Originally planning to run for re-election, the incumbent governor, Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, entered the election year with a significant erosion in her level of popular support, due in large part to perceptions of inadequate performance in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

In December 2006, Blanco called a special session of the Louisiana State Legislature which she intended to use to dispense $2.1 billion worth of tax cuts, teacher raises, road projects and other spending programs.

[2] By late 2006 and early 2007, Blanco was facing increasingly heated accusations of delays and incompetence in administering the Road Home Program, a state-run program which Blanco had set up following Katrina in order to distribute federal aid money to Katrina victims for damage to their homes.

[3] By January 2007, the first opinion polls of the campaign showed Blanco trailing expected opponent Bobby Jindal by over 20 percentage points.

Noting that Bush neglected to mention Gulf Coast reconstruction in his 2007 State of the Union Address, Blanco called for a bipartisan Congressional investigation into the conduct of the Bush administration following Katrina, to determine whether partisan politics played a role in the slow response to the storm.

[6][7][8] However, controversy emerged as to whether Breaux would meet the residency requirements to run for governor as he had listed his primary address in Maryland since 2005 and was registered to vote there.

But her announcement came after weeks of growing calls from members of the Louisiana Democratic party for her to step aside and allow a more popular candidate to face Jindal.

[12] An ad campaign by the Louisiana Democratic Party launched in late August, 2007 which attacked Bobby Jindal on the basis of supposed inflammatory remarks made about Protestantism.

The ad drew attention to essays Jindal had written over a decade previously discussing his Catholic faith and conversion.