1986 New Orleans mayoral election

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The New Orleans mayoral election of 1986 resulted in the election of Democrat Sidney Barthelemy as mayor.

Elections in Louisiana—with the exception of U. S. Presidential and Congressional elections—follow a variation of the open primary system. Candidates of any and all parties are listed on one ballot; voters need not limit themselves to the candidates of one party. Unless one candidate takes more than 50 percent of the vote in the first round, a run off election is then held between the top two candidates, who may in fact be members of the same party. In this election, the first round of voting was held on February 1, 1986, and the runoff was held on March 1.

The election campaign began in earnest after voters rejected a charter amendment which would have allowed Dutch Morial to run for a third term. This came after a failed attempt in 1983 to remove the two term limit completely from the charter. The two term limit was placed in the city charter adopted in 1961. Early in the primary campaign, polls showed Barthelemy with a 21 point lead over Jefferson, but Jefferson's endorsement by Morial and the support of Morial's political organization LIFE enabled him to take much of Barthelemy's support in the black community. Later, though, Morial's endorsement hurt Jefferson in the runoff as white voters overwhelmingly chose the opponent of 'the Morial candidate.' Barthelemy spent 1.7 million on the campaign; Jefferson spent 1.3 million.

The election was a milestone in many respects. 1986 marked the first time in which the runoff featured two black candidates. It was also the first time that the majority of the voting population (51%) was African American. The city's white electorate became swing voters; the combination of part of the African American electorate and white voters won Barthelemy the runoff. Unlike his two immediate predecessors Moon Landrieu and Dutch Morial who were first elected by a combination of a minority of white voters and an overwhelming proportion of the black electorate Barthelemy won election against a candidate most blacks preferred by appealing to the vast majority of white voters, a strategy which was successfully duplicated by Ray Nagin against Richard Pennington in the 2002 election.