Is Mitch still a kingmaker?

Here is Grace musing over whether Mitch will endorse a mayoral candidate and, I guess, when Cedric Richmond will endorse Charbonnet in the mayor's race. (He's already working on her behalf.) She throws in a mention of the governor's endorsement of Jay Banks in the District B race but that's a separate matter. Edwards isn't interested in being a kingmaker in New Orleans. Mitch and Cedric are, though.  And the test of their relative strength is an interesting sidebar to this election.

Mitch and Cedric command different power bases. But they also overlap and sometimes complement one another so you don't often see a direct contest between the two of them. This may become a bit of one if Mitch decides to endorse LaToya.  I don't think he's going to do that, though.  I'm sure Mitch likes Cantrell just fine, but it's not clear whether an explicit endorsement from him helps anybody right now.

The game right now is all about finessing the white vote.  In New Orleans that means two things. First, candidates appealing to younger more liberalish white voters should present as ostensibly progressive in a banal, "good government" "business friendly" sense of the word. Say "technology" and "innovation" a lot regardless of whether you actually mean anything by those words.  This sort of thing is Landrieu's bread and butter but there's a problem.  Because candidates also have to tell white voters they are "tough on crime."  And because the New Orleans white vote is shot through with latent, intractable racism, Mitch's role in helping take down Confederate monuments is somehow imagined to have caused the crime rate to worsen.  So if "Monuments Not Murders" Mitch openly gets on board with a mayoral candidate, it's not obvious how that might play.

Mitch has support with black voters too, of course. But given that Cedric Richmond is going to be able to deliver a significant portion of that to Charbonnet, Landrieu's value as a kingmaker should be his ability to deliver white voters. But it's not clear how he's going to do that without a fair amount of subtlety.