EBR turns blue for Obama

• By JEREMY HARPER
• Advocate staff writer
• Published: Nov 6, 2008 - Page: 1A - UPDATED: 12:05 a.m.

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President-elect Barack Obama’s narrow advantage in East Baton Rouge Parish marked the first time a Democratic presidential candidate carried the parish since Bill Clinton in 1996.

Political analysts say the result is probably a reflection of the parish’s increasingly diverse electorate and the Obama campaign’s ability to woo new voters.

But officials with both political parties say it remains to be seen whether East Baton Rouge Parish will become one of Louisiana’s few permanent Democratic strongholds.

Obama won the parish with 99,431 votes, or 50 percent, to Sen. John McCain’s 95,297 votes, or 48 percent. Obama garnered only 40 percent of the vote statewide.

President Bush easily carried East Baton Rouge Parish in 2000 and 2004, and every Republican presidential candidate since 1964 has won the parish, except for the 1996 election.

“We’ve seen Baton Rouge move slightly toward the Democratic Party in the last couple of years,” LSU political analyst Wayne Parent said. “It’s not dramatic, but it’s certainly noticeable.”

One of the driving forces behind the shift, Parent and other analysts say, has been East Baton Rouge Parish’s growing minority population.

East Baton Rouge Parish has seen an increase in its black population since 2000 and a comparable drop in its white population over the same period.

For the past two years, the U.S. Census Bureau has estimated that ethnic minorities constitute a majority of the people living in the parish.

This year a voter registration drive signed up a record number of new voters in the parish — the majority of them black Democrats. And statewide exit polls found that 94 percent of black voters supported Obama in the election.

Troy Blanchard, an LSU sociology professor and demographer who has closely followed the population changes in East Baton Rouge and other parishes, said Obama’s campaign took advantage of the changing local demographics.

“East Baton Rouge Parish is getting increasingly diverse, and this is a candidate that essentially ran on diversity, in part,” Blanchard said.

Parent said he believes there is also a second factor at play: the ability of Obama and the Democratic Party to attract more college-educated, suburban white voters.