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Originally posted by: chumdawg
Don't stick your heads in the sand, people. If you think this isn't bad news for the Repubs in '08, you're crazy.
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Maybe. Maybe not.
BY JAMES TARANTO
Tuesday, September 6, 2005 3:23 p.m. EDT
A Political Tempest?
It was inevitable, we suppose. Less than a week after hurricane Katrina, the first poll came out to measure its political impact. The results, which ABC News released Sunday, will be highly disappointing to the Angry Left: 55% of those polled do not blame President Bush for the storm's devastation, and although 67% think the federal government wasn't "adequately prepared," 75% say the same thing about state and local government. John Podhoretz's interpretation is right on the money (capitalization his):
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Once again we see the gigantic divide in this country--not between Right and Left, but between people who live and breathe politics and those for whom politics are only an incidental part. You need to look at the world through political glasses to assume that THE key aspect of a natural disaster is the response or lack thereof of the authorities--whether they be local, state or federal. The president doesn't MAKE hurricanes, therefore he will not be blamed FOR hurricanes. Nor do the governor and the mayor.
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ABC also has an emotional breakdown by party: Democrats were far more likely than Republicans to describe themselves as "shocked" (68% to 42%), "angry" (63% to 27%) and "ashamed" (63% to 28%) at the response to Katrina, while Republicans were far more "hopeful" (80% to 50%) and "proud" (43% to 17%). Is there any doubt that those gaps would have been similar if the poll had been conducted after any other major event--or indeed at any other time--since President Bush was elected, other than immediately after 9/11?
Indeed, the experience of 9/11 shows how resistant political trends are to the influence of big events. The attack on America changed a lot, but not the electoral map: Only three states were carried by a different party's presidential candidate in 2004 than in 2000, the smallest such shift since 1924.
This is not to say 9/11 had no effect at the ballot box. At least one politician probably owes his election to the attack on America: New York's Mayor Michael Bloomberg. A beloved but term-limited Rudy Giuliani campaigned heavily for Bloomberg, who beat Mark Green, a deeply unserious man in a suddenly serious time.
Similarly, if Katrina has an electoral effect, it is likely to be local rather than national, especially since President Bush won't be running for re-election. (The Democratic Party and the left seem to have so fully absorbed the Clintonian doctrine of the "permanent campaign" that they've lost sight of the importance of actual elections.)
If Katrina's aftermath was, or is seen to have been, a government failure, state and local officials in the affected states--especially Louisiana--are likely to pay a price. And Katrina may change Louisiana politics for another reason: demographics. The storm forced a mass exodus from New Orleans and vicinity, and many residents surely will resettle out of state. The political effect will depend on whence the emigrants turn out to have come.
In the 2004 election, President Bush carried Louisiana by 281,870 votes, according to data from David Leip's election atlas. A breakdown by parish shows that the two candidates ran almost exactly even in the New Orleans area: John Kerry had a 109,763-vote margin within the city (Orleans Parish), while Bush beat Kerry by a combined 109,546 votes in the suburban parishes of Jefferson, Plaquemines, St. Bernard and St. Tammany.
Obviously if more New Orleans residents than suburbanites move out of state, Louisiana will become more Republican. Less obviously, the state will become more Republican even if flight from the suburbs equals that from New Orleans, since the evenly divided New Orleans region will account for a smaller part of the population than the heavily GOP-leaning rest of the state.
New Orleans's Mayor Ray Nagin is up for re-election in February 2006, Gov. Kathleen Blanco and Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu in November 2007, and Sen. Mary Landrieu in November 2008. All four are Democrats. When they point the finger at the federal government for whatever went wrong in the Katrina response, remember that they are fighting for their political lives.