deficits in Republican-leaning parishes that had gone strongly for George W. Bush in 2000.
Yet it seems clear the Indian American’s ethnic origins had hardly been forgotten by election day. Far from it. An observation by the victor herself, on election eve, suggests as much: “A Hindu out-Catholic’d both of us, Richard,” Blanco was reported as telling Attorney General Richard Ieyoub. The quote infuriated the Jindal camp; he’s been a fervent Catholic all through adulthood.
Early this year, top Louisiana Republicans turned away from Jindal, reportedly fearing his origins barred success. They may have been right.
Consider the odd poll numbers over the campaign’s last week, which appear to tell a similar story. Jindal dropped far and fast, from a 10-point lead in pollster Verne Kennedy’s survey four days out, to a three-point deficit the day before the election.
“It’s unusual to see a drop that occurs that rapidly,” says Kennedy, who downplays racism. Yet he acknowledges that for voters in North Louisiana, the most reliably Republican part of the state, “the Indian American factor never let them be solidly committed.”
A Tulane University racism expert thinks the sharp tumble in Jindal’s support “means it never was there.” Lance Hill, head of the Southern Institute for Education and Research that studies bias, thinks analysts have underestimated the racial-ethnic factor in Jindal’s defeat, particularly given its critical role in Louisiana elections for decades.
Now look at the North Louisiana Republican turnout. Of the key parishes, Jindal won Bossier and Ouachita, but narrowly lost Caddo. Overall, he received 34,000 fewer votes in these three parishes than President Bush in 2000. That’s nearly two-thirds of his total losing margin statewide. “If Jindal had been white, he’d be governor right now,” Hill says.
Two days before the election, in the Tangipahoa Parish seat of Amite, voters were talking about the “foreigner,” or saying they had heard others call Jindal that and worse. Jindal lost Tangipahoa, though it went solidly for Bush in 2000 and gave David Duke a strong vote in 1991. It was just those Duke voters Jindal was seeking in his hard-right campaign.
The owner at the lawyers’ watering hole in downtown Amite passed on a sampling of racist comments too scurrilous to be reprinted. Even the mayor remarked on Jindal’s problematic “appearance,” saying he was going to vote for Blanco.
To their credit, the Democrats did not overtly exploit these sentiments. Yet, a last-minute Blanco television ad, with its strident “Wake Up Louisiana! Before it’s too Late!” and its disturbing photograph of a very young, dark-skinned Jindal with his hair sticking up, emphasized his alienness: his status as being outside the category of those who needed to be “awakened” — Louisianans.
True, the white men in Amite expressed nearly as many reservations about Blanco as a woman as they did about the “foreigner” Jindal. But many white voters evidently opted for the lieutenant governor as the more Louisianan of the two candidates.
“I think she’ll go in and blend in to what Louisiana is all about,” Edgar “Sonny” Mouton, the political veteran and former state Senate president pro tem, said recently. “She understands the greatness of this state.”
The Louisiana governor’s race, pitting the son of Indian immigrants against a woman, was hailed as the harbinger of something new for the old South. In fact, it turned out to be a throwback to something very old.
Because instead of putting the first non-white in a Deep South governor’s chair since Reconstruction, it recalled a different facet of that era — its demise, when racism mobilized to toss out biracial state governments and set the Southern Democracy in white stone for 100 years.
— Adam Nossiter
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