In 2004, the Democratic Party sunk to a historic low in the South. While heading into the election, we had 15 senators in the South (including Maryland and Delaware, and the Census Bureau does), afterwards, we dropped down to 10, with only 1 Democratic senator in all of the Deep South, for the first time in ages. Democrats had only 59 US House seats in the South, compared to the Republicans 95. Democrats were only 7 of the region’s 16 governors. Then things changed a little bit.
Since then, we’ve gained 8 US House seats, 1 US Senate seat, and now 9 of the region’s governors are Democrats. And Democrats have some strengths in the region. Democrats have majorities in many state legislatures. For example, in both houses of Alabama and Louisiana, as well as Arkansas, West Virginia, North Carolina, Maryland, and in 1 of the houses each in Delaware, Kentucky, Tennessee and Virginia, with ties in both Tennessee’s and Oklahoma’s state senates. We’re looking to do more damage this year, hoping that roughly a third of our gains in the House will come from seats in Texas, Florida, North Carolina, Alabama, Louisiana, Maryland, and Virginia. Six Southern senate seats appear to be in play, with Virginia a certainty, North Carolina leaning our way, dead heats in Kentucky, Mississippi, and Georgia, and Texas leaning Republican.
So, we’ve, in my opinion, seen the peak of Republican power in the South, and in some respects they have taken a significant, though not insurmountable majority by any means, while in others they’ve made parity with local Democrats at best. In reality this means that they have taken much of the states of Texas, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Kentucky, South Carolina, Florida, and Georgia, while making little progress in Arkansas and West Virginia, a bit more in North Carolina, and we split power in Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi. They’ve lost ground in Virginia.
Why have they peaked in the South? Partially, this is because of demographics. Latino population growth has been fastest in many parts of the South. African Americans are returning from the North, as factories close down up there, because housing prices have been lower in the South, job growth somewhat higher, and they can find a neighborhood with a high proportion of African Americans to join. Many urban areas are growing, and growing more Democratic.
However, the South doesn’t fit neatly in as a base of the Republican Party. While nearly all of the Republican strongholds have a higher than normal proportion of extractive industries and agriculture, and a heightened religiosity (from evangelical Christians, Mormons, or Southern Baptists), in other areas of the nation where the Republicans are strong, they are dominant. In the region including Idaho, Wyoming, and Utah, Democrats have one congressman and one governor, with little other power in those states. In the section of the western portions of the plains states, and the Texas panhandle, Democrats have one senator and one governor elected, and have done little else. But in the South, there is no such vast pocket void of Democrats. In one of Obama’s weakest states, Tennessee, they have a Democratic governor, and five out of nine US Representatives are Democrats (though not necessarily great ones). In Obama’s second weakest Southern state, Alabama, only two of its nine federal representatives are Democrats, but both houses of the state legislature are Democratically held in large (insurmountable) majorities. Oklahoma is Obama’s worst Southern state, and Democrats have a tie in the state senate, and they have a Democratic governor. This is the case across much of the South, where a state looks disastrous for Democrats at one level, but not on another. South Carolina may be one of our worst-off states, but we have a shot (a long shot, to be fair) at nabbing two congressional seats there, and had we run a real Democratic candidate, we might have been able to take out Lindsey Graham, since the under-funded and un-aided Democratic challenger is running better than many of our senate candidates in the Mountain West and plains states at about 40% in recent polling (hence the genius of the 50 state strategy, and running and fighting for candidates even if it seems like a long shot). The South is not off-limits for Democrats, it is a true swing region, and it is becoming more so by the day, it seems like.
The biggest problem for the Republicans is that the South is not very conservative. Or, if it is, then the Republicans aren’t. The traditional Republican definition of "conservatism" is that government should be small, the constitution should be respected, and we should stay out of foreign entanglements. "Conservative" Southerners are of a different breed. They loved them some FDR, because they loved the New Deal, most of them. They loved the Tennessee Valley Authority and all kinds of government interventions in the economy. They are the "big government conservatives" the traditional conservatives are scared of. This is one of many distinction between Southern populist conservatives and traditional conservatives and libertarians, and it is a big one, and it is one we can exploit. They are economic populists (and cultural ones, too), and on that we can win them.
The Recipe:
African American Voters
African American voters are mostly concentrated in the South, particularly in the Deep South states of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina. Moreover, African American populations in the South are growing, as the great migrations are reversing. This growth will help minorities become the majority in many Southern states, as has already happened in Texas. This, in turn, will make these states more competitive, as African Americans vote in the area of 85 to +90% Democratic. African American voters, however, tend to more culturally conservative and economically populist, especially the lower their income gets. Economically they fit well into the coalition.
Latino Voters
Latino population growth in the South is faster than in any other region. Like African American voters, they tend to be more economically populist and culturally conservative. They also tend to vote Democratic 2-1. This, along with growing African American populations, will help turn many of these states into majority minority states, or should at least get them close enough to be competitive.
Growing Urban Centers
Urban areas, including university towns like the Research Triangle, are growing, and growing more Democratic as college-educated professionals, academics, and Yankees move into the area. Many of these people are more economically and culturally liberal than the groups I’ve mentioned above, which will mean a somewhat different strategy, and could cause some problems.
The Employee Free Choice Act
CNN’s 2004 exit polls found that 14% of voters were union members. Of those, 65% voted for a Democrat for the US House, and a similar 61% voted for John Kerry for president. However, in the South, only 6% of voters were union members, though 62% of them voted for Democrats for the US House, a very similar number. The reason for the disparity in union density is that while there are 22 Right to Work states, they are concentrated in the South, where the entirety of the old Confederacy is Right to Work. Of the 16 states in the census-defined South, 12 are Right to Work:
Oklahoma
Texas
Arkansas
Louisiana
Mississippi
Alabama
Tennessee
Georgia
Florida
South Carolina
North Carolina
Virginia
Of course, of the four remaining states considered Southern by the Census Bureau, three are dominated by Democrats (Maryland, Delaware, and West Virginia) and the fourth is a swing state with more registered Democrats than Republicans (Kentucky). Right to Work laws provide major disincentives for workers to organize, and also provide governments with more cover to investigate unions. EFCA would not directly fight RTW laws, but it would make it much easier for workers to unionize. My father, who is in the leadership of a major union, has told me that EFCA would increase the size of his union by roughly 10% a year for an indefinite period, and I’ve heard estimates that passage of EFCA could increase union membership by 50-250% in total. But judging from the above numbers, roughly 9.1% of the national vote consists of union members who vote Democratic, but only 3.72% of the Southern vote consists of union members who vote Democratic. If after the passage of EFCA, union membership only rose to the current national average, but the percentage of union members who voted Democratic stayed the same, then that 3.72% would rise to 8.68%. Now certainly some of these people were voting Democratic already, but surely not all, at the same time. There are many poor and working-class blacks in the South who vote Democratic nearly all the time, but many poor and working class whites for whom union membership and the exposure to union discourse may change their partisan preferences.
Increased union density as a result of EFCA may increase pressure on Democrats in the South to try to repeal the Right to Work laws. Currently, Right to Work states in the South, in which Democrats control the state government include Arkansas and North Carolina, but Democrats also control the state legislatures in Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana, and in Tennessee, Virginia, and Oklahoma, there are Democratic governors and one of the two state houses are controlled by Democrats. Pressure needs to be brought to bear on them in the future. Repeal of Right to Work laws would do much to improve people’s lives and make much of the country more Democratic, which would in turn improve people’s lives.
The Strategy:
The South can be split into many different groupings. The Deep South (Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina) represents the areas with the highest African American populations in the country, the Border South (Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas, Tennessee, Kentucky, West Virginia, Virginia, North Carolina, Florida) are the peripheral areas around the Deep South, which have lower, though still often significant African American populations. This represents one big difference in how we can campaign to win in the South- in the Deep South, our victories will be based on high African American turnout and support, in the Border South, not as much, though somewhat. Texas and Florida also have high numbers of Latinos, and Asian Americans are significant in Louisiana, Texas, Georgia, Florida, and Virginia. In other words, only Kentucky and West Virginia are Southern states where there aren’t high numbers of non-whites. Principally in Florida, Texas, and the Deep South, our campaigns must be driven by economic populism, which is the set of issues which makes minority voters Democrats, and may have to be more culturally conservative.
Another divide can be seen on the Atlantic Coast, upon which all of the Southern states where Barack Obama is very competitive are: Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, and Florida are all pretty urban, as opposed to more rural states like Kentucky, Arkansas, and Alabama. Urban areas tend to vote more Democratic than rural areas, and tend to be more progressive and liberal, and so Democrats running in these states could perhaps be more liberal.
Eastern portions of Virginia and the Carolinas, southern Alabama, Georgia, and Florida are less religious than the rest of the South, and as a whole those states are not really more religious than the nation as a whole, making them perhaps more resistant to cultural conservatism than other areas of the South, so our candidates running in these parts will have more freedom to venture into cultural liberalism.
Finally, young people ("Gen Y" or "Millenials") tend to be more progressive and liberal, and the Deep South is not that old. Georgia is the youngest state, Mississippi is fairly young, on average, while Florida and Texas are probably the oldest states in the South.
This makes Georgia a very attractive place for Democrats, despite their current state of being largely out of power in the state, because it is less religious, more urban, young, and has a high portion of minorities. It is potentially a place where urban progressives can ally with economic populists from all over the state to win a statewide campaign. However, in most Deep South states, or perhaps all of them, it appears that we will have to run economic populist candidates, who are also fairly conservative culturally. This is to maximize the number of minority voters, and working class whites, who would support the candidate. In a few of the larger and more liberal urban areas Democrats could elect culturally liberal candidates, but these states tend to be too rural and conservative to elect a liberal statewide.
Border States are different. Florida is a very irreligious place, with a high portion of Jews (who vote 3-1 Democratic), a high portion of racial minorities, and a very urban state, one in which we can elect people who are pretty liberal, like Bob Graham (though certainly Graham was quite the populist). The eastern sections of Virginia and North Carolina are not that religious, and parts of them are quite young. Significant portions of them are pretty urban, and both still have significant African American populations, and growing Asian and Latino populations as well. Both are becoming the kinds of states in which we can elect fairly liberal Democrats, like Mark Warner and Kay Hagan.
Texas is a state that deserves a category all to itself. Texas is both very urban and very rural. It also happens to be at the western end of the corridor running through the South which comprises the main concentration of African Americans in the county, and the eastern end of the concentrated area of Latinos in the Southwest. Meeting there in the middle of the Sunbelt, they together have already made Texas a majority minority state, and the proportion of whites in the state should continue to decline, opening it up for Democrats more and more. Because of the preponderance of minorities, and their importance to Democratic chances, it will have to be a fairly conservative, populist Democrat who wins there, generally.
The northwestern states in the Border South, Arkansas, Tennessee, and Appalachian Kentucky and West Virginia remain. Arkansas, West Virginia, and Kentucky are all similar- nearly all white, mostly Democratic, and fairly populist and culturally conservative. Tennessee is a quandary, though. It’s very rural, very white, very evangelical, very gun-toting. We should be able to penetrate it, but it’s difficult. I mean, most of it’s congress people are Democrats, but aside from Cohen, they are not very Democratic. They have a Democratic governor who is fairly conservative. But it boggles my mind why we can’t seem to make progress there. AR, KY, and WV, though, should be competitive, or even solid, for conservative populist Democrats. Arkansas, though, is filled with Tennessee-style Democratic politicians, who are both fairly socially conservative and economically right-neoliberal. We could do better, if it wasn’t for the Clintons and Arkansas being the home of Wal-Mart.
I believe that over the next few cycles we’ll see the South increasingly in play for Democrats, and that Democrats will regain much of the ground they’ve lost in the last few decades. The South will no longer be a base region of the Republican party, but a swing region, like the Midwest and Interior West. There will still be pockets of Republican strength, like Tennessee, and the Texas panhandle, but generally, the South should be trending Democratic, and if we play it the right way, it could be the Solid South for Democrats once again. This time, though, they won’t be Dixiecrats. This time our Southern coalition will consist of progressive professionals and populist white working-class folks, too, but the base of Southern Democracy will be African Americans and Latinos, above all else.