The Duke factor

Did the remants of David Duke's white-supremacist voting contingent help elect a white Democrat to the Louisiana Governor's mansion?

It appears they did indeed:

New study suggests bias, ex-Duke voters key to Blanco's 2003 win

Unexpected support from the so-called "David Duke vote" was decisive in Democratic Gov. Kathleen Blanco's victory, the detailed statistical analysis by two government professors at Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y., suggests.

White voters who had backed former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke in 1991, and who normally vote Republican, instead turned away from Jindal in the 2003 race, according to the analysis by Richard Skinner and Philip A. Klinkner. "Duke voters," particularly in north Louisiana, were enough to provide the new governor her margin, Skinner and Klinkner suggest.

However, before conservative partisans go pointing fingers about this case, it's perhaps worth noting that far more often, the racist vote in the South, and Louisiana specifically, usually favors Republicans:

In two other recent governor's races, for example, pitting a conservative white Republican -- Mike Foster -- against liberal black Democrats Cleo Fields and William Jefferson, the white's big win could arguably have been attributed to the political conservatism of the Louisiana voter.

Also worth noting:

The new study appears to confirm the fears of the Republicans who turned away from Jindal. "This analysis provides a solid case that Jindal's ethnicity was the reason a substantial number of voters who normally vote Republican, voted against Jindal," said LSU political scientist Wayne Parent. He called it the "last word" on the role Jindal's ethnic origins played in the 2003 vote.

"They applied sound political science methods to the election results and uncovered some voting patterns that should give us pause," said Lance Hill, executive director of the Southern Institute for Education and Research at Tulane University. "Jindal's Indian ethnicity played a greater role in the outcome of the election than pundits accorded it."

So, how long do you think it will be before we see another minority candidate for higher office in the South being nominated by the GOP?