David Duke and Black Threat: An Old Hypothesis Revisited

This analysis employs the 1990 U.S. Senate race between David Duke and Senator Bennett Johnston in Louisiana as an opportunity to reexamine the effects of racial threat on the political behavior of whites in the "new" South. Using the parish (county) as the unit of analysis we conduct a regression analysis of the effects of percent black and other control variables on white mobilization for Duke. Results indicate that the threat factor continues to be operative in the South: Despite controls for socioeconomic status, percent black is positively linked to levels of white support for Duke. However, given the current social and economic trends in the region, we conclude that the dynamic of racial threat is no longer capable of playing the central role in southern politics that it once did.