New Orleans May Pick First White Mayor in Decades

April 21, 2006 — -- In New Orleans, the political pundits are convinced this city is about to elect its first white mayor in three decades.

When voters head to the polls Saturday they'll have 20 white candidates to choose from. The candidates say they decided to run after Mayor Ray Nagin declared New Orleans would recover from Hurricane Katrina and its demographics would again reflect a mostly black city.

But that hasn't happened.

Since the hurricane, the majority of the residents who've returned to New Orleans are white, and many say they're fed up with the mayor.

One woman told ABC News, "I think some of his comments and remarks, you know, were offensive to a lot of people."

Today most of the city's African-American voters who would typically make up a large voting block remain spread across the country and have to vote by absentee ballot. The ballots are due in New Orleans tomorrow, but just 8,072 of the 16,610 ballots requested have been returned in the mail.

"Blacks got used to winning, and whites got used to losing," said Ed Renwick of Loyola University. "Now with all of this upheaval, some blacks think that maybe they're not going to win, and some whites think they're going to win."

Candidate Primer

As New Orleans looks to elect its first mayor since the hurricane devastated the region, the front-runner is Lt Gov. Mitch Landrieu.

He's the brother of Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., and the son of New Orelans' last white mayor. He says the election has become terribly divisive, but he's not encouraging white residents to vote for him simply to put a white man back in city hall.

"If you're voting for me for that reason, vote for somebody else," Landrieu said.

Another candidate, Ron Forman, runs the Audobon Zoo in New Orleans and is very popular among the city's wealthiest white voters who were able to move back into their homes last year.

Mayor Nagin says he's counting on black voters to come home for the election. This week civil rights groups and black churches began providing free bus rides for early voting.

"It looks as though people are making the extra effort to get on buses to get here to vote," Nagin said.

But even among black New Orleans residents, his handling of Hurricane Katrina may prove a real liability.