Helena Moreno and the New Orleans Comeback Everyone Is Watching

NEW ORLEANS — The first crisis of Helena Moreno’s mayoralty came before it officially began.

With New Orleans at risk of missing payroll and the state eyeing receivership, the city’s mayor-elect late last year reached out to a politically ambidextrous friend: trial lawyer Gordon McKernan.

McKernan — better known as “Get Gordon” on his ubiquitous highway billboards and for car-dealer-sized flags towering over his Baton Rouge office — bonded with Moreno over their shared affection for LSU women’s basketball, and he supported her campaign last year. A personal injury lawyer backing a Democrat? No news there.

Except McKernan also happens to have useful friendships with many a Louisiana Republican. That roster of relationships includes Gov. Jeff Landry, who McKernan once joined at a Texas hunting ranch to try to hash out an insurance reform compromise, as well as another powerful conservative figure in Louisiana: State Attorney General Liz Murrill.

“He's very close with Liz Murrill, and when she was the biggest opposition I had, I went to [McKernan], and I was like, ‘Hey, please go talk to her, please, help me out here,’” Moreno recalled in an interview late last month. McKernan’s message to Murrill, Moreno relayed, was: “Give Helena a shot.”

Murrill did. Landry, whose cell phone Moreno first dialed herself, also came around.

It was the 48-year-old mayor-elect’s initial test, and it illuminated the scale of her challenge. Yet the baptism-by-fire also captured her potential to be an effective diplomat, leader and ambassador for a tourism capital whose fate hangs on luring visitors and residents alike.

So when she’s sworn in Monday as mayor, Moreno will be able to run her own city. She’ll then only face a few, small obstacles: the specter of imminent layoffs and floating a bond to pay bills, an outgoing mayor under federal indictment on the tawdriest of crimes and a Saints team about as effective as the Orleans Parish jail guards, who 10 inmates mocked in their “To Easy LOL” escape last May.

You know, the stuff that makes for an easy, if lazy, NOLA caricature.

Despite those hurdles — or perhaps because of them — rarely has there been such heightened anticipation and expectation for a new mayor here, at least not since Mitch Landrieu succeeded Ray Nagin, another felonious mayor, in 2010.

“There’s a great deal of excitement about page-turning in New Orleans,” Marc Morial, the former mayor who now runs the National Urban League, told me. “The atmosphere has been so contentious, and there’s been a sense of rudderlessness the last four years.”

Yet nationally, in an election year dominated by a trailblazing young, Muslim socialist in New York and a pair of East Coast women who won larger-than-expected gubernatorial victories, Moreno’s success was largely overlooked. It shouldn’t be.

A month before election day, the Mexican-born Moreno became New Orleans’s first Latina mayor by claiming 55 percent of the vote in the first round of balloting here, avoiding a run-off by posting a convincing majority over two well-known Black men. Even more striking was the coalition she forged to win in the first round of balloting, harnessing support from prominent Uptown Donald Trump donors, DSA hipsters and, most significantly, Black voters across the city.

“For everyone but a Landrieu, New Orleans elections were a census,” said James Carville, who worked on a city mayoral campaign in the 1970s. “Helena changed that.”

That it took a woman who lived in Mexico until she was eight and then grew up and attended college in Texas to break that black-white racial stratification is, yes, illustrative of how eager New Orleans was to move on from LaToya Cantrell, who was largely checked out even before she faced charges for crimes relating to an alleged affair with her taxpayer-funded bodyguard.

Yet Moreno’s coalition is also a testament to her own sweat equity. Combining name (and face) ID from her years as a local TV anchor and a history as a state representative and leader on the city council, she showed up at everything but the opening of an envelope.

A regular Mass communicant in a Catholic city who’s also fluent in Spanish, the SMU graduate has a reporter’s talent for being at ease in most any setting. Which here means she’s as comfortable with the Uptown swells dining at Clancy’s as she is in the Zulu Aid and Pleasure Club in Mid-City.

And along with her in-person ubiquity, Moreno built a social media presence almost by happenstance. It began when she started recording the modern equivalent of fireside chats: Instagram videos of her Sunday walks, when, in sweats, she’d discuss policy issues while navigating the city’s potholes and cracked sidewalks.

“I just thought, let me do a walk and talk about drainage and explain why drainage is such an issue here,” Moreno said. “It blew up, and so I said maybe next week I’ll do a different issue.”

If it all sounds familiar — the younger mayor breaking through on social media and tapping into near-universal hunger for a fresh start — that’s for good reason.

And as with her counterparts in San Francisco last year and New York this year, Moreno also takes office benefiting from something else many other new mayors can’t fully claim: the plunge in crime preceding them.

Local headlines here have been dominated by how almost every metric showed violent crime down in 2024, most notably a homicide rate that fell to its lowest in a half-century.

“Despite the fact that we have a mayor under indictment, when it comes to public safety and what our city is about, we're an exceptional city,” Moreno told me. “We're actually a much safer city than we've been in many years.”

Being the former journalist that she is, the mayor-to-be grasps the importance of storytelling and narrative. She also knows that for cities, and particularly tourist hubs, perception is everything.

So over the course of our 45-minute conversation in her transition office, perched in a central business district tower overlooking the City Hall she’ll move into this week, Moreno repeatedly emphasized the differences with her predecessor, highlighted the challenges ahead, set expectations and promised a turnaround.

“For your national audience, I think what's important to know is that there's a new day ahead for the city of New Orleans and a whole new direction, which is why I got elected,” she said.

How, I asked, could the city convince some of the thousands of young people desperate to attend Tulane and New Orleans’s other universities to stay here after they graduate?

“We change the vibe,” Moreno said, snapping her fingers, “we change the vibe.” One of her hopes: to make New Orleans not just a live music town but a music industry hub, a la Nashville.

Even before taking office, she’s made clear to city, state and federal officials how hands-on she’ll be once she’s mayor.

Walt Leger, a former state lawmaker who now runs New Orleans’s tourism arm, told me Moreno called him late last year to check in — not about 2026 convention bookings but how the city was looking for the remainder of 2025. She asked how she could be helpful and made clear that the city’s fiscal situation was dire enough that they needed to fulfill every contract leading up to the new year. Tourism and visitors make up about half the revenue that funds city operations.

In our conversation, Leger trumpeted some coming conferences and said others were in the works — calling the city “clean, safe and ready to host” — but he said he’d happily hand the microphone to New Orleans’s new leader, with whom he’s close. “When you have a new mayor who’s a gifted communicator, you’d be foolish not to,” he said of the telegenic Moreno.

Before we get to how Moreno will fare in Baton Rouge and Washington, though, a word about the current occupant of City Hall: Cantrell, New Orleans’s first female mayor, handled Covid adeptly enough to be easily re-elected in 2021. But she clashed fiercely with Moreno and others on city council and, even before being indicted, became a punchline locally for her constant junketeering and insistence on flying first-class.

“The second term was very different from the first term,” as Morial deadpanned.

More damaging, though, was what Cantrell didn’t do — namely, leverage the pandemic as an opportunity to market the city to new residents open to relocation, losing out to other Covid-era destinations such as Austin.

The relationship between the outgoing and incoming mayor has so broken down that they’ve not had an in-depth conversation since Moreno’s October victory.

Cantrell did put in a call to Moreno’s office after the mayor-elect won. But Moreno told me: “I didn't even know what number to call her back on because she and I have not had a conversation since January of 2022.”

She did, though, emphasize her “very substantive conversations” with former Mayors Landrieu and Morial and pointed to her strong relationships with her former colleagues who are still on council.

Moreno insisted that Cantrell’s trial wouldn’t be a distraction but allowed that it would get some media attention (the good news for Moreno is that, unlike with the travails of past mayors, Trump blocks out the sun on most all political news, including the local sort).

“My laser focus is on city operations,” she said, before returning to her expectation-setting. “We have an unbelievably phenomenal, exceptional city that people who live here love, but they are not happy that it's a bit broken right now.”

Moreno’s bigger challenge than the spectacle of a trial — which Cantrell may avert with a plea deal — is how to balance winning state support while also ensuring city autonomy.

San Francisco’s Daniel Lurie and New York’s Zohran Mamdani are Democratic mayors of Democratic cities in Democratic states. But Moreno is a Democrat in a Democratic town who’s about to need significant help from a Republican-controlled state and federal government.

Having been a fixture in public life, in TV and politics, since 2001, she has a host of longstanding relationships with high-profile figures in the state and will need to maximize each of them. Perhaps most important are those in Baton Rouge, where Moreno served for nearly eight years as a legislator.

Her early foray into keeping the city out of receivership won plaudits — Moreno wisely travelled up I-10 to make her pleas on the turf of state Republicans — but her relationship with Landry will go a long way to shaping the success of her term.

One part Cajun wheeler-dealer and one part modern MAGA, Landry has a zest for gator hunts, Fox News hits and landing publicity-generating jobs announcements. He’s also thirsty enough to be in the national conversation that he accepted a part-time envoy post to Greenland so amorphous that even his aides didn’t fully know what it was about when Trump announced it on social media out of the blue last month.

Less well-known, and perhaps most crucial for Moreno, is he’s a red state governor who has an interest in his big, blue city — and not as a foil.

Turning toward City Hall during our interview, Moreno pointed toward a nearby plaza that city leaders have long pleaded with state officials to help renovate.

“We tried Bobby Jindal, we tried with John Bel Edwards — you know who I got it done with in three months when I was on council?” she asked. “Jeff Landry.”

Recalling her time in state politics, Moreno said Landry was not the sort of Republican apt to pick on a city full of liberal whites and Black voters.

“He certainly puts in a lot of attention to New Orleans and focuses on us more than I've seen from other governors, who feel like they have to listen to the legislators who don't like New Orleans,” she said. “We're very different politically, but if we can find some things we can work together on that are going to benefit the city, I'm going to do it.”

Landry sounds equally optimistic.

“We share a commitment to accountability, public safety and strong collaboration between the city and the state,” said the governor of himself and the new mayor. More promising, Landry made a point of saying: “New Orleans is a special city that deserves strong leadership.”

What the governor, and most anybody who’s ever left Louisiana knows, is how much the state relies on its iconic city.

As Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) put it to me: “I want her to do well because when New Orleans does well, Louisiana does well.”

Morial invoked an old story, which he insisted was not apocryphal, of when then-Gov. Buddy Roemer went on a trade mission to Japan and announced to a room of business executives that he was from Louisiana. “They nodded respectfully,” Moral recalled. “Then when Buddy said ‘New Orleans,’ they all stood up smiling.”

If Landry appreciates the city’s value, that doesn’t necessarily mean the governor and mayor will always get along.

There’s law enforcement, for example.

Moreno has been happy to have a state police presence in the city and is open to National Guard members, particularly those who hail from the state and are needed at high-profile moments on the calendar, such as the Sugar Bowl and Mardi Gras, or for storm preparation.

“I'm opposed to just having the National Guard come down just for the National Guard to be here,” she said. “I don't think that's the best use of the National Guard – it ends up actually being more of an impediment to NOPD.”

This is, of course, is very different from what Republicans prefer, most significantly the president himself. In his announcement of the Venezuelan operation this month, Trump digressed into claiming New Orleans crime was “down to almost nothing” in the weeks since the guard arrived (never mind that there’s still crime and that rates were coming down well before he even took office again last year).

It's the federal government that could prove more of a challenge for Moreno than state Republicans.

The recent ICE raids in the city and its suburbs were more jarring than in other localities because it involved migrants, documented and undocumented, who have repeatedly stepped in to help rebuild after a series of storms, dating to Katrina in 2005.

“I asked for very basic things about transparency over who is being arrested and for the agents to not be masked and be in uniforms. And all of these things were really ignored,” Moreno complained. “ I think that that's a really big red flag.”

The truth is, though, she has no choice but to find a way to work with the Trump administration. The city is broke and will need a series of exemptions and extensions from Congress and the White House.

There have been some positive initial signs.

Working with Landry and House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.), Moreno and the Louisiana Republicans were able to convince the Department of Homeland Security to offer a six-month extension on a pot of infrastructure money that comes from FEMA.

As with Landry, Moreno has known Scalise, whose district includes New Orleans, for years, and they have a cordial relationship. The two can and do call each other directly on their cell phone. She said she had not yet spoken with House Speaker Mike Johnson, however, whose district geographically, culturally and spiritually is far closer to Arkansas than it is New Orleans.

Neither of the two Louisiana leaders is known as a pork-barreler, though, much to her chagrin.

“You would think we’d be getting so much more,” Moreno said, recounting how former Sens. John Breaux and Mary Landrieu, both Democrats, were happy to send anything back home from Washington that wasn’t nailed down. “I don't see our delegation doing that. And then also, Mike Johnson, I mean, his alignment is solely to just do what Trump wants.”

One request of the feds the delegation may be happy to fulfill, though, is on law and order: Moreno desperately wants more federal prosecutors to help quickly adjudicate a backlog of cases here.

For all the connections Louisiana Republicans have to Trump, Moreno would have been better situated had Kamala Harris won — and not just because they share a party. The then-city councilor was an early supporter of Harris’s presidential campaign in 2019, and the two have stayed in touch. The former vice-president, in fact, will attend Moreno’s inauguration on Monday, before staying in town to sell her book the following day.

Yet Moreno didn’t hesitate to invoke Trump’s victory as an illustration of how voters reward a focus “on what’s right in front of them” — namely, the cost of living. And whether it’s the president, Mamdani or herself, Moreno said, that was the key to success.

However, there’s something else here — a city traditionally bifurcated by race, and within race by class, that’s also still male-dominated — which helped Mareno transcend those old rules.

“The city of New Orleans embraced me, coming in as a young journalist,” she said. “And I learned that this city — it will love you back if you love it.”