Effects of Oil Price Decline Seen Working Against Bush : GOP Prosperity Message May Fail in Louisiana

NEW IBERIA, La. — As the Republicans gather in New Orleans to talk about the prosperity of the Reagan years, there will be more than a little skepticism among some of the folks gathered around their television sets in Louisiana.

“Republicans are going to be up there looking at us and talking about good times? Man, you got to be kidding,” said Dempsey Meyers, an unemployed draftsman who was catching blue crabs for his supper and getting a serious sunburn recently near this Cajun-country town.

The GOP chose Louisiana in part because the South has been its bastion in recent elections, but this year the Republican presidential ticket faces the very real prospect of losing this state.

“It puzzles me why the Republican Party would even hold a convention in a depressed state when part of the GOP message is going to be prosperity,” said James A. Richardson, director of the Public Administration Institute at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge.

Decline Accelerates

Louisiana is reeling from the decline in oil prices that began in the early years of the Reagan Administration and accelerated after President Reagan’s reelection in 1984.

Unemployment is at 10.4%, one of the highest figures in the South. Once-booming Gulf Coast towns such as Morgan City and Houma are in severe distress. Welders have taken up fishing and shrimping--if they can get the work; pipe-fabrication yards are choked with weeds, and tugboats rarely leave the docks as the shipping industry languishes.

“It’s not just roughnecks we’re talking about,” Richardson said. “It’s geologists, people in engineering, lawyers whose main business is oil and gas rights. It’s companies that built office space they can’t rent but still have to pay off loans at high interest rates.”

The state government is bloated with employees who were hired during the 1970s and early 1980s, when Louisiana was running a huge surplus thanks to the oil boom. Now, the new Democratic governor, Buddy Roemer, will have to call a special session of the Legislature to begin to straighten out a mess that, according to Richardson, includes a taxing system that discourages businesses from locating in the state.

‘Can’t Blame Reagan’

“You can’t blame Reagan for all of this, but then you’ve got to blame somebody,” said Richardson, an economics specialist who is advising Roemer, as are a number of other LSU professors and administrators.

The Democratic presidential and vice presidential nominees, Michael S. Dukakis and Lloyd Bentsen, are convinced that they can pick up Louisiana’s 10 electoral votes in November. Jimmy Carter was the last Democrat to win here, in 1976, and that was by a thin margin.

“Basically, this is a conservative state, one more in tune with the Republican Party nationally,” said Robbie Curry, a top aide to Republican Rep. Bob Livingston, who represents the most affluent part of the state--the mostly white suburbs of New Orleans.

Curry insists that the Republicans will prevail again, although he concedes that it will be close.

Jim Carvin, a Louisiana pollster whose clients are mainly Democrats, agrees that it will be close, but he sees it tipping to the Democrats.

Has Populist Tradition

“We are a depressed state economically, and in Louisiana, with its Populist tradition, that favors a Democrat,” Carvin said.

Political professionals like to break down a state by congressional districts to get a handle on how the whole state will go in a presidential race. There are eight districts in Louisiana, and interviews with a number of professionals indicate that right now, Livingston’s--the 1st District--is the only one Bush can definitely count on.

That makes it even at this point, since the heavily black and Democratic 2nd District, which includes the city of New Orleans, is expected to go for Dukakis.

The 4th Congressional District, which includes Shreveport in the northwestern part of the state, probably leans toward Bush, as does the 5th District, in the northeastern, most rural part of the state.

Both these areas have large populations of white Protestant voters whose socially conservative views have sent them into the Republican camp during presidential elections.

More Liberal Views

In the 3rd and 7th districts, by contrast, the Roman Catholic Cajuns--descendants of 18th-Century French-Canadian pioneers--lean toward more liberal social views and have been more friendly to Democratic presidential candidates.

These two areas have also been among the hardest hit by the oil bust and will be the most skeptical when Bush talks about the sustained economic growth under the Reagan Administration.

“I haven’t made up my mind, but somehow I find it hard to believe anything Bush says ever since the Iran-Contra thing,” said Pat Cannon, who escorts trucks carrying wide loads on Louisiana highways. “He never has told us what he knew and what he advised the President.” Cannon was having a platter of tasty crawfish with two friends in Henderson, a tiny town in the heart of Cajun country on Bayou Amy.

“I think it’s going to be the women who have a rude surprise for the Republicans in Louisiana,” said Cannon’s friend, Gina Tauzin. “Ever since things went bad, you’ve had wives having to go to work as waitresses and galley cooks to help ends meet.”

Two Tossup Districts

In addition to the two New Orleans congressional districts, the two conservative ones up north and the two more liberal ones in Cajun country, there is the 6th District around the state capital of Baton Rouge and the 8th District in the center of the state.

These will be battlegrounds for Bush and Dukakis in the fall and could well tip the state. Both are rated now as tossups.

Curry argues that the tendency of conservative, prosperous voters around Baton Rouge to vote for Republican presidential candidates will push the 6th to Bush.

The 8th has been more faithful to the Democrats than the rest of the state, and its population is 40% black, which should favor Dukakis.

Blacks Could Be Factor

Louisiana has one of the largest black populations of any state--29%--and Richardson thinks that could be a big factor in the Democrats’ favor, “if they can turn out the black vote. Many of these people are very poor. They don’t have cars. Getting them to the polls is an effort.”

Richardson added: “The main thing that I think favors the Democrats in this presidential election (in Louisiana) is that the state’s Democratic officials are getting behind the ticket. They didn’t do that for Mondale in ‘84, and it was hard to do it for Carter in ’80. Adding Bentsen helped a lot to reassure everybody about Dukakis.”