White Flight From Southern Democrats Doomed Mary Landrieu

National Journal ^ | 12/07/2014 | SCOTT BLAND

[SeekAndFind]

Democrats have been worried about the African-American vote in Louisiana for months. But what really doomed Sen. Mary Landrieu's reelection bid was the near-monolithic white vote against her.

Landrieu's loss Saturday to Republican Sen.-elect Bill Cassidy followed a November all-party primary in which the incumbent got a lower share of the white vote (18 percent) than all other Democratic Senate candidates in the country but one, according to exit polling. There was no exit poll Saturday night due to a lack of media interest in the runoff, perhaps because even Landrieu's campaign acknowledged that she would need at least 30 percent support from white voters to win another term, a huge jump from her baseline in November.

That's about what Landrieu received when she won her final Senate term in 2008, and her drop-off since then highlights how the white voters who used to be the Democratic Party's Southern foundation have left—and how the party has collapsed without them.

"She came home to a sea of change since she last ran," said Bernie Pinsonat, a pollster in the state. "We don't have any Democratic statewide officials, after her, left. The Legislature is now dominated by Republicans; you don't even need a Democrat to pass a bill. Next year there will be maybe 10, or maybe eight or seven white Democrats left in the entire Capitol building. There's been a mass exodus and not something that had gone unnoticed. I don't know why she ran for reelection."

[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you for sharing your insights, dear justiceseeker93!

[fieldmarshaldj]

It WAS a coup d’état by the Democrats. It occurred in 1934 under then-Governor Theodore Francis Green (himself a scion of the early controlling families of RI and before 1932, an also-ran against GOP candidates going back decades).

For a brief time in 1938, it looked like the GOP managed to “take it back”, only to lose it for the long term and effectively to date (save the occasional wins, and the fact the state has tended to prefer non-Dem Governors since after 1984, with Dems only winning due to a scandal-plagued incumbent (DiPrete in 1990) or a split in the center-right vote (in 2014 with the GOP & Ex-Cool Moose’r, and 2010 for that matter since Chafee was the most left-wing candidate).

[nicmarlo]

Individuals are not the Party, to which my commentary concerned.

You’ll always find individuals who don’t represent the Party platform, values, or ideals, like Zell Miller wasn’t representative of the Democrat Party.

[nicmarlo]

Agreed. But the Progressives are brainwashing the public school children and college students with their false narrative, and it appears most accept the lies on its face. They have groomed kids to be unable to critically think or challenge educators at the college level due to fear of receiving a poor grade in class.