The last time I took a stab at handicapping this thing, I did so in a bunch of comments over at WCBF. And that was before Leslie Jacobs dropped out. At the time, we were speculating about what Mitch Landrieu's entry did to the race at that point. You can read the rest of the thread at the link above, but here's the part with the math in it.
Let's just look at the white vote for a second. Here are the top white vote getters from the 2006 primary (Of course, a number of white voters will vote for a black candidate. Perry and, I think surprisingly for some Murray, are banking on it. I'll try and factor for that later. But what I'm breaking down here are votes from 2006 FOR white candidates. It's imperfect terminology I guess. So be it.) :
Landrieu: 31,499
Forman: 18,734
Couhig: 10,287
Boulet: 2,367
Wilson: 772
Let's assume for now that Jacobs is in. If she's really optimistic right now she's looking at [Most of Boulet] + [something like 1/4 or maybe a bit more of Forman] + [a percentage of Mitch which has suddenly slipped from 1/2 to maybe 1/8 optimistically]
Couhig will probably get most of his 2006 vote but will lose some percentage of that to Georges. He will get most or all of Wilson.
Mitch and Georges are basically fighting for what's left which is the part of Forman + Mitch '06 that Jacobs leaves on the table.
Just speculating, since I have no idea what the polling looks like, I'll say that Georges (if he's optimistic) is good for [about 1/2 of Forman] + [1/4 of Mitch '06] (I could have that apportionment exactly backwards. We're talking about a very similar pool of voters here)
This leaves Mitch with [1/4 Forman + 5/8 Mitch '06]
So here I've rounded the above values down to the nearest thousand (or hundred in the case of Wilson) and if we take into account the fact that I am bleary eyed and likely to have made a stupid mistake (not to mention that this whole premise comes directly from my ass) we get this approximate result.
Mitch: 23,875
Georges: 16,750
Jacobs: 10,675
Couhig: 9,700
Last time around, Mitch ran second with 31,499 votes. Don't know if 23,000 is enough to get him in the runoff but it sure as shit screws Georges and Jacobs. Maybe someone should try swearing at their dog. See if that helps.
Now since then, Jacobs has dropped out. We had given her 2000 votes from the Boulet people, 4800 from the Forman people and 3875 from the Mitch '06 people. Let's say Mitch gets all of her Boulet vote and all of her Mitch vote. That's 2000 + 3875 = 5875 voters we had pegged for Jacobs who I think are solidly Mitch. The 4800 people who voted for Forman last time when they could have voted for Landrieu probably still don't want to vote for Mitch if they can help it. John Georges isn't exactly Ron Forman but he's a close enough analog to eat up most of that chunk of folks. I'll give him 4500. So here's the white voter scorecard after Jacobs drops out.
Mitch: 23,875 + 6175 = 30,050
Georges: 16,750 + 4500 = 21,250
Couhig: 9,700
Despite the fact that it looks like I'm pulling this out of thin air, I'm pretty confident that I've got a good bead on what the people who voted for white candidates in the 2006 primary are going to do and that it looks something like what I've got up there.
The model is less certain when we look at what people who voted for black candidates in 2006 might do this time around for a couple of reasons. First of all, in 2006 one of the black candidates was the incumbent who everyone expected to run first no matter what. Secondly, the circumstances resulting from the post-flood population displacement injected race into the election in an urgent and unique way. And while race is still an important factor in 2010, it probably won't affect the results in exactly the same way it did in 2006.
So I'm out on a thinner limb with this but let's do some numbers anyway.
Here were your top black candidates in 2006.
Nagin: 41,489
Tom Watson: 1,264
Kimberly Butler: 793
That is a massive number of people who voted for black candidates last time around who, if they want to vote for a black candidate this year, will have to choose from among three fairly low profile candidates. I think Troy Henry is the best positioned candidate to pick up support here. I've said before I don't think James Perry is a serious candidate. But there are plenty of votes to pass around out of this pie so let's give him 1500. (Perry's actual base is white voters who supported either Boulet or Landrieu in 2006 but they're probably all voting for Mitch now.) Then we'll say some of this stuff will go to Landrieu and Georges; probably about 8-10 percent of it and probably 3/4 of that to Landrieu. I'll do the math for you. That's roughly 3150 for Mitch, 1050 for Georges. So that's 37,846 that I think Henry takes a much larger share of than does Ramsey. But Let's split that 80-20.
Again, this is an extremely flawed model and I've made a ton of arbitrary decisions here. But, remember, I am not a professional poll watcher or analyst or anything. I'm just some dude who likes to guess at stuff. And so given all of this, here's what I've got on my scorecard as of tonight.
Landrieu: 33,200
Henry: 30,276
Georges: 22,300
Couhig: 9,700
Ramsey: 7569
Perry: 1500
Do what you want with that. I'll go back to writing about football now.
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