Whistling Past Dixie

Simon & Schuster

Chapter One

[A]nyone who believes Democrats can consistently win the White House without puncturing the Republican dominance across the South is just whistling Dixie. - Los Angeles Times columnist Ronald Brownstein For Democrats, the South has become the Sahara of the Electoral College. Give it up. - Slate columnist Timothy Noah

The Democrats are in disarray. National politicians are unsure what to say about everything from gay marriage to late-term abortion, and what to do about everything from tax rates to Iraq. The party is losing a manufactured culture war and watching its labor union base lose a very real manufacturing war. Rank-and-file Democrats from coast to coast are increasingly frustrated with the party's lack of a coherent message, and they are not alone: Fewer than half of all Americans agree that Democrats "know what they stand for." In presidential elections especially, the party somehow seems to self-destruct, picking bad candidates who run poor campaigns based on myopic advice from overpaid consultants.

Desperate and fearful of being relegated to minority status for decades, some Democrats reflexively think back to the halcyon days ofparty dominance and conclude that the only solution is for the party to somehow restore its lost glory in the South - the most solidly Democratic region since the end of the Civil War, the backbone of the New Deal, and home to the party's three most recent presidents. To become a national majority party again, they insist, the Democrats must compete in Dixie. Strategists Steve Jarding and Dave "Mudcat" Saunders, both southern Democrats, articulate this view most forcefully in their 2006 book, Foxes in the Henhouse. "Democrats cannot afford to keep writing off the South," they write. "If you don't start getting a message there, if you don't start listening to people there, if you don't start spending time, energy and money there, you can say good-bye to any notion of realigning political power and instead say hello to the numbing reality that you are relegating yourself to the status of a permanent minority party."

The truth is that the geographic coalition the Democrats forged during the New Deal has come undone. The dramatic economic, social, and political changes of the past half century can be neither rewound nor ignored. The old "three-party" model of regional American partisanship - with northern and southern Democrats outvoting western Republicans - is now defunct, replaced by a new three-party model that pairs southern and western Republicans against urban-based Democrats of the Northeast, Midwest, and Pacific Coast states. Simply put, the South is no longer the "swing" region in American politics: It has swung to the Republicans.

That said, Democrats should forget about recapturing the South in the near term and begin building a national majority that ends, not begins, with restoring their lost southern glory. Most of the South is already beyond the Democrats' reach, and much of the rest continues to move steadily into the Republican column. White southerners used to be among the most economically liberal voters in America but are now among the most conservative. The South is America's most militaristic and least unionized region, and the powerful combination of race and religion create a socially conservative, electorally hostile environment for most statewide Democratic candidates and almost all Democratic presidential nominees.

Meanwhile, there are growing opportunities for Democrats to improve their electoral fortunes in other parts of the country, where demographic changes and political attitudes are more favorable to Democratic messages and messengers. Citizens in the Midwest have been decimated by globalization and are looking for economic salvation. In the Southwest where white and, most especially, Hispanic populations are booming, a strong platform on immigration reform and enforcement could divide the Republicans and put the region up for grabs. In parts of the Mountain West, Democrats can pair the lessons learned from Ross Perot's fiscal reform campaigns with an emphasis on land and water conservation to establish traction among disaffected libertarians and the millions of coastal transplants who either moved westward or bounced back eastward from California in search of open spaces and more affordable suburban lifestyles. If the Democrats can simultaneously expand and solidify their existing margins of control in the Northeast and Pacific Coast states - specifically by targeting moderate Republicans for defeat, just as moderate Democrats in the South have been systematically terminated by the GOP - the Democrats can build a national majority with no help from the South in presidential elections and little help from southern votes elsewhere down the ballot.

That's a pretty big checklist, no doubt. But these tasks are far more doable than trying to rewind history to re-create a pre-civil rights era Democratic South in post-civil rights America.

The South has long been America's regional political outlier. When the Republicans dominated national politics for seven decades between the Civil War and the New Deal, they did so with almost no support from the South. Thanks to the significant African-American population base in the South, the Democrats will never be so handicapped from the outset because there will always be a minimum degree of Democratic support and number of Democratic elected officials in the region. Building a non-southern majority, therefore, should be much easier for Democrats today than it was for the Republicans a century ago. Anyone who claims otherwise is willfully ignoring partisan history, not to mention contemporary demography.

As Democrats expand their non-southern support, the South will continue to assimilate into the national political culture from which it had mostly divorced itself until recent decades. Then and only then can Democrats begin to rebrand themselves in Dixie. In the interim, the Democrats' near-term goal should be to isolate the Republicans as a regional party that owns most of the South, but little else.

FLUNKING THE LITMUS TEST

The Republicans now dominate the South. Neither Al Gore nor John Kerry won a single southern state in their consecutive, failed presidential bids. The GOP controls solid majorities of southern governors and members of Congress, and a growing share of state legislative chambers and seats. In 2004, Republicans barely broke a sweat in claiming all five U.S. Senate seats vacated by retiring southern Democrats, and George W. Bush improved his vote share compared to 2000 in every southern state except North Carolina - the home of his opponent's running mate.

Why do Democrats struggle so mightily in the South? The reasons are many and include specific factors such as the historical absence of organized labor presence in the region, as well as more general factors like a political tradition of stubborn contraposition to northern political attitudes. The short answer, however, is that social and cultural issues tend to trump economic considerations for many voters in the South, where race and religion are woven through almost every aspect of the region's political culture. There are cultural conservatives outside the South and libertarian populists inside the region, of course. But southerners hold distinctly conservative values and have long prided themselves for their obstinacy, for resisting the social transformations unfolding elsewhere across America. What Thomas Frank laments has gone wrong in Kansas is even more wrong in the South, where cultural issues weigh heavily in the minds of voters in America's poorest region.

Against this backdrop of cultural conservatism, political candidates running in all but a few isolated pockets of the South essentially must pass a values "litmus test." Stuart Brunson, campaign manager for Tennessee's popular Democratic governor Phil Bredesen, explained how it works. "Voters go through a two-step process," says Brunson. "The first is a credentialing filter, which asks if a candidate shares their values. The second is on issues - education, health care, the economy." Howard Dean was roundly criticized during the 2004 Democratic primaries for openly referring to this phenomenon with his pithy, "god, guns, and gays" tagline. The blue-blooded Vermont governor and future Democratic National Committee chair did not need to speak in folksy aphorisms to prove he understood the underlying dynamics of modern southern politics.

Bickering Democrats are divided about how to attract, or at least pacify, culturally conservative voters. Some believe the party must moderate its positions on social issues. The truth is that moderation is unlikely to assuage, no less convert, wary southern conservatives. Besides, whatever small gains might come from abandoning support for reproductive choice or gay rights will likely be erased by the votes lost, both inside and outside the South, from projecting moral ambiguity. Frustrated Democrats tend to either avoid social issues altogether or, worse, make clumsy attempts at cultural contortionism. We are thus treated to campaign images of Al Gore wearing cowboy boots with his belt-clipped Blackberry, or a barn jacket-clad John Kerry buying a goose hunting license. These hollow, inauthentic gestures only accentuate and magnify the Democrats' cultural disconnect, forcing liberals to avert their eyes in horror, while conservatives look on from afar with a mixture of disdain and disbelief.

Others think Democrats can bridge the cultural gap by emphasizing the destructive impacts of Republican economic policies. But it's extraordinarily difficult for Democratic candidates to differentiate themselves sufficiently on economic policies to compensate for the built-in advantages Republicans enjoy on social issues, and post-NAFTA Democrats are having a hard time convincing many working-class voters that there is any meaningful differentiation at all. Besides, no matter how attractive their economic messages may be, Democrats must first pass through the "cultural credentialing" filter to get a full hearing from southerners on economic policy. The best Democrats can do is hope for fate to drop in their laps a huge electoral windfall, like an economic collapse of such magnitude that it eliminates the culture filter or a natural disaster like Hurricane Katrina that allows Democrats to play the incompetence card. This is neither a workable long-term strategy nor a noble way to run a political party.

In theory, the Democrats' economic messages ought to be embraced by working-class white and black southerners with equal gusto. Yet nowhere in America do people who come from similar economic stations vote so differently from one another. The self-comforting belief among Democrats that southerners vote against their interests is both condescending and false: White southerners are aware of their economic interests, but simply assign more weight to social issues than economic ones, and accordingly vote Republican; because they experience far less internal dissonance between the partisan implications of their cultural and economic preferences, African Americans in the South vote Democratic. Consequently, because white southerners far outnumber African Americans, neither hedging on cultural issues nor highlighting economic policy differences - or even both approaches in conjunction - can save the Democrats in the South. The only task more difficult than crafting a series of economic ideas capable of convincing white southern conservatives to ignore their social values is persuading them that the Democratic Party shares those values in the first place.

So why bother trying to leap the wide cultural chasm to reach them? Rather than superficial and mostly futile pandering to the nation's most conservative voters, Democrats should begin to build a non-southern majority by unapologetically tailoring policies and targeting messages to more receptive audiences outside the South. Bowing and scraping to salvage a few southern votes here and there only leads to the sort of ideological schizophrenia that does little to improve the Democrats' southern fortunes and, worse, muddies the party's image outside the South.

SISYPHEAN SOUTHERN SITUATION

The Democrats' situation is exacerbated by two glaring political liabilities in the South. The first is that racial polarization has created a virtual Republican monopoly of the southern white vote that prevents Democrats from winning statewide races. The second is that religion plays a more prominent role in the South than in any other region.

The central irony of southern politics is that the nation's most Republican region is home to half of all African Americans, the Democratic party's most loyal voters. Unfortunately, racial antagonisms exacerbate the Democrats' electoral problems in the South, creating a white countermobilization - a "blacklash," so to speak - that fuels Republican victories. In the 2000 and 2004 elections, many of George W. Bush's biggest wins came in southern states with the highest share of African Americans, and some Democratic congressional candidates are capturing as little as 30 percent of the white vote in the South. By contrast, the African-American vote in presidential elections and statewide contests is most successful for Democrats when it is part of multiethnic voting coalitions outside the South, as it is in states such as Illinois, Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. Republicans have established a virtual monopoly on the white southern vote - and need to, given the partisan head start Democrats enjoy by virtue of the size of the African-American populations in most southern states. Meanwhile, as we will see later, the Republicans have systematically diluted the power of African Americans by packing them into as few congressional and state legislative districts as possible. Unless the Democrats are prepared to abandon shamelessly their commitment to racial justice in order to win elections, these realities do not suggest a Democratic revival in the South any time soon.

Whereas secular electorates elsewhere are more likely to hold religion aside or even reject the interference of church into state matters, the party's second liability is that churchgoing faithful are very skeptical of Democratic candidates. The partisan effects of southern piety are astounding. No region boasts a greater share of evangelicals than the South. According to surveys conducted by the University of North Carolina, southerners are more likely than non-southerners to believe that God exists and answers prayers, in the biblical account of creation, and that people are sometimes possessed by the devil. A Pew Forum study conducted prior to the 2004 election by the University of Akron's John C. Green showed Democrats holding a narrow lead in partisan identification among Catholics and trailing only slightly among mainline Protestants, but facing a 56 percent to 27 percent Republican edge among evangelical Christians. Evangelicals in the South are not merely more numerous, but doctrinally and politically more conservative than non-southern evangelicals. Not surprising, 2004 exit polls reported that nearly 4 in 5 self-described white evangelicals voted for George W. Bush. The top eighteen states in terms of their share of white evangelicals - which, of course, include every southern state - went for Bush. The evangelical chorus in the South wears red, sings with a decidedly conservative tenor, and votes righteously.

Two partisan features of the South further diminish any hope that Democrats harbor about a regional resurgence.

The first is the rising share of southerners who reached political maturity since Richard Nixon's successful use of the "southern strategy" in 1968. Born during the latter stages of the New Deal and coming of age after the Great Society, this postboomer generation of southern Republicans share no familial or historical connection whatsoever to the New Deal-era Democratic Party. Southerners under the age of 50 in some states have never seen a Democrat capture their state's electoral votes. As tough as it may be to reconvert Republican seniors who once revered Franklin Roosevelt or supported Lyndon Johnson, it will be even tougher to attract young southerners who associate the national Democratic Party with Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton and have never cast a Democratic vote in their lives.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Whistling Past Dixie by Thomas F. Schaller Copyright © 2006 by Thomas F. Schaller. Excerpted by permission.
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