Blood and Politics (48 page)

After the convention the campaign pushed hard toward the primary in October. Duke’s speeches at rallies and political advertisements remained focused almost exclusively on the same theme that had informed his public politics since his years in the Klan: white majority dispossession. His rhetoric was more cleverly embroidered than ever before, but it was no less pointed. Typically, Duke began his stump speeches by attacking the media. It was a predictable shtick built on the decades he had recirculated William Pierce’s propaganda pamphlet with a cartoon of Uncle Sam chained by a Star of David to a television. From his first moments in a swastika through to his candidacy as a so-called Populist, Duke had claimed explicitly that it was “the Jews” who owned the nation’s media. Pointing at the Jews was the line around which his worldview rotated. During the state legislative race, he had coded the point by emphasizing that
The Times-Picayune
(New Orleans) was “New York owned” (“New York” often serving as a stand-in for “Jews”). But in the conjoined candidacies that followed, Duke needed a campaign package more than an ideological device. He emphasized the New York angle less and focused on the media simply as an oppressive elite. By constantly referring to his years as a Klan leader, he argued, the media unfairly attacked him—and by extension all those around him. Even if his past was “controversial,” he would claim that he was a victim of calumny, just as whites as a people were also victims. By the same reasoning, minorities pressing for affirmative action were the “real racists.” And he would assert, with some justification, that he was simply saying out loud and in public the same things that his audience said quietly and at home. This supposedly shared victimization and vocalization established a connection between Duke and his constituents. At the same time, the constant reference to his “controversial” past was offered as proof that he was a strong leader whose views were honestly held.
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His preaching against the corrupting influence of “special interest” political contributions added cross stitches to his central message but
did not change it. Duke was concerned less with “good government” reform than with the need to generate campaign contributions and volunteers. He pledged never to accept any PAC funds (but of course he was never offered any). So his talk about big-money funds was usually a prelude to passing the bucket. Significantly, when he talked about jobs and the economy, Duke was unusually inarticulate. (During one televised debate a reporter asked him to name Louisiana’s largest employers. He could not do it.
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) Although the state was then suffering from a decline in the oil industry, he rarely mentioned the multinationals. When he tried to explain his position on jobs and deindustrialization, the audience would fall politely quiet and remain virtually still while he sputtered on about “smaller government” and “taxes.” (His direct mail to voters often hit at taxes as well.) If Duke’s vote totals had depended just on economic resentments, he would never have threatened any of the mainstream candidates. Only after he had started attacking the use of taxes for school busing and for welfare did he generate a visible response. And that was when David Duke hit his stride. He could talk for hours about race issues, and the growing crowds would respond viscerally.

The number one problem facing the country, in every media ad and every speech, was the “growing welfare underclass.” It was this “underclass” that cost so much in taxes and was responsible for crime and drugs (drug addiction was “worse than slavery”). In a quick rhetorical phrase, the same underclass was responsible for the decline in academic performance in public schools because of busing “for integration.” The underclass also lowered standards in the economy and universities through the “massive” program of racial discrimination against whites known as affirmative action. In sum, it was this underclass that most threatened the “Christian” and “European” majority. There was almost nothing they couldn’t be blamed for (except maybe controlling the media). And if the time permitted in Duke’s Fidel Castro–length speeches, he would get to the bottom line: it wasn’t the economic cost of the underclass that most worried the once-and-future biological determinist. It was the class’s reproductive potential. Simply put, the population growth of black people threatened the majority status of white people. During the Senate and governor’s race he left explicit mention of the Jews off the platform. Otherwise the message remained essentially the same as when Duke had chanted “white power” at Klan rallies ten years before.

From virtually the beginning of the dual campaigns, however, it had mattered less to voters what package Duke used to dress his message.
His core ideas were a known item. The battle was over whether or not Duke the person was considered a socially acceptable candidate. As the Tulane political scientist Douglas Rose noted about the Senate race, the crucial contest “may have been the one for acceptability, not the one for support.”
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To gain further acceptance, Duke attempted a gambit in the final months of the governor’s race that ultimately did him more harm than good. After two decades as a secularist, Duke decided it would be advantageous to portray himself as a born-again evangelical Christian. Although he had often risen to defend the “Christian” nature of Western Civilization, and his rallies often opened with some kind of prayerful invocation, he was not a religious man. (Christian Identity had never caught his fancy.) As a result of this patently transparent ploy, hard-core national socialists who had been supporting his campaign pilloried Duke for opportunism. And several important evangelicals publicly doubted this professed faith.
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Further, as reporters stopped treating him as a three-headed monster (to be looked at but not touched), they asked questions that easily pierced his born-again veil.

Nevertheless, on October 19, 1991—just one year after the Senate race—Duke upset all expectations and forced himself into a runoff with Democrat Edwin Edwards. In a field of twelve, the Republicans’ official nominee, Congressman Clyde Holloway, pulled just over 5 percent of the vote. The sitting governor, Buddy Roemer, once so smug and confident, polled 27 percent. David Duke easily topped both with 32 percent. Only the disgraced Democrat from Acadiana, Edwin Edwards, beat Duke on primary night—but by a scant two points. As the entire country looked on, the final weeks turned into a contest between Duke’s thinly disguised brownshirt racism and Edwards’s corruption-soaked patronage politics. Signs sprouted in New Orleans’s French Quarter and on the back bayous,
VOTE FOR THE CROOK, IT’S IMPORTANT
. Split by race, ideology, and ethnic personality, Louisianans voted in record numbers. With a remarkable 80 percent turnout, Edwards walked away in the final election, 61 percent of the vote to Duke’s 39 percent. Buried inside those seemingly lopsided numbers were questions that needed to be asked. The answers would have meanings long after David Duke stepped down from his election night platform in Baton Rouge.

Who were the six hundred thousand voters Duke had attracted in the 1990 Senate race and the seven hundred thousand plus he won over in the 1991 governor’s contest? Why did they punch the button for a man widely reviled for his days as a Klansman, proved to still hold the tenets
of his faith in scientific racism, and denounced by local business interests worried that his election would engender a tourist boycott? Who voted for Duke, and why? Duke, the white supremacist, was a known item. The core staff, volunteers, and contributors who made up his campaign machinery were also relatively identifiable. But the most enigmatic questions remained.

Some observers chose not even to ask about this white majority Duke had won, perhaps (mistakenly) believing that ignoring these voters would make them go away. Typical in that regard, William F. Buckley, Jr., declaimed in
National Review
: “What happened, we now know, was not a close race but a total repudiation of a reptilian creature.”
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If Duke had in fact been repudiated in the governor’s race, it had not been by a majority of whites, and Buckley was not known for setting his compass by black voters. Another
National Review
column claimed that Duke was for the most part a symbol of the electorate’s dissatisfaction. “The less viable Duke is as a nominee, the more attractive he will be as a protest vehicle.”
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When such a view was ventured as an explanation for voter behavior, it was only undermined by the facts. In the future, as Duke became “less viable” as a candidate and thereby potentially a greater “protest” candidate, he received qualitatively much smaller vote totals. A similar view had been advanced by Vice President Dan Quayle after the Senate race. Duke voters were angry at the federal government and wasteful bureaucracy, he said. But
National Review
and conservative politicians were not alone in the attempt to omit race and racism from explicit consideration.

Those at the center of the established terrain did the same. One consensus view held that Duke’s vote was an anomaly peculiar to the state’s “hot and spicy” political tradition. “Duke’s message is more economic than Southern,” a national television news broadcast explained during the Senate race. “It feeds on resentment in a state where the oil business is still slumping and unemployment is over six percent.” By this typical account, the Bayou State was virtually a banana republic. “America’s Third World: that’s what Louisiana almost is,”
National Journal
’s 1992 edition of
The Almanac of American Politics
averred.
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A standard reference work akin to the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
in status, the
Almanac
did ask the most important question: “Why did such an anomaly [the anomaly being Duke] get so many votes?” But its answer was most telling by what was missing. “Duke seems to have been the right person in the right place, a tax opponent in a time of economic distress, a plausible speaker in the state with a great weakness for demagogues and a carelessness about civil liberties, the only prominent opponent in an anti-incumbent year of an incumbent who had not been working the
state intensively for years.”
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Unless racism comes under the umbrella of “a carelessness about civil liberties,” and it doesn’t, the
Almanac
did not mention race as a factor.

The notion that the Duke vote rested, in the final analysis, on financial distress, the downturn in Louisiana’s oil industry, or some other proximate economic cause echoed across the political center and reechoed on the left. One West Coast sociologist, an astute critic of conservative movements such as the Christian right, ventured the idea that Duke’s supporters “were downwardly mobile not so much as a status group but as an economic class. Duke’s electoral success is better explained as the result of voters’ declining economic conditions.”
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It was a sentiment repeated in left-wing forums from Cambridge to Berkeley.

Such a conclusion was certainly reasonable. As we have seen, it had been depression-like conditions in the Farm Belt just a few years before that had opened the way to a steady stream of far right racists and anti-Semites in the rural Midwest. They had plied farmers with forests of propaganda that blamed Jews directly for high interest costs and low commodity prices. The constant refrain that eight Jewish families “owned” the Federal Reserve Bank had spoken directly, even if falsely, to the concerns of bankrupt farmers. And the solutions offered by the radical right, although ultimately specious, at least offered a glimmer of a chance that a family’s way of life could remain intact. But Duke didn’t offer any plans to create new jobs. He didn’t speak out in favor of raising the minimum wage or supporting trade unions. And when discussion turned to the oil industry during the governor’s race, Duke claimed to be an “ecologist,” a term usually understood to mean he was an opponent of an expanded oil industry.
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As the votes were tallied in the governor’s race, few signs showed that “economic distress” had mattered.

In fact, overnight surveys showed that David Duke’s voters came from a broad swath of the white working and middle classes, regardless of whether or not they actually experienced declining economic conditions. A quick look at the numbers reveals a visible class line in the Duke vote, but no real correspondence to an experience of distress. While he took 55 percent of the total white vote, Duke’s pull rate was slightly higher at 60 percent among those with middle-class family incomes ranging from thirty thousand to fifty thousand dollars a year. Among the working poor, those with family incomes between fifteen and thirty thousand, it was higher still at 63 percent.
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The surveys also asked Duke’s voters about their economic condition. Those who reported that their economic condition had “stayed the same” voted for Duke at marginally higher rates than those who reported that they were “worse off”: 60 percent for the “sames,” 58 percent for
the “worses.” Only those who reported that they were “better off” voted at levels below the white norm, but at 47 percent it was not much below that norm. In fact, that last number is a stinger. Almost half the white people who said their economic situation had improved voted for the former Kluxer.
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If economic distress did not predict much about Duke’s voters, what did? Education told a bit. Among whites with a high school diploma or less, he took 68 percent of the vote; of those with at least some college, he won 48 percent. A gender gap showed also. Among all voters (white and black), he took 41 percent of men and 37 percent of women. The measurable gap in gender would have been greater if just white voters had been counted. The religious identification of white voters revealed a bit more, as he took 69 percent of those calling themselves Christian born-again fundamentalists. A composite of the most likely Duke voter thus emerged: a financially stable, middle-class white male, with a high school education and a born-again Christianity. Conversely, black people from all classes and whites with college educations earning above seventy-five thousand dollars a year were most likely to vote against Duke.
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