Were the machines effective in mobilizing the vote for Kathleen Blanco?

Orleans is divided into 17 wards (see map below) made up of 442 precincts of roughly 500 voters each. An interesting phenomenon in this election is that relatively few precincts split nearly equally, instead the vast majority of precincts split heavily for one candidate or the other.

% of votes for Blanco	Number of precincts
<40%	70
41-60	55
61-70	44
71-80	186
>81	187

When 373 of 442 precincts deliver more than 70% of their votes to a particular candidate you might guess that something is working for the organizers. The highly organized 7th, 8th and 9th wards delivered a whopping 79% of their votes to Blanco contirbuting a net 38,000 votes to her margin. (The 50,000 vote swing that 136,000 voters in Orleans delivered to Blanco made up 90% of her 55,000 margin of victory out of 1.4 million votes statewide. Had the machines decided to deliver their votes to Jindal, we would have a different governor today.)

In the heavily African-American 9th Ward which comprised 25% of all the voters Pre-K, organizers were especially effective. Of the 118 precincts in the ward, 73 delivered more than 80% of their votes for Blanco. Wow!

Compare that to the Nagin-Pennington election where the machines were far less active. The 9th ward split 50-50% and only 5 precincts delivered more than 70% of their votes to either candidate. In that election the white Uptown and Lakeview wards were more unequally split. The 4th ward in Lakeview delivered more than 80% of its votes to Nagin  in 20 of its 27 precincts.