Striking a Blow for Unity? Race and Economics in the 2010 New Orleans Mayoral Election

The 2010 mayoral election in New Orleans confounded pundits and analysts alike. Few anticipated, as the election campaign began, that New Orleans was on the brink of electing its first White mayor in a generation or that the eventual winner, Mitch Landrieu, would pass the 50 percent threshold required to win outright at the primary election stage, avoiding a potentially divisive general election runoff. Landrieu declared that in voting overwhelmingly for him, the “people of the city of New Orleans” had decided to “strike a blow for unity.” James Carville, with characteristic hyperbole, declared the conjunction of the Saints’ Superbowl win and the mayoral election outcome “the city's best two days since the Battle of New Orleans in 1815” and proclaimed a “unity of spirit and purpose unlike any time in our history.” This apparent unity presents a challenge to our understanding of voting behavior in majority‐minority cities. New Orleans voters of both races voted overwhelmingly for Landrieu, with little evidence of racially polarized voting or White strategic accommodation. Landrieu's 2010 voting coalition was apparently cross‐class and cross‐racial in nature. Newspaper accounts suggest a substantial disempowering effect on the Black community, producing exceptionally low turnout among Black voters. But this also registers a challenge to our understanding of Black urban voting behavior, undercutting the expectation that intergroup competition, or the availability of an in‐group candidate, spurs political participation. In this article, we take advantage of the unique result in New Orleans to present an alternative analytical framework for understanding urban politics. Our analysis reveals the extent to which racial context mattered to the election result, beneath the apparent cross‐race unity. At the same time, we illuminate variation within Black and White groups along geographic, economic, and partisan lines. The result is a more complex description of the contours of the New Orleans electorate. While understanding that the specifics of the story we tell about New Orleans in 2010 might be unique to, or at least distinctive of, the politics of that city, we believe the analytical strategy adopted in this article could be applied to the ethnic and racial politics of other cities in the United States. While Landrieu's win was comprehensive, we postulate that a more complex reality can be uncovered by examining the impact of social context on voting behavior. A