Louisiana Democrats Ponder Racial Factor
by Bruce Alpert - Times-Picayune (excerpt)

DENVER -- David Bositis, a specialist on black electoral politics for the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, said he suspects there are probably a higher percentage of Democratic voters in Louisiana who won't vote for Obama because of his race than in other Southern states such as Georgia and Tennessee, where voters have elected African-Americans to statewide office.

In Tennessee, Bositis said Harold Ford Jr., an African-American Democrat, lost to a white Republican in 2006 but still got more white votes than John Kerry did in the state two years earlier. "There's not been that kind of voting behavior in Louisiana, " he said.

Bositis said it's tough to measure how many voters are influenced primarily by racial concerns because it's no longer considered acceptable in polite society for someone to say, "I'm not voting for a candidate solely because of race." There is no way, Bositis says, to know whether a voter who says he is not voting for Obama because he's too inexperienced or because he's too liberal is masking racial bias.

Louisiana Democratic Party Chairman Chris Whittington said there's little doubt that some white voters won't see past Obama's race when they go to the polls. Whittington, who initially backed Clinton and is now supporting Obama, said the party conducted a $2 million voter registration drive to try to offset the loss of Democratic-voting African-American residents from New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

Whittington said the drive will provide some additional voters for Obama to make him more competitive in the state than indicated by polls showing a double-digit lead for Republican John McCain. And, he said, these voters might offset what he says is a relatively small number of voters who won't vote for Obama simply because of his race.