We're two days away from early voting and nine days away from Election Day in the New Orleans mayor's race. According to one analyst, the candidates running behind Helena Moreno need their supporters to show up at the polls if they want any chance of forcing a runoff.
"If they can turn out their voters better than Helena can turn out hers, they can win," pollster Ron Faucheux said.
According Faucheux, Royce Duplessis and Oliver Thomas must use the coming days to rally their voters to support them at the ballot box to make the race competitive and possibly force a runoff. Faucheux notes that there's another way Duplessis and Thomas can gain ground and prevent Moreno from winning outright in the primary.
"(They can) figure out how to take votes off of her, and they can do that through positive or negative campaigning," Faucheux said.
Faucheux says Thomas and Duplessis have an outside chance of picking up voters who watched the recent televised candidate debates--either in full or in clips--based on what they say. However, Faucheux says Thomas, Duplessis, and Moreno have all performed well in public forums so far.
"Because of that, there have been no clear losers," Faucheux said, suggesting that this is bad news for Thomas and Duplessis because they need to pull votes away from Moreno to force a runoff. "Polling shows that Helena Moreno is getting 50 percent of the vote or higher at this point, and, of course, if she holds that and that continues, she would win in the first primary."