Whistling Past Dixie: How Democrats Can Win Without the South
352
Whistling Past Dixie: How Democrats Can Win Without the South
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Overview
The South is no longer the "swing" region in American politics -- it has swung to the Republicans. Most of the South is beyond the Democrats' reach, and what remains is moving steadily into the Republican column. The twin effects of race and religion produce a socially conservative, electorally hostile environment for most Democratic candidates. What's wrong with Kansas is even more wrong in the South, where cultural issues matter most to voters.
Yet far too many politicians and pundits still subscribe to the idea that Democrats must recapture the South. This southern nostalgia goes beyond sentimentality: It is a dangerously self-destructive form of political myopia which, uncorrected, will only relegate the Democrats to minority-party status for a generation. The notion that Democrats should pin their hopes for revival on the tail of a southern donkey is no less absurd than witnessing the children's variant of the party game, for both involve desperate attempts to hit elusive targets while wandering around blindfolded.
Meanwhile, political attitudes and demographic changes in other parts of the country are more favorable to Democratic messages and messengers. The Midwest and Southwest are the nation's most competitive regions. There are opportunities to expand Democratic margins in the Mountain red states while consolidating control over the reliably blue northeastern and Pacific coast states. Before dreaming of fortynine-state presidential landslides like those of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, the Democrats ought to first figure out how to win twenty-nine states. And that means capturing Arizona -- or even Alaska -- before targeting Alabama.
Republicans cannot win without the South, Schaller argues, but they also can't win with the South alone. Much as Democrats were confined to the South for decades prior to the New Deal, the Democrats should South but little else. After winning and governing successfully elsewhere, Democrats can then present their record of achievement to the South -- the nation's most conservative region, but one that is steadily assimilating with the politics of the rest of America and, therefore, will become more competitive in the future.
But for now, Democrats must put strategy ahead of sentimentality. To form a new and enduring majority coalition, they must whistle past their electoral graveyard. They must whistle past Dixie.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780743298360 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Simon & Schuster |
| Publication date: | 10/03/2006 |
| Sold by: | SIMON & SCHUSTER |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 352 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
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1
Partisan Graveyard
[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 of party 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.
Second, the South is the region with the fewest swing voters and independents, as the recent presidential campaigns of John McCain, Ralph Nader, and Ross Perot made abundantly clear. Despite their glaring differences -- a Republican who challenged his party from the inside; a Green who challenged the Democrats from the outside; and a Reform Party nominee who challenged both parties -- all three candidates failed miserably in the South. In 1992, all ten of Perot's poorest showings were below the Mason-Dixon line. Nine of Nader's ten worst performances in 2000 were in southern states. And McCain? The humidity of the 2000 South Carolina primary quickly melted his tart tongue. The contemporary South extends almost no hospitality toward alternative candidacies. In partisan terms, it is a place where voters make firm commitments and stick to them, and insurgents and independents go to die.
Perot's 1992 performance revealed one place where soft partisans and disaffected independents are in play: the Interior West, where Perot got at least 20 percent of the vote in a wide variety of states including Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Utah, and Wyoming -- several of which were also states where Nader performed better in 2000 than he did nationally. The margins by which George W. Bush carried the southwestern states in 2000 and 2004 were far smaller than when his father won these states a few cycles earlier. Meanwhile, the Midwest remains the most competitive partisan region in the country. "The future Democratic coalition is going to be bicoastal, with the Midwest being the key and the Southwest being the opportunity," asserts Democratic pollster Paul Maslin. "And the South is gone."
For Democrats, electoral opportunities abound in places where the social and cultural hurdles are easier to clear. Indeed, demographic trends and the ideological preferences outside the South favor the Democrats, and thus any surrender to southern sympathies reinforces the very image of diffidence and dissension that turns off swing voters in other states and regions. The most foolhardy option is for Democrats to waste these new opportunities in a Sisyphean attempt to reconstruct an antiquated geographic coalition based on the notion that the party's southern wing can be revived.
Now let's reverse the partisan-regional question for a moment and ask, When is the last time anyone wrote a political analysis arguing that the Republicans need to somehow figure out how to restore their lost glory in the coastal states, or that the GOP's anti-northern posturing is turning off so many blue state voters that it prevents the Republicans from becoming a true, unchallenged national party? Such criticisms are rare, first, because the national media perpetuate the canard that the more regionally monolithic and racially monochromatic Republican coalition is somehow more "national" and "representative" than the Democrats' almost identically sized yet far more heterogeneous coalition. The second reason why this criticism is so rarely heard is more logical and therefore, legitimate: It simply doesn't make strategic sense for the GOP to focus primarily on trying to fill its partisan basket by reaching for high-hanging fruit in the bluest of blue cities and states along the coasts.
How, then, is it logical for Democrats to attempt to create a winning coalition by focusing first on the region of the country that will be hardest for them to reach? Strategically or operationally, it isn't. The pan-western states -- in an arc from Ohio, west to Montana, and south to Arizona -- are where the low-hanging and most ripe-for-the-plucking electoral fruit for Democrats is to be found. The party therefore must shelve its New Deal nostalgia and recognize that the South will be the last, not first, stop along the path to a new Democratic national majority. Efforts to recapture the South first will only imperil that future majority.
FUZZY (ELECTORAL) MATH
Doesn't the South's sheer size and rapid population growth make it too big for Democrats to concede? Actually, no. Here's a fact that might surprise lazy television pundits: Census data reveal that, in relative terms, the populations of several southern states are stagnating. During the 1990s, population growth in Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi was slower than the 13.1 percent national rate for the decade. The 2005 estimates further confirm that these three states -- along with Arkansas and Tennessee, plus border states Kentucky and Oklahoma -- have continued to grow more slowly than the rest of the country since the 2000 census. Half of the southern states have fewer seats in Congress than they did a century ago, when the Republicans dominated national politics with almost no support whatsoever from the South.
It's true that Florida, Georgia, Texas, and the Carolinas are rapidly gaining population, thereby increasing the South's total share of U.S. House seats and electoral votes slightly. But population booms in metropolitan areas surrounding Charlotte, Orlando, and Houston and other "new South" cities mask the fact that, relative to the rest of the nation, the rural red states of the old Confederacy are shrinking. Mississippi already lost a congressional district after the 2000 census, and Alabama is likely to suffer a similar fate in some future reapportionment. The five Deep South states had 38 of 310 House seats in the 1880s, but have just 37 of 435 seats today. The fact is the South today wields not much more electoral power nationally than it did a century ago.
Even with the rapid growth of the "Outer South" states like North Carolina, Virginia, and Texas, the region's share of House seats, Senate seats, and electoral votes is about what it was in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Because of expanding statehood since then, the South has a smaller share of senators, and growth in the share of southern House seats, though not insignificant, has only increased from about 27 percent when Republicans were the majority party a hundred years ago to 32 percent today. If Florida -- the most non-southern of the southern states -- is excluded from consideration, southern power in the Congress and the Electoral College is actually less today than it was on the eve of the Republican realignment of the 1890s.
Based on census population projections, William Frey of the Brookings Institution forecasts a continuing, substantial shift in Electoral College voting power from the Snow Belt to the Sun Belt. Between 2000 and 2030, Frey projects, Texas (+8 House seats/electors) and Florida (+9) will receive the major windfalls, with Arizona growing at the fastest rate -- catapulting from eight to thirteen House seats by 2030. Northeastern and midwestern states, bookended by New York and Illinois, account for most of the reapportionment losses to come. Some commentators cite Frey's study as proof that the Democrats need to fix their southern problem, noting that Bush-won states will gain seventeen electors during this period. "You can't get wiped out [in the South]," declares Democratic analyst Ruy Teixeira of the Center for American Progress. "These trends just put an exclamation point on that idea. You don't want to cede huge blocks of states to the other side -- especially states whose electoral vote is increasing."
A closer look at Frey's projections, however, reveals that subtracting the western states (+12) from the eleven Confederate states (+19) results in a net gain of only seven electors in the next three decades. When highly competitive Florida is removed from the equation that margin disappears completely. And if Democrats can convert the Sunshine State, the net effect of the Snow-to-Sun Belt shift could actually favor the Democrats if they focus on capturing the Southwest. Moreover, part of the Sun Belt's new growth is occurring among demographic groups amenable to Democratic policy appeals. "The turbulent demographic change occurring in New America makes its political future much more up for grabs," writes Frey. "Two groups which favor Democrats, Hispanics, and Gen Xers, are a significant part of [its] recent growth."
The reason Bush won the White House in 2000 despite losing the popular vote is that many of the thirty states he carried were among the least populous. It wasn't just that Al Gore racked up huge margins in California and New York. By a difference of 64,000 people, the twenty states plus the District of Columbia Gore carried actually contained more citizens than the thirty states Bush won. Because every state starts with two electors courtesy of its two U.S. senators, the smaller and more sparsely populated states upon which Republicans depend exercise disproportionate power in the winner-take-all Electoral College system. "This power imbalance has grown so large that 13 small states in Retro America with a population of more than 18 million have voting power equal to California with a 2004 estimated population of more than 35 million," writes John Sperling, in his comprehensive accounting of the differences in what he calls America's "metro" and "retro" states.
Republican power in the Senate today is similarly exaggerated. Following the 2004 elections, twenty-one states had two Republican senators, sixteen had two Democratic senators, and the remaining thirteen delegations were split. With the thirteen split-delegation states removed from the equation, those sixteen Democratic states are home to 120.9 million Americans, compared to just 116.9 million in the twenty-one GOP states. Blessed by winner-take-all elections and the exaggerated political power small states exercise in Senate and presidential elections, the Republican minority sheep is bleating loudly while dressed up in a majority wolf's disguise.
And remember: That sheep grazes in more crowded partisan pastures than the empty southern fields Republicans faced when they dominated American politics for seven full decades following the Civil War. That is, between 1860 and 1928, when Democrats won just four of eighteen presidential elections, the South was far more monolithically Democratic than it is Republican leaning today. If the GOP was capable of maintaining majority status for four generations with virtually no southern help, surely the Democrats can become a national majority with the support, however small or shrinking, they receive from southern states that today carry only slightly more electoral weight than they did a century ago -- and less weight if Florida is removed from the scales.
This is especially true in the House, the place where the South's numerical clout has grown the most. The existence of a sizable African-American population, coupled with Florida and Texas Hispanics and a core number of "yellow dog" white Democrats, guarantees that the Democrats will never be entirely shut out of the region the way the Republicans were during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Back then, the solid Democratic South took at least a fourth of U.S. House seats off the table, yet Republicans still managed to carve congressional majorities out of the remaining 75 percent of the non-southern seats. Because black, Hispanic, and "yellow dog" Democrats in the South are unlikely to ever account for fewer than 40 of the South's current 131 seats (they presently hold 49 seats), southern Republicans may continue to grow in number but are unlikely to ever reach 109 seats in the South -- one-fourth of the House overall. At present, the southern Republicans make up 19 percent of the House. Surely the Democrats can build a majority from the remaining 81 percent if Republicans did exactly that a century ago with only 75 percent of the non-South chamber in play.
Being shut out in the Senate and the Electoral College, of course, makes for much more difficult Democratic tilling because these are winner-take-all elections in which African Americans add to the South's electoral clout but have insufficient power to swing states into the Democratic column. But again, even with Florida out of the mix -- and certainly with Florida included -- a non-southern Electoral College majority for the Democrats is very doable. Those who say it is impossible to win the White House without the South are conveniently overlooking the two most recent presidential elections. But for a few thousand votes in New Hampshire, Al Gore would have pulled it off while winning the popular vote; more astounding, but for the switch of about 60,000 votes in Ohio, Kerry nearly did so despite losing the popular vote. After surveying the American electoral landscape, partisan historian Todd Estes concluded:
[I]f there is a new political majority in the offing it is likely to belong to the Democrats. Republicans seem to have given it their all in 2004 and, with all those exertions, could produce the slimmest of majorities. . . . [T]hat Republicans need to win nearly all the states labeled as leaning Republican to win a simple Electoral College majority leaves them on dangerous ground. The loss of only a key state or two could drop them below the 270 [electoral] votes needed to win.
Anyone who claims that a non-southern majority is impossible is willfully ignoring either American political-electoral history, simple arithmetic, or both. Republicans won without the South when the region was not much smaller yet far more locked down than it is now, so certainly Democrats can build a national majority with little if any help from the South today.
BOXING IN THE REPUBLICANS
For a century, from the Civil War to the civil rights movement, the Democrats owned the South. For seven defeat-filled decades between 1860 and 1932, however, the solid South relegated the Democrats to the role of a regionally confined minority party. The party elected only two presidents, Grover Cleveland and Woodrow Wilson, neither of whom represented a southern state nor managed to win a majority of the national popular vote in either his election or reelection. The Democrats' favored strategy during this period was to nominate pro-southern northerners for president and hope for the best. Long-forgotten Democratic nominees such as James Cox, John Davis, and Alton Parker all captured the southern states yet failed to receive even 30 percent of the total electoral vote nationally. The South was unified, but in their unity southern Democrats mostly found themselves on the outside of American politics looking in.
That changed in 1932, when white southern populists joined northeastern ethnics to form the New Deal coalition, led by Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Thirty-two years later, Texan Lyndon Baines Johnson's landslide defeat of Arizona's Barry Goldwater in 1964 was the New Deal's apogee. LBJ's victory, though resounding, masked the growing frictions between the Democrats' southern conservative wing and its northern liberal wing. The South was about to become more pivotal to national politics than it had been at any time since before the outbreak of the Civil War.
Richard Nixon quickly grasped the new regional calculus Goldwater made viable by carrying the five Deep South states in 1960. Abandoning his earlier gestures toward racial reconciliation, Nixon in 1968 perfected Goldwater's "southern strategy" to narrowly win the White House. With that victory he irreversibly altered the partisan calculus in presidential elections, setting in motion a dramatic partisan transformation in which the Republicans -- by fits and starts, including Ronald Reagan's presidential victories and the 1994 Republican takeover of Congress -- gradually but inevitably converted the once solidly Democratic South into a Republican stronghold. GOP candidates have received 83 percent of all electoral votes cast by the southern states in the past nine presidential elections. In 1960, there was not a single southern Republican governor or U.S. Senator, but today the Republicans boast seven of the region's eleven governors and eighteen of its twenty-two senators. Capturing the South gave the GOP enough ballast, enough confidence, and enough momentum to begin envisioning itself as the dominant party.
Republicans cannot be a national majority party without the South, but neither can they do it with the South alone. Anyone who watched the last three Republican National Conventions realizes that, more than anything else, Republican operatives fear their party will become synonymous with its most radically conservative, southern-based elements. That's why Americans don't see the likes of Tom DeLay or Trent Lott paraded onstage for prime-time viewing. Indeed, the only fire-breathing southern conservative given a featured speaking role during the 2004 Republican convention in New York's Madison Square Garden was Georgia's Zell Miller -- a disgruntled Democrat who supported Bush's reelection. And many regarded Miller's venomous speech as the convention's lowest moment.
With impunity from the media, Republicans brazenly mock Democrats for their ties to northeastern liberals, especially the "Taxachusetts" variety. They depict Democrats as effete, permissive, "out of touch" snobs who "just don't get it." The GOP understands the power of us-versus-them politics, which requires that some ambiguous "them" be identified and subjected to abuse and scorn. To unify a Republican Party composed of both Wall Street bankers and heartland preachers -- the profits-plus-pulpits coalition -- the GOP has created the perfect foil: a ubiquitous and nefarious "liberal elite" that is somehow blamed for orchestrating America's cultural and spiritual demise. The Democrats need their own "them," and the social conservatives who are the bedrock of southern politics provide the most obvious and burdensome stone to hang around the Republicans' necks.
Democrats must therefore use political jujitsu on the Republicans to turn the solid South into a political-electoral albatross for Republicans in the same manner it was for Democrats for almost a century following the Civil War. Yet, despite polls showing Democratic advantages on a wide range of issues, from health care coverage to a living wage, Democrats make little attempt to depict southern resistance as out of step with the dramatic social, economic, and technological changes occurring in the country. If the GOP can build a national majority by ostracizing an entire region of the country, the Democrats should be able to run outside the South by running against the conservative South. Citing southern obstructionism as a continuing impediment to the investments and progress the country must make in the coming century, Democrats must not only resolve for themselves, but also send a message to the American electorate that they can offer something better than the retrenched, regressive, and sometimes revanchist southern way.
The Democrats' non-southern strategy must also utilize the same sort of tactics and coded language Republicans used to capture the region from Democrats. Because the majority party is in theory more susceptible to divide-and-conquer politics, the Democrats can use the South's social conservatism as the point of a wedge to split apart the pulpits wing from the profits wing. The Republicans want pro-life voters? Make them stand up at roll call and cast their votes for a constitutional amendment to outlaw abortion, something that President Bush and the Republican leadership in Congress know will destroy their chance of forging a more permanent majority. The GOP wants to secure cheap labor for American corporations? Make them defend the look-the-other-way border policies they support in one breath, while in the next bragging that they are the party to trust on homeland security.
Whenever possible, Democrats must also equate the Republican Party with its least-electable elements, many of whom have deep, long-standing ties to the South. This means forcing the GOP to either embrace or denounce people like Liberty University's Jerry Falwell and groups like the Alabama-based American Family Association. There's a reason Republicans keep what I call the "eyesore" and "black-eye" Republican elements within their coalition from public view -- namely, because they frighten most Americans, as the Terri Schiavo right-to-die episode in Florida proved. The Democrats are regularly pilloried for their association with people like controversial filmmaker Michael Moore, even though Moore exercises little if any influence on the party. The Republicans, meanwhile, are far less often equated with their most radically conservative elements, despite the fact that the leaders of these movements are much more deeply embedded within the GOP's agenda-forming and decision-making apparatus. The Democrats must pull back the curtain behind which the "Michael Moores of the Right" are hiding, revealing a party that threatens the liberties that are dear to both eastern liberals and western libertarians alike. If Democrats do this, they can begin systematically to circumscribe and marginalize the Republicans as a party that dominates the South but only the South.
LET GO THE NEW DEAL COALITION
The first rule of electoral politics is, Do not try to win the last election. Yet far too many politicians and pundits continue to repeat the conventional wisdom that the Democrats must try to recapture the South. Their southern nostalgia is more than blurry sentimentality. It is a dangerously self-destructive form of political myopia that, left uncorrected, will only relegate the Democrats to minority party status for at least a generation. The notion that Democrats should pin their hopes for revival on the tail of a Southern donkey is no less absurd than witnessing the children's variant of the party game, for both involve desperate attempts to hit elusive targets while wandering around blindfolded.
Some region, by definition, must be the most politically and culturally conservative in the country. The South is that region, and the idea that Democrats ought to start rebuilding their national identity by trying to first restore its lost southern glory is what I call "extended ladder" politics -- the stretching toward the treetops in a foolhardy effort to fill their partisan baskets when riper, closer-hanging fruit is at hand. That said, the time is long overdue for Democrats to let go of their electoral past and begin building a non-southern majority coalition. The party will need to develop the right messages and messengers to accompany this strategy -- no easy chore, that. But before entertaining dreams of forty-nine-state Electoral College victories, the Democrats must first find a formula to win twenty-nine states. Rather than trying to compete in Alabama, the party should first figure out how to convert Arizona, or even Alaska. Only after making gains in other parts of the country -- solidifying the coastal states, locking down the Midwest, converting the burgeoning Southwest, and stealing selected seats in the interior West -- should the Democrats begin the arduous task of their own southern reconstruction.
Until then, the Democrats must whistle past their southern electoral graveyard. They must whistle past Dixie.
Copyright © 2006 by Thomas F. Schaller
Table of Contents
Contents
1 Partisan Graveyard
2 The Southern Transformation
3 Blacklash and the Heavenly Chorus
4 Go West, Young Democrats
5 Diamond Demography
6 A Non-Southern Platform
7 The Path to a National Democratic Majority
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
What People are Saying About This
"Thank goodness for Whistling Past Dixie by Tom Schaller. His perceptive blueprint for de-southernizing our politics couldn't come at a better time." — Thomas Frank, author of What's the Matter with Kansas?
"Now that Dixie politicians and George W. Bush have remade the national GOP in their own image — messianic adventurism in the Middle East, Texas-style corruption, bungled oil strategy, and fealty to radical religion — the new Republican South is turning into a symbol of party parochialism and excess. Tom Schaller's Whistling Past Dixie is the best analysis to date of how the Democrats may be able to take advantage." — Kevin Phillips, author of American Theocracy