Voters go to the polls in New Orleans for a historic mayoral election in a city still devastated by Hurricane Katrina. The stakes are high and time is short.
With less than two weeks to go before the start of a new hurricane season, repairs have still not been completed on the protective levee system and thousands of people are living in mobile homes unable to withstand strong winds.
Experts predict a busy hurricane season and residents were warned to prepare for several mass evacuations. Roughly 1,000 people who did not leave died last year when Katrina flooded most of the city on August 29.
Whoever is elected mayor must direct the safe exodus of 221,000 people, a hefty figure but less than half the city's pre-Katrina population. The mayor must also oversee the distribution of billions of dollars in federal reconstruction aid.
The two candidates - embattled incumbent Mayor Ray Nagin and opponent Lieutenant Governor Mitch Landrieu - are more striking for their similarities than for their differences. The election is unique because allegations of political corruption, a staple of Louisiana politics, are refreshingly absent.
"They both have very good reputations for integrity," said Susan Howell, a professor of political science at the University of New Orleans. "The differences between them are pretty subtle."
Landrieu and Nagin have similar views on how to rebuild the city. Both refuse to concede that certain flood-prone neighborhoods should not be rebuilt in order to provide affordable city services: two key recommendations of Mayor Nagin's own Bring New Orleans Back Commission.
"We are philosophically the same," Landrieu said earlier this week.
However, voters in post-Katrina New Orleans are looking for pragmatic leadership, not ideas, analysts say.
"This election is about who can get the job done, get more money and spend that money wisely," professor Howell told AFP.
While Landrieu has a reputation for being a coalition builder, Nagin has been seen to needlessly alienate key government officials.
Nagin has also been criticized for the slow pace of the city's recovery.
Almost nine months after the storm, thousands of abandoned "Katrina cars" have not yet been hauled away.
Entire neighborhoods are virtually abandoned. The relatively few residents who have returned to eastern New Orleans and the Lower Ninth Ward did not get running water until last week.
Only a handful of the city's 16 hospitals are operating at full capacity and the city's restaurants and nightclubs have shorter hours due to a labor shortage.
The notorious violent crime rate is rebounding.
However, Nagin announced a key victory in the days leading up to the election: he secured a 150 million dollar loan that will keep the city out of bankruptcy. He is also trying to capitalize on the age-old American political philosophy that "you can't change horses mid-stream."
Race is a strong but complex undercurrent of Saturday's election.
Landrieu could become the city's first white mayor since his father, Moon Landrieu, left office in 1978 with a pioneering reputation for building biracial coalitions.
Racial politics in Louisiana are more complicated than it may appear to outsiders, said Lance Hill, a professor of history at Tulane University.
"Nagin won more white votes in 2002 than Mitch Landrieu could ever dream of winning," Hill said.
Both candidates are Democrats. However, Nagin is more conservative than many of his black constituents; Landrieu is more liberal than most New Orleans whites.
Nagin first won office by defeating a popular black police chief with a majority of the white vote. But whites deserted Nagin after his infamous declaration last year that New Orleans should be a majority-black "chocolate city." That declaration helped him capture a sizeable portion of the black vote in the April 22 primary election in which he lead a field of 23 candidates.
However, some white Republican conservatives have drifted back to Nagin. They see Landrieu, the scion of a powerful Democratic political family, as an unacceptable liberal who managed to garner more than 20 percent of blacks votes in the April 22 primary election.
The winner takes office May 27; hurricane season starts June 1.
