LOUISIANA
State Profile
The following data and information about this state is taken from the 2006 Almanac of American Politics. The 2006 Almanac can be ordered online, or by phone at 1-800-356-4838.

State At A Glance  •  Key Elected Officials  •  Political History & Analysis

“Louisiana's politics has a Third World quality, with its own peculiar election laws and a heritage of no-holds-barred conflict and demagoguery no other state can match.”

At A Glance

• Size: 51,840 square miles
• Population in 2000: 4,468,976; 72.7% urban; 27.3% rural
• Population in 1990: 4,219,973
• Population Change: Up 5.9% 1990-2000; Up 0.3% 1980-1990
• Population Rank: 22d of 50; 1.6% of total U.S. population
• Most Populous Cities: New Orleans (469,032); Baton Rouge (225,090); Shreveport (198,364); Lafayette (111,667); Lake Charles (70,735)
• Registered Voters: 1,618,431 D (55.4%); 700,691 R (24.0%); 604,273 unaffiliated and minor parties (20.7%)
• State Senate: 24 D 15 R
• State House: 62 D 40 R 1 I
• State Legislative Term Limits: Yes

Key Elected Officials

• Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco (D)
• Sen. Mary Landrieu (D)
• Sen. David Vitter (R)
• Representatives: (5 R, 2 D):

Bobby Jindal   (R-01) William Jefferson   (D-02) Charlie Melancon   (D-03)

Jim McCrery   (R-04) Rodney Alexander   (R-05)

Richard Baker   (R-06) Charles Boustany   (R-07)

About Louisiana

Louisiana often seems to be America's banana republic, with its charm and inefficiency, its communities interlaced by family ties and its public sector sometimes laced with corruption, with its own indigenous culture and its tradition of fine distinctions of class and caste. It is a state with an economy uncomfortably like that of an underdeveloped country, based on pumping minerals out of soggy ground and shipping grain produced in the vast hinterland drained by its great river, an economy increasingly dependent on businesses typical of picturesque Third World countries--tourism (now the second largest industry, hard hit by September 11) and gambling. Its politics too has a Third World quality, with its own peculiar election laws and a heritage of no-holds-barred conflict and demagoguery no other state can match: what other state has produced a Huey Long or an Edwin Edwards? Louisiana has a hereditary rich class and a large low-wage working class. It has conservative cultural attitudes: Louisiana and Utah have the most restrictive abortion laws in the U.S.--its partial-birth abortion ban and optional "Choose Life" license plates have been ruled illegal by federal courts--and Louisiana in 1997 became the first state to offer covenant marriages, in which spouses would agree not to be covered by no-fault divorce laws. But Louisiana also has a lazy tolerance of rule-breaking, and feels more like the Caribbean or the Mediterranean than the North Atlantic or the Pacific Rim. This is not an entirely original observation. Four decades ago, A. J. Liebling described Louisiana as an outpost of the Levant along the Gulf of Mexico. Most of the United States faces east toward the vast Atlantic Ocean or west toward the vast Pacific; Louisiana faces south, to the Gulf of Mexico and the steamy heat and volatile societies of the Caribbean and Latin America.

New Orleans preserves the look and feel it had as a French and Spanish outpost in the New World. Traditions of centralized control and easygoing corruption, classic traits of colonialism, are part of this heritage. The dirigiste tradition comes from the fact that Louisiana is the only state whose law is based not on the common law of England but on the Napoleonic Code of France; the concept of civil liberties has shallower roots in Louisiana than in the other 49 states. Here abstract ideals have been overshadowed by the practical need for centralized action. This Delta land--much of it below sea level, soggy, swampy, laced with tributaries and offshoots of the Mississippi and other major rivers like the Atchafalaya--requires vast capital expenditures for levees and drainage and causeways.

The economy that grew up in these rich Delta lands has always been based on raw materials. Antebellum Louisiana produced and exported sugar, rice and cotton in enough abundance to generate the wealth which built grand plantation houses behind alleys of oaks running in from the Mississippi, and to make New Orleans the nation's fifth largest city by the time of the Civil War. Then came oil, found in the great Spindletop strike just over the Texas line in 1901 and in salt domes in Louisiana not long after, followed by the huge Baton Rouge refinery that became the training ground for generations of top oil executives. When energy prices boomed after the oil shocks of 1973 and 1981, Louisiana, like an oil-rich Third World country, boomed too, reaching up toward national income levels, generating 500,000 new jobs between 1972 and 1981. But it lost 150,000 jobs in the next six years as oil prices crashed and the rig count dropped by two-thirds and energy taxes fell from 41% of state government revenues in 1982 to 9% in 1996. Louisiana's economy has never regained much forward momentum. Gambling, legalized in 1991, has produced less revenue than expected, and nothing like the boom that some promised. People have been leaving the state: From 1980, near the peak of oil prices, until 2004 Louisiana's population increased only 7%, far less than any other Southern state, less than any state except two in the Great Plains and the industrial triangle of Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia. Louisiana has high rates of cancer, early death rates, a high incidence of AIDS. Louisiana has attracted few immigrants: its population is 32% black, the second highest of any state, but only 2% Hispanic and 1% Asian. It is a population with low incomes and work force participation and low levels of education. Income disparities here are greater than almost anywhere else in the United States. New Orleans's rich are notoriously unventuresome and tight-knit, determined to hold on to their wealth against the grasp of the impecunious and unlearned masses.

The most enduringly famous politician here, and by far the most talented, was Huey P. Long, who in less than a single term each as governor (1928-32) and senator (1932-35), left an imprint on the state's public life and imposed an organization to its politics that have faded into history only recently. Long's genius was not that he promised to tax the rich to help the poor--hundreds of idealists and demagogues in America have done that--but that, to an amazing extent, he actually delivered. He dominated the legislature so thoroughly that, as governor, he roamed the floors of both chambers at will, bringing to the podium bills he insisted be passed without changing a comma--and they were. He was ready to use bribery, intimidation and physical violence. He built a new skyscraper Capitol, a new Louisiana State University and more miles of roads than any state but rich New York and huge Texas. He also built a national following, and by 1935, he was planning to run for president on the platform of ''Share the wealth, every man a king,'' when he was assassinated at age 42 in the hallway of the Capitol, where the bullet holes can still be seen in the marble walls.

For America, the Long threat may have moved Franklin D. Roosevelt to embrace the liberal programs--the Wagner Labor Act, social security, steeply graduated taxes--of the second New Deal. For Louisiana, Long delivered a political structure that revolved around him even after he was dead--and a class of political leaders who, lacking his talents, treated the state as Long's incompetent doctors had treated his fatal wound, leaving Louisiana without either a fully developed economy or a fully competent public sector. For 50 years, until Huey's son Senator Russell Long retired in 1986, Longs and Long protégés held high political office in Louisiana and elections were run along pro- and anti-Long lines. The Long experience has strengthened Louisiana's already strong predispositions--tolerance of corruption, disinterest in abstract reform and taste for colorful extremists regardless of their short-term means or long-term ends--in a way that helps explain the rise and fall of such unlikely politicians as the four-term Governor Edwin Edwards and the onetime Ku Klux Klan leader and state legislator David Duke, both of whom by 2003 were spending time in jail.

Louisiana has natural political divides. One divide is by religion: Catholic Cajun parishes (Louisiana has parishes rather than counties) cast about 30% of the state's vote, the New Orleans area casts around 25% or so, and about 45% are cast in Protestant parishes from Baton Rouge on north. White Protestants for years have wanted nothing to do with national Democrats, while Cajuns tend to mull it over. Another divide is by race: Blacks are overwhelmingly Democratic, whites split in seriously contested elections. A third divide is by income: Low- and high-income whites vote very differently and are much less influenced than voters in most other states by candidates' cultural values, marital status, lifestyles and the like. As a result, Louisiana politics since Huey P. Long's time has often been a struggle between reformist and conservative forces on one side and roguish populists on the other, a struggle waged in lavishly financed campaigns and with grandiloquent rhetoric.

For a quarter century, the lead role was played by Edwin Edwards as the roguish populist, with a number of rivals as reformist conservatives. Edwards was elected governor in 1971 and 1975 and was not eligible to run in 1979. In 1983 he beat incumbent Republican David Treen; in 1987 he lost to Buddy Roemer, a Democratic congressman who later switched parties. For much of this third term, Edwards faced corruption charges, until he was acquitted by a jury in 1986. In 1991 he ran again, and this time an even odder character surfaced. David Duke was an active Nazi sympathizer up through 1989, but he also had a knack for speaking to mainstream political issues in attractive political language. In 1989 he was narrowly elected to the state legislature from a district in suburban Jefferson Parish as a nominal Republican--a victory that got enormous national publicity. Then in 1991, Duke ran for governor, against Roemer and Edwards. Louisiana has a unique primary system, invented by Edwards: candidates of all parties run in a single primary; any candidate who gets 50% is elected; otherwise, the top two finishers, regardless of party, have a runoff. In late 2004 leaders of both parties talked of returning to the system of party primaries used in most other states, but the legislature did not act in 2005. Edwards received only 34% of the votes in that 1991 race, and Duke made the runoff by finishing second with 32%. All articulate opinion in Louisiana moved to Edwards's side, and Republicans from George H.W. Bush on down endorsed Edwards, who won 61%-39%.

In the first years of this century Louisiana has not set a clear political course. In 2000 the state, after voting twice for Bill Clinton, voted 53%-45% for George W. Bush. In 2002 Democratic Senator Mary Landrieu, elected by 5,788 votes in 1996, failed to win a majority in the November primary and faced a runoff with Republican Suzanne Haik Terrell. Shrewdly Landrieu cast this as a choice between an independent who would fight for Louisiana interests and a Republican who would vote in lockstep with Bush; she won 52%-48%. In 2003, when Republican Governor Mike Foster was ineligible for a third term, Republican Bobby Jindal led in the October primary with 33% of the vote to 18% for Democratic Lieutenant Governor Kathleen Babineaux Blanco. In the November runoff Jindal's youth, Indian ancestry and policy wonkishness didn't set well with voters in northern parishes who vote heavily Republican for president, and Blanco, a Catholic Cajun, was elected 52%-48%. In the 2004 Senate race, left open by the retirement of Democrat John Breaux, the balance fell the other way. Democrats had two serious candidates running, Congressman Chris John and state Treasurer John Kennedy. There was just one serious Republican, suburban New Orleans Congressman David Vitter and, as George W. Bush was carrying the state 57%-42% over John Kerry, Vitter surprised the pundits by winning outright with 51% of the vote. Vitter, who jousted with almost every other legislator when he served in Baton Rouge, fits the mold of the Republican reformer. Neither Landrieu nor Blanco falls in the Edwin Edwards mold; there is no evidence that either is corrupt, nor are they, by the standards of the Democratic party at least, particularly liberal. Nor is either one of them, any more than Vitter, assured of reelection based on their most recent electoral performance. Louisiana, having outgrown the Longs and Edwin Edwards, is embarked on a politics of uncertain direction.