Louisiana gov's race a tossup

The first post-primary poll of the Louisiana governor's race shows a tossup:

The survey of registered voters showed 42 percent of the voters choosing Blanco, the lieutenant governor, compared to 41 percent for Jindal, the former health official. Seventeen percent of voters were undecided, in the two-day series of tracking surveys by pollster Verne Kennedy.

However, Kennedy adjusted the numbers to account for undecided black voters, who overwhelmingly vote for Democrats, and said the runoff election currently stands in Blanco's favor. With that adjustment, Blanco would get 53 percent of the vote, compared to Jindal's 47 percent, Kennedy said.

"Jindal can win this. Either candidate can win it," Kennedy said Wednesday, noting that he gave Jindal 10 percent of the black vote when he weighted the survey to account for black undecided voters. Republican candidates rarely get that percentage of the black vote, and Jindal did not get that in the primary.

"For Jindal to win, you'd need a significantly low African-American turnout," Kennedy said.

Word from people in LA is that the Republican Jindal is a charismatic campaigner, and has a great storyline (would be the first South Asian Indian to hold the governorship in the U.S.). Blanco, on the other hand, is supposedly an uninspiring campaigner, and is running a vanilla race.

Jindal still has some hurdles, the biggest perhaps being whether Republicans will enthusiastically turn out for a non-White candidate (why is this shit still an issue???). He apparently built a large part of his support in the primary via radio. Now that voters will see more of him, it could affect his chances with his target wingnut demographic. Sad but true.

Blanco, on the other hand, benefits from a pro-Democratic Party wave that elevated Democrats to the state's highest jobs (Lt. Gov and AG), and gave the multiple Democratic gubernatorial candidates a combined 57 percent of the vote compared to 39 percent for the two Republicans.

But again, this will come down to turnout (where have we heard that before?). And in particular, the African American vote (who could be disappointed by the loss of their preffered primary candidate, Richard Ieyoub).

One last thing -- LA blogger Ricky Prado says the poll is b.s., so take that into account:

I'm only mentioning this poll to say that it's probably meaningless if you happen to see any discussion of it anywhere else. It was taken as a hypothetical over two nights before the Saturday election, so the likely voters from last week is sure to change going into a runoff election. The numbers don't suggest anything that most halfway intelligent people couldn't have inferred on their own anyway.

So yeah, the poll itself may be flawed, but being the only poll released post primary it's become CW by default, and it's probably (and accidentally) correct anyway.

Funny world, this politics is.

Posted October 10, 2003 10:38 AM | Comments (20)