Ed Renwick Quotations

What he?s done is reverse his base. He got 85% of the white vote when he was elected first time. Now, this time, he?s likely to get a small percent of the white vote, but a large percent of the black vote.

Number-one problem, Katrina was the worst disaster in the history of the United States. Number two, the lack of leadership by the president, FEMA (the Federal Emergency Management Agency ), the governor and the mayor.

Nobody knows who they are or where they are or if they're going to vote. Ideally, you'd have to run a multi-city campaign in Baton Rouge, Dallas, Houston, Atlanta.

If it's a close race between second and third place, that number of voters could be very important.

It certainly didn't look like there was any mass movement out of Houston to Lake Charles to vote.

We don't know who the people are who are going to vote and we don't know where they are.

Blacks got used to winning, and whites got used to losing. Now with all of this upheaval, some blacks think that maybe they're not going to win, and some whites think they're going to win.

I've never heard of an election like this where you don't know where the voters are.

A lot of whites thought there would not be another white mayor. And blacks thought there always would be a black mayor. Now they are starting to rethink their position.

This is the most screwed up election I've ever seen.

It's expensive enough to advertise in metropolitan New Orleans, but if you have to add in Baton Rouge, Lafayette, Houston and Atlanta, you might as well run for president. I don't know what the answer is. And, of course, for direct mailing, they don't have their addresses.

It's low. It was a very important election and there was great interest in it, but of course many people aren't here. Turnout among people that were here probably was considerably higher than 36 percent.

It?s so hard to predict because we don?t even know who the voters are, where they are or who they?re going to vote for, so that kind of leaves a few holes to be filled in.

It's not good news for an incumbent to be in a runoff.

The black vote used to be heavily concentrated. Large numbers of blacks that were identifiable and reachable, in public housing. Much of that has been taken down, virtually none of it is being used.

I don't know how you describe him. He was an executive at Cox Communications who got elected easily as mayor. He has certainly been all over the block since. He's hard to pin down.