Loyola University • New Orleans • Volume 95 • Issue 9
Protest rocks Senate debate By Nick Reimann nsreiman@loyno.edu @nicksreimann
Protests boiled over into confrontations with police during the Louisiana Senate debate Wednesday night, November 22, at Dillard University in New Orleans. Demonstrators were upset about the university allowing former Ku
Klux Klan leader David Duke to speak at the university, as well as the decision not to allow the public to view the debate. Police had to disrupt multiple attempts by protesters to force their way into the building at different entrances, sometimes using mace and shoving protesters to keep them out. Tracy Riley, U.S. Army Ret., who clashed with police, believes the au-
thorities went too far. “I think it was an overuse of force to pepper spray the students, not just of Dillard University but students of other universities who came here to support Dillard,” Riley said. “I think the appropriate thing to do would be to allow the students to observe and participate. They are citizens and voters, after all.”
See DEBATE, page 6
NICK REIMANN / The Maroon Protesters throughout the debate attempted to force their way into the debate hall, resulting in clashes with police who responded by spraying with pepper spray.
Why is Louisiana red? By Nick Reimann nsreiman@loyno.edu @nicksreimann
With only days to go until the presidential election, polls show that the race has already been decided in Louisiana. All signs point to Donald Trump winning Louisiana, likely by one of the widest margins of any state. According to FiveThirtyEight’s election forecast, Louisiana is now one of the reddest (most Republican) states in the country, showing Donald Trump with a greater than 99 percent chance of winning the state’s eight electoral votes. Louisiana’s position as a red state is a recent phenomenon, though. In fact, up until about a decade ago, nearly every election held in the state of Louisiana resulted in a Democrat winning, and this was true at every level of government.
At the presidential level, Louisiana, like much of the Deep South, voted solidly Democratic from about the end of the Reconstruction until around the time of the Civil Rights era. From 1880 to 1960, Louisiana went for the Democratic nominee every election except for 1948, when Strom Thurmond of the States’ Rights Party carried the state, and in 1956, when the popular Republican president Dwight D. Eisenhower won reelection. Sean Cain, Loyola associate professor of political science, attributes this Democratic dominance to the fact that it was the largest party in the South prior to the Civil War. This, combined with black voter suppression, allowed for the party to take over. It was during this period that blacks accounted for nearly all Republican support in the South, in stark contrast to 2016, where most polls show less than 5 percent support for Donald Trump among this demographic. The short-lived suffrage for blacks during Reconstruction allowed for Republicans to win many elected offices in Louisiana. It would be a long time until that happened again. At the state level, Louisiana did not elect a single Republican to the state House
of Representatives from 1920 until 1964. Republicans would not be the majority in the house delegation to Washington until Dec. 1, 1995, and a Republican U.S. Senator would not take a seat from Louisiana until David Vitter in 2005. Only a year after the Republican breakthrough in the U.S. House, though, Democrat Bill Clinton won the state in the 1996 presidential election. Louisiana still supported a Democrat for president at that time, with Republican nominee Bob Dole picking up less than 40 percent of the vote. Again in 2016, a Clinton will appear on the ballot as the Democratic presidential nominee in Louisiana. This time, though, the results on election day will likely be very different. Cain believes that Bill Clinton’s victory in 1996 and Hillary Clinton’s likely loss in 2016 is a prime case of how southerners’ views of the Democratic Party have changed recently. “In 1996, Bill Clinton was able to appeal to the rural, small town voter,” Cain said. “After leaving office, the Clintons moved to New York and became more involved with ‘big city’ politics.” Cain believes the Democratic party over the last couple of decades has moved away from trying to appeal to rural voters, instead focusing on their core of liberal “big city” supporters, not a group one would find a large number of in the South. Cain says this move is primarily because the Democratic Party doesn’t really need to compete in the South to win anymore, since energizing the liberal urban base has proven to be enough recently. Barack Obama was able to win both of his elections in 2008 and 2012 without carrying a state in the Deep South (Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina). Still, Louisiana State University journalism professor and former Democratic strategist Robert Mann believes that, even with their current liberal message, Democrats would still stand a chance in the South if they actively campaigned there. “Obama is not speaking to white southerners. Carrying southern
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states was not something that he needed to do. I’m not saying he doesn’t care about Louisiana, but he never really needed to pay any attention [politically],” Mann said. “When Bill Clinton was president, he was down here all the time. I mean, he was here all the time. He felt very comfortable here.” Mann refers to the 1990s, when Clinton served as president, as Louisiana’s swing state period, where both parties actively tried to win the state. This continued on the national level as late as 2000, when Al Gore held rallies in the state. Since then, though, Louisiana has gone Republican in every presidential election and hasn’t been a focus for Democrats, according to Mann. On the state and local level, though, Republicans were finding it much harder to win at the time. In fact, many parishes which voted solidly Republican on the national level still had Democrats representing them at the state level. For example, Richland Parish in northern Louisiana, which has gone to the Republican candidate for president in 10 out of the last 11 elections, only had their first Republican representative to the Louisiana state house in February of 2011. Also, Jackson Parish, which has gone at least 60 percent Republican in the last four presidential elections, just sent their first Republican representative to the Louisiana house in January of 2016. In fact, at the time Bobby Jindal took office as Louisiana governor in 2008, six of the eight statewide elected offices were held by Democrats. Since this time, Robert Mann said that Democrats in the state have fallen “very fast.”
See REPUBLICAN, page 6