We haven’t had a lot here at The Hayride about the one Louisiana election scheduled for this year which has any real statewide substance to it, which is the mayor’s race in New Orleans. Conrad Appel had a post a couple of weeks back when state representative Royce Duplessis jumped into the race, and his assessment pretty much summed up the sentiment of all of our contributors…

Based upon the political history of the candidates, the race for mayor of New Orleans will feature two characteristics. If true to form, the campaigns will emulate the ascension of the more extreme far-Left leanings of the national Democratic Party, and this race will undoubtably be a contest to see who can promise the most free stuff to the voters.

Second, the candidates will blame the undefined, but in their worldview, clearly greedy “rich” and unethical businesses for the poverty of the people and the failures of the city to create opportunity and prosperity. They will claim that social justice mandates that these same “rich” and businesses must be forced to pay to make up for the injustice of poverty, a political tactic I call fear and jealousy. This is all pretty typical Louisiana populism, but with an expected added touch brought on by the radial takeover of the national Democratic Party.

It’s hard to argue with Conrad on this.

Especially given where the race is…

A new poll conducted by pollster Ron Faucheux finds that New Orleans City Councilmember Helena Moreno is holding on to her lead in the mayor’s race.

According to that poll, Moreno leads the field with 47 percent support. Councilman Oliver Thomas is in a distant second place with 16 percent, followed by state Senator Royce Duplessis with 14 percent and retired judge Arthur Hunter with five percent. Fifteen percent of the 600 respondents said they were undecided, while three percent selected one of the other 14 candidates who qualified for the race.

Moreno’s lead comes despite Duplessis’s late entrance into the field of candidates.  Now, one analyst suggests that this could be Moreno’s race to lose.

“I’m not really surprised by the results,” UNO political science professor Ed Chervenak said. “Most people thought that once state Senator Royce Duplessis got into the race that it would probably take some of the support away from Oliver Thomas and Arthur Hunter.”

In fact, Chervenak says Moreno is in a good position to win the election outright in October.

“She’s at or near the position to be to win in the primary, but it’s still early,” Chervenak said. “Polls still are just a snapshot in time. They only tell us what’s going on right now. We still have to get through the campaign. Maybe one of the candidates catches fire. We just have to wait and see.”

It’s going to be a race to the bottom.

And we already know how Royce Duplessis does business during election season. Especially when he’s running against a white leftist like Helena Moreno. He proved it in that race a couple of years ago after Karen Carter Peterson had to quit politics due to her little gambling problem and Peterson’s Senate seat came up.

That race was between Duplessis and his then-colleague in the Louisiana House of Representatives Mandie Landry, in a district which had slightly more minority voters than white ones. Landry’s voting record was perhaps a little more flamboyantly leftist than Duplessis, but that didn’t stop him from playing the race card from the bottom of the deck again and again.

As we noted when this dropped, the charge was meritless because the way redistricting works not just in the Louisiana legislature but practically everywhere is that when an area is losing a seat – as Shreveport did in the last round of redistricting for the House – the districts get redrawn so that the incumbents aren’t thrown together and have to run against each other. Danny McCormick’s seat wasn’t chopped up to make a majority-black district; Alan Seabaugh’s was, because Seabaugh was termed out and running for the state senate.

And Mandie Landry went along with that plan because (1) there was no point in fighting it, and (2) if she didn’t, it wasn’t outside the realm of possibility that her own House district might get chopped up and turned into a majority-minority district.

That ad ended up turning the race and winning it for Duplessis in a wokefest of an election, because at the end of the day, black tribalism plays among New Orleans’ voters. And if you’re Royce Duplessis, you’ve gotten into this race late, you’re still behind Oliver Thomas in the polls (though that’s likely to change with time), you’re not likely to have more money than Moreno and the only way you can catch her, really, is to racially polarize the vote in a city where 54 percent of the voters are black, black tribalism is your jam.

It’s how you’re going to keep Moreno, who’s at 47 percent in that poll released earlier this week, from winning outright in the primary, and it’s how you’ll beat her in the head-to-head race.

Is this a sure thing? Not exactly, but it’s how Ray Nagin, who had actually been elected as a reform candidate with racial crossover appeal back in 2002, survived against Mitch Landrieu in the 2006 election. Nagin opened with his “chocolate city” gambit and never looked back, and he won a race he had no business winning after his performance during the Katrina crisis in 2005 (and it turned out best for New Orleans, too, because Nagin’s second term saw an economic renaissance in New Orleans that Landrieu quickly killed after he was finally elected in 2010).

And playing the race card was how LaToya Cantrell managed to survive that recall effort against her.

The thing to understand, as Conrad noted in his column, is that you aren’t going to get any discussion of new or innovative or intelligent ideas on fixing infrastructure, fighting crime or creating economic growth from any of the candidates in that race in New Orleans. Nobody has gotten elected mayor of that city with any of those things in a very long time; Nagin’s 2002 race was probably the only time in the last half-century that it happened. You get elected by promising to redistribute wealth to the poor, and by ginning up factional or tribal hatred.

So the only thing Royce Duplessis, or Oliver Thomas for that matter, has to offer against Moreno, who’s the most accomplished promiser of swag from other people’s wallets in New Orleans today, is the race card.

And it’s coming.

Which is why you won’t likely see a lot of coverage of the New Orleans mayor’s race here at The Hayride. There isn’t much point in it. We know the outcome of the race regardless of who wins.