NEW ORLEANS — Democrat John Bel Edwards beat Republican businessman Eddie Rispone in the Nov. 16 runoff election by about 40,000 votes. In Orleans Parish, the margin was more than 100,000 votes.
That puts Rispone's Orleans Parish loss as one of the most lopsided in the state's history. He received about 13,000 votes, or 10% of the vote.
In Louisiana's modern election history, New Orleans has been a bastion for Democratic candidates, with Republicans struggling to pick up more than 15% of the vote.
That landslide, Edwards: 114,812 to Rispone: 13:401, even beat one of Louisiana's most infamous races, when former KKK Grand Wizard and state representative David Duke ran against Edwin Edwards in 1991.
In the 1991 election, Duke got nearly 26,000 votes (13% of the vote), almost twice as many individual votes as Rispone did in 2019. Edwin Edwards got 173,000 votes (87% of the vote).
Edwin Edwards, who is not related to John Bel Edwards, beat Duke 61% to 39% across the state, gathering over a million votes to Duke's 671,000.
Statewide, Rispone secured about 63,000 more votes than Duke did.
The difference in votes between John Bel Edwards and Rispone was much smaller across the state, with Edwards securing 51% of the vote to Rispone's 49%.
By the raw numbers, about 80,000 more Orleans Parish residents voted for governor in 1991 than in 2019. Which means John Bel Edwards also secured thousands fewer votes in Orleans Parish than Edwin Edwards did.
Taken without context, the vote percentages seem to indicate Duke was more popular in New Orleans than Rispone.
But the disparity can partially be attributed to Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
In 1991, the population of New Orleans was just shy of half a million. But the hurricane cut the population by more than half: only 208,000 people lived in New Orleans in 2006.
Over the past 14 years since Katrina, the New Orleans population has grown. The estimated population was 392,000 in 2019. But that's still 100,000 fewer potential voters than the city had pre-Katrina.
There are some parallels between the two elections:
Both were the result of runoffs when no candidate secured an initial 51% of the vote.
Both were elections where the Republican lost to a Democrat.
And black voter turnout was key in both.
In the 1991 race, Louisiana's African American voters resoundingly voted against Duke. Around 80% of eligible black voters in the state turned out for that election, according to an election story from the New York Times. In fact, according to the New Orleans Advocate | The Times-Picayune, 1991 was the only time in Louisiana's modern history that black turnout was higher than the 2019 election.
Duke's racist history was also outlined in an explosive exchange with New Orleans reporter Norman Robinson, who pushed the candidate to apologize for his racist beliefs.
According to the L.A. Times article about the 1991 election results, Robinson told Duke he was scared about what would happen if the former Klansman won. The article said the discussion was "startling TV" that was likely one of the reasons black turnout was so high.
While the 2019 election did not have a direct racial confrontation the way the 1991 race did, black voters were an important part of John Bel Edwards' coalition in retaining the governor's mansion.
"John Bel Edwards won with African American votes and African American turnout," political analyst Ron Faucheux said. "The 51% that Republicans got combined in the primary fell to 49% in the runoff, and that was largely due to increased African American turnout."
Edwards spent much of his time in the closing days of the race in predominantly-black areas, trying to bring more black voters to the polls. During the last week of the campaign, Mayor LaToya Cantrell stumped for the incumbent governor.
"This race really proved to be rural vs. urban, and Governor Edwards really performed so well in all of the urban areas," said pollster and analyst Greg Rigamer.
The strategy worked overwhelmingly. By the time final results came in Saturday night, Edwards had secured about 99% of the African American vote, according to WWL-TV's election analysis
By 9:45 p.m. on election night, WWL-TV called the election for Edwards because 93% of returns had come in, and the majority outstanding were from predominantly black districts, which had broken universally for the Democrat.
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