Striking a Blow for Unity? Race and Economics in the 2010 New Orleans Mayoral Election
Bibliographic record
Abstract
THE 2010 MAYORAL ELECTION IN NEW ORLEANS confounded pundits and analysts alike. Few anticipated, as the election campaign began, that New Orleans was on the brink of electing its first White mayor in a generation or that the eventual winner, Mitch Landrieu, would pass the 50 percent threshold required to win outright at the primary election stage, avoiding a potentially divisive general election runoff. Landrieu declared that in voting overwhelmingly for him, the “people of the city of New Orleans” had decided to “strike a blow for unity.”1 James Carville, with characteristic hyperbole, declared the conjunction of the Saints’ Superbowl win and the mayoral election outcome “the city’s best two days since the Battle of New Orleans in 1815” and proclaimed a “unity of spirit and purpose unlike any time in our history.”2 This apparent unity presents a challenge to our understanding of voting behavior in majority-minority cities. New Orleans voters of both races voted overwhelmingly for Landrieu, with little evidence of racially polarized voting or White strategic accommodation. Landrieu’s 2010 voting coalition was apparently cross-class and cross-racial in nature. Newspaper accounts suggest a substantial disempowering effect on the Black community, producing exceptionally low turnout among Black voters. But this also registers a challenge to our understanding of Black urban voting behavior, undercutting the expectation that intergroup competition, or the availability of an in-group candidate, spurs political participation.3
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".