In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the WP’s Dan Froomkin wrote (“Who’s in Charge? Karl Rove!”, 15 Sep ’05):
Rove’s leadership role suggests quite strikingly that any and all White House decisions and pronouncements regarding the recovery from the storm are being made with their political consequences as the primary consideration. More specifically: With an eye toward increasing the likelihood of Republican political victories in the future, pursuing long-cherished conservative goals, and bolstering Bush’s image.
Digby elaborated (“Katrina: Slow as Molasses,” 25 Aug ’07):
Louisiana has been a swing state for some time, in which Democrats were dependent on the black majority in the state’s largest city to win. It was not lost on Rove that all of those poor New Orleans African Americans—and their children—being dispersed throughout the nation could only be good for Republicans. As of now, only about 66% have returned, not enough to keep the state swinging (in more ways than one.) It looks very likely that the state will have a Republican Governor and two Republican Senators in 2008. Experts in the area estimate that the congressional delegation advantage for Republicans will be five to one by 2012. There is little doubt that the Katrina diaspora finally turned the state blood red.
Let’s see.
Below is a map from the NYT (5 Nov ’08) showing “Differences between support for the major parties between 2008” and 2004 (“Voting shifts” option), where the darkest blue indicates +~15% for Dems and the darkest red indicates +~15% for the GOP:
Rove’s strategy according to Froomkin’s and Digby’s analysis certainly seems like it could be correct. Below is a detail of Louisiana: at left Katrina damage (from the State Library of Louisiana), at right party shifts (+19% GOP):
There are notable differences. However, “evacuees” (basically, refugees who haven’t [1] crossed a national border and [2] received UNHCR imprimatur) don’t just disappear, they move—and are often resented for disrupting life in the areas where they resettle.
So where did Katrina refugees go? Below is a map of the “Hurricane Katrina Diaspora” (according to gongol.com) as of 1 Sep ’05 (left) and 3 Sep ’05 (right):
Southern detail of NYT vote-shift map:
Again, there are notable differences (for example, the blue shifts in Missouri, southern Illinois, and southern Indiana). But it’s possible—strictly in local, “tactical” terms—that the Bush administration’s sustained negligence in the wake of Katrina paid off twice for the GOP: first, by driving Dem-leaning black populations out of southern Louisiana, and second, by fostering a racist backlash in the surrounding region most heavily affected by Katrina evacuees’ migrations and resettlements. Of course, the big picture is that the administration’s inept handling of Katrina played a decisive role in the collapse of public support for the administration. But if there is in fact a correlation between evacuees’ migration and the GOP’s regional electoral gains, some of the reddest areas of the South in yesterday’s election may be less resistant to the overall bluing of the nation than generic analyses (e.g., “Bible Belt”) would suggest—and, instead, that they might have voted based in part on a racially tinged experience of social and economic dislocation that the rest of the nation never experienced so directly.
See also: Wikipedia, “Political effects of Hurricane Katrina: Political effects of population displacement”; fivethirtyeight.com, “Road to 270: Louisiana” (14 Oct ’08); and Mike Davis, “Who Is Killing New Orleans?”, The Nation (23 Mar ’06).
