Bobby Jindal

Study cites racial bias in Bobby Jindal’s defeat

A new study by two political scientists suggests that racial bias was likely a key factor in the defeat of Indian-American Bobby Jindal in the 2003 Louisiana governor’s race, the Associated Press reported. It was unexpected support from the so-called “David Duke vote” that was decisive in Democratic Gov. Kathleen Blanco’s victory, a detailed statistical analysis by two government professors at Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y., suggests, the report said.

White voters who had backed former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke in 1991 and who normally vote Republican, instead turned away from Jindal in the 2003 race, according to the analysis by Richard Skinner and Philip A. Klinkner, the AP report said.

“Duke voters,” particularly in north Louisiana, were enough to provide the new governor her margin, Skinner and Klinkner suggest, the report added. The unusual Louisiana election, which Jindal lost by a narrow margin, provided the political scientists with a laboratory for studying an irreducible racial element in Louisiana politics. In two other recent governor’s races, for example, pitting a conservative white Republican –– Mike Foster –– against liberal black Democrats Cleo Fields and William Jefferson, Foster’s big win could arguably have been attributed to the political conservatism of the Louisiana voter, the report said, quoting the study. But in 2003 Jindal himself ran as a conservative Republican, removing that element from the calculation. Or, as the authors were quoted as saying in the AP report: “It seems that the racial divisions in Louisiana are really about race, and not merely a surrogate for the ideological differences that often separate blacks and whites,” the report quoted the study as saying.



Anti-immigrant group targets Sen. Daschle in TV ads

Sen. Tom Daschle (D-SD)

Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D-SD)is the latest target of an anti-immigration ad campaign sponsored by a coalition of organizations that some members of Congress have linked to racists, according to a news report.

The Coalition for the Future American Worker is running ads in South Dakota, Texas, Utah, South Carolina and other states, telling voters that unemployment rates and health-care costs will continue to increase because of efforts by Congress to expand immigration through guest worker and amnesty programs for illegal immigrants, the report said, adding that some ads featured minorities on street corners and sirens in the background.

The coalition –– named an “anti-immigrant” group by the Southern Poverty Law Centers –– includes groups such as the Federation for American Immigration Reform, the American Immigration Control FOundation and Numbers USA, the report said.

“This ad was not meant to raise serious debate issues about policy –– it was meant to spread fear and a fringe view,” Jesse Fassler, campaign manager for Rep. Martin Frost (D-TX), was quoted as saying. Fassler has asked Dallas TV stations to pull the ads.

Rep. Frost, who is facing a tough re-election, has said at least one group in the coalition has taken money from racist groups in the past, the report said. Like Sen. Daschle, who has supported bills to expand immigration, Rep. Frost is also a subject of the ads.

A spokesman for the coalition, however, said it takes no money from racist groups and said that “Americans of all races are victims of [expanded] immigration.”