Runoff Elections

C. Ray Nagin will have to maintain the support of black voters, regain the trust of whites and come up with specific ideas for rebuilding New Orleans if he wants to stay in the mayor's office, analysts here said Sunday. Nagin, who won 38% of the 108,000 ballots cast in Saturday's mayoral election, nevertheless is not considered the favorite in his May 20 runoff with Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu, who garnered 29% of the vote.

The third-place finisher in the New Orleans mayoral race endorsed the runner-up, Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu, over Mayor C. Ray Nagin in next month's runoff election. Ron Forman, head of the organization that runs the city's zoo and aquarium, said Landrieu had his "full support" in the contest to decide who should lead the city in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Landrieu said he was pleased to get Forman's endorsement. The city "needs all of its people to come together.

Rep. Cynthia A. McKinney, the Georgia Democrat renowned for her strident rhetoric as well as her recent scuffle with a Capitol Police officer, lost a runoff election Tuesday. McKinney, 51, won 41% of the vote, trailing far behind challenger Hank Johnson, a moderate and soft-spoken attorney, in the Democratic runoff in Georgia's 4th Congressional District.

President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva faces a tough runoff election this month after his stunning fall from prohibitive favorite to co-survivor in Sunday's vote. The charismatic Lula, whose cries of "I was betrayed!" seemed to carry him relatively unscathed through sundry other corruption cases, could not overcome a "dirty tricks" scandal that broke two weeks before the election and left many Brazilians appalled.

A chastened President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva won a landslide victory Sunday, gaining a second term as leader of Latin America's largest nation. With 99% of the ballots counted, official tallies showed the leftist incumbent with 61% of the vote, compared with 39% for his challenger, former Sao Paulo Gov. Geraldo Alckmin of the centrist Brazilian Social Democracy Party.

Congo's president is leading his rival in a tense runoff election, according to the first returns released by the country's electoral commission. The results, based on fewer than 1 million ballots from the nation's 25 million registered voters, show President Joseph Kabila with about 68.5% of the vote, compared with 31.5% for former rebel leader and current Vice President Jean-Pierre Bemba.

Ecuador's Rafael Correa, a leftist vowing to rein in political elites, won Sunday's presidential runoff with 57% of the votes after most ballot boxes were tallied, a top election official said. Opponent Alvaro Noboa has refused to accept defeat and says he might challenge the election with a review of the ballots.

One of the nation's last unresolved House races will be decided Tuesday when seven-term Republican Rep. Henry Bonilla faces former congressman Ciro Rodriguez in an unusual runoff in a newly redrawn district. In a special election Nov. 7, a well-financed Bonilla won 49% of the vote, just shy of the majority he needed to win outright. Rodriguez, 59, who represented a neighboring district in the House from 1997 to 2005, finished second with about 20% of the vote.

Mayor James K. Hahn and Councilman Antonio Villaraigosa on Monday launched into their first full week of campaigning for the mayoral runoff by trying to one up each other on education issues. Both campaigns maneuvered to present their candidates as champions of the city's beleaguered public school system, but offered few specifics on how to improve it.

Los Angeles Mayor James K. Hahn has raised significantly less money for the mayoral runoff campaign than rival Antonio Villaraigosa in the weeks since the March 8 election. Hahn's campaign reported Thursday that the incumbent raised $407,795 through last Saturday, less than two-thirds of what his opponent collected during that period. Villaraigosa, a city councilman and former speaker of the state Assembly, reported Wednesday to the City Ethics Commission that he had raised $653,255.