In New York, people are mean when you ask for directions. In New Hampshire, they’ll act nice but give you the wrong directions on purpose.

In Louisiana, the people are plenty friendly, but no one seems to know where anything is. I noticed this many times, but especially in Baton Rouge last Thursday. I was fruitlessly asking people there at a downtown gas station for help finding an address that turned out to be less than two blocks away.

After traveling the state and speaking with many people, my gut tells me that Bobby Jindal is going to win for governor on Saturday with more than 50 percent of the vote. That is to say, he will avoid a November runoff. Okay, it’s not just my gut, but also the fact that he’s polling at 57 percent in the rural, protestant northern part of the state, a conservative stronghold that he actually lost to Kathleen Blanco in 2003. Conservative Democrats dominate in that part of the state, and so this is proof that he has strong bipartisan support there. At the Jindal event I attended in Bastrop, the Democratic candidate for state Senate was there in the crowd — both he and his Republican opponent are supporting Jindal.

Jindal had better win without a runoff, because Republicans never win statewide runoffs in Louisiana. Yes, there has to be a first, but history holds that Democrats win runoffs, and white Democrats always win runoffs. In the current multi-candidate field, none of the other candidates has generated any real interest in himself, to the point that all poll at or below 10 percent. It’s like an old Soviet election: there is only one candidate on the ballot — Bobby Jindal — and you can either vote for him or against him. Even voters who are dead-set against him are not so sure whom they’ll support. Not all of them will vote. (Interestingly, Jindal’s campaign was going negative on independent candidate John Georges when I left the state.)

A runoff would mean an entire month for one of the other candidates to slam Jindal and build up name recognition. I still think he could win, but the odds become worse once anti-Jindal voters unite around a single candidate.