Claims of Cultural Shift in Deep South Put to Test

It was a throwaway remark. But for those predisposed to detect signs that something historic is happening in the American south, there was a spine-tingling quality to the moment this week in the Louisiana capital when the ex-governor of neighboring Mississippi mounted the steps of the statehouse to voice his support for Barack Obama. Ray Mabus saw himself, he said, as a "typical Obama supporter ... a white guy, former elected official from the deep south." The crowd laughed, as Mabus intended. Nobody even slightly familiar with the archetype of the southern white governor could have missed the joke.

The notion that a black candidate's success among white southerners marks a cultural shift in this deeply conservative region will be put to another important test today, as Louisiana holds its primary elections. Already, though, Obama's Super Tuesday performances in Alabama and especially Georgia - where 43% of white voters backed him, rising to 54% among 18- to 29-year-olds - have prompted commentators to talk in terms of tectonic shifts.

"As one who grew up in Alabama, I never thought I'd live to see this day," wrote the columnist George Curry, remembering a childhood dominated by discrimination. "If I wanted to ride the bus, I had to sit in the back. If I wanted a drink of water, I'd have to get it from a 'colored' fountain."

Wander the bars of central Baton Rouge, or the wealthy neighborhoods to the south of the city, and it becomes clear that it would be easy to exaggerate the transformation. The overwhelming majority of white Louisianans vote Republican, and if Obama wins the primary today, as expected, it will be thanks to the state's African-American population, proportionately the second-largest in the US, who represent almost half the Democratic electorate.

In any case, Louisiana does not straightforwardly reflect the south as a whole: the state has a better history of race relations than elsewhere, despite the racial divides exposed after Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in 2005.

Even so, one change is indisputable. Now that the Democratic nominee will definitely not be a white man, it is the voting intentions of white men - who have never known a president who was not one too - in the spotlight. A demographic group so dominant that they were rarely thought of as a demographic group at all now face the dilemma of voting for someone of the opposite sex or of a different race, and thereby potentially bestowing the presidency.

Smoking outside Boudreaux and Thibodeaux, a cajun music venue in the old centre of Baton Rouge two blocks from the Mississippi, a handful of Democrat-leaning members of the demographic seemed to be enjoying the attention. "I could definitely vote for Obama - I just like the idea of someone new and more my age," said one, who said he was 38.

There was no support for Hillary Clinton. Her husband, a popular figure in Louisiana, was doing his best to change that today, with a tour of the state, a day after Obama spoke to a rapt crowd at Tulane University, New Orleans.

But most white men seemed to be busy deciding between John McCain and Mike Huckabee, and tending towards the former. "I just wish there was someone worth voting for on the Democratic side," said John Stewart, a state employee, heading home from the Roux House restaurant. "We've got to show a forceful face to the world. That's why I just couldn't think about Hillary Clinton or Obama."