Hillary will need to win over the black voters that Mary Landrieu couldn't

But the difficulty Landrieu faced in her own race this year demonstrates how Clinton’s attempts to appeal to the black community can backfire on her candidacy. The senator earned an incredibly high share of Louisiana’s black vote on Election Day last month, according to exit polls. Ninety-four percent of blacks voted for her—higher even than what Obama received in his last election.

What hurt Landrieu was her performance among white voters—just 18 percent of them backed her. And that’s not a coincidence, some of the state’s political experts say, because the diligent effort she made to attract African-Americans had an equal reaction of pushing away white voters.
Landrieu backed expanding background checks on some gun sales and refused to denounce her vote for Obamacare—ostensibly because doing so would harm her support within the black community. And before the election, she said racism contributed to Obama’s unpopularity in the state.

“If you do what Mary Landrieu did and you make so much of your campaign about turning out the black vote, then you get in big trouble with the white vote,” said Elliott Stonecipher, a nonpartisan political analyst in Louisiana. “And that is exactly what happened here.”