Beyond Racial Threat: Failure of an Old Hypothesis in the New South

Former Ku Klux Klansman David Duke ran three statewide campaigns in Louisiana. This note presents a GLS analysis of his voting support. It suggests that whites living in racially heterogeneous parishes were no more likely to support Duke than those in less-diverse locales, contrary to the “racial threat hypothesis.” Suburban whites were particularly likely to back Duke. Giles and Buckner (1993) present contrary results because their analysis contained measurement error and omitted variable bias, aggregated data for urban areas inappropriately, and used OLS on grouped data.