To explore the relationship between political sophistication and attributions of responsibility in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, we rely on an original statewide survey of Louisiana residents that we conducted in May and June of 2006 in cooperation with the Survey Research Center of Louisiana State University.7 We employed a Waksberg-Mitofsky (a.k.a. ‘‘random digit dialing’’) sampling design to select respondent households, and ended up with 557 completed surveys. In an attempt to mitigate sampling biases, we used the ‘‘birthday method,’’ asking to speak to the registered voter in the household who had most recently celebrated a birthday. Despite this precaution, however, our sample produced the almost inevitable under-representation of males, especially black males. Thus, all data analyses reported here employ an inverse probability weighting by race and gender to make our sample conform to the Census Bureau’s post-Katrina estimate of the Louisiana population.8