One might think that as a Democrat in South Carolina, I wouldn't have much to be thankful for this holiday season. Yet I can see a number of silver linings in the dark clouds that hovered over this state on Election Day.
First of all, despite reports of problems with GOTV downstate and a significant delay in getting serious about supporting candidates for state offices, this is the first time in several years that the SC party apparatus hasn't been in a total shambles. Despite not running any TV spots until just a few weeks prior to Election Day, Tommy Moore managed to close to within ten points of incumbent Governor Wal-Mart Sanford after being down twenty points or more in early October. Yes, we lost our last seat on the Budget and Control Board, but Grady Patterson wasn't exactly progressive anyway, and if it hadn't been for that damned marriage amendment, we would have held onto that one and also ousted our idiot boy Lt. Governor, Andre "Leadfoot" Bauer.
Second, we didn't fare that badly on the national stage, either. We held on to both Democratic House seats, and one of our reps, James Clyburn, will be the next House Majority Whip, giving South Carolina more clout than Texas in the new Congress. And while John Spratt's seat in district 5 was never in serious jeopardy, his opponent put up enough of a fight to tip the national GOP's hand and prompt them to waste some money before bailing out just weeks prior to the election.
But the most promising thing to emerge for this election in SC was the Democratic retention of the office of Superintendent of Education, which prevented a Republican sweep of state constitutional offices. I know: some of you are thinking "how the hell can this be a cause for optimism?" The answer, my friends, is in the details, and what they may reveal about the future of the GOP in the deep south.
The Superintendent of Ed. office came open this year when its current occupant, Democrat Inez Tennenbaum, announced her retirement. Inez has been a strong advocate for public education in SC, and on her watch the state has adopted educational standards that are among the strongest in the nation, lifting our educational system out of "thank God for Mississippi" status (no disrespect to Mississippi, but that has been a popular saying down here for a long time) to a respectable level. In the process, she has managed to remain fairly popular with the public, and in fact ran a very competitive race against Jim DeMint in the 2004 U.S. Senate election. But when I found out that she was retiring, I feared the worst, and the worst was what I got.
The worst in this case was Karen Floyd, a pro-voucher ex-prosecutor with a prim soccer-mom look and no experience whatsoever in education. From the time of her primary victory, she looked like a shoo-in. She wore her complete lack of credentials with pride, citing her experience as a mother as sufficient qualification for the complex duties of an ed. superintendent. Her opponent, Jim Rex, was running such a low-key campaign that had my wife not been active in the NEA, I would not have had a clue who he was. I learned over time that he was well-qualified, having served as a teacher, coach, and college dean over a three-decade career in education. He was perfect for the job, and there was no way in hell that he was going to win.
Or so I thought. Rex was trailing Floyd by 12-15 points in most polls as late as October, and like the other Democratic candidates, he didn't start running commercials until a few weeks before the election. A one-sided victory in their only debate helped him to close the gap, but Floyd still looked like a sure thing. After all, she had the same thousand-yard stare that I saw on some of my fellow voters on election morning. And as an added boost to her campaign, the day before the election she was a victim of a strange accident similar to the ones that her fellow Republican candidates had experienced, which were so bizarre that a person with conspiratorial leanings might have thought that they had been staged. First there was Andre Bauer's plane crash, then Governor Wal-Mart's eye-burning incident; then, as Floyd's private plane was circling to land, her cabin door flew open, forcing her to dig in her heels and say the Lord's Prayer as Satan's minions tried to hoover her out into the ether. It made for a good story, sure to resonate with the legions of freaks poised to turn out at the polls the next day to demonstrate to the country just what they think of faggots.
But it didn't quite turn out that way for Karen Floyd. On election night, as I sat in my den enjoying watching J.C. Watts babble incoherently and Bill Bennett try to draw his head down into his body like a turtle, I was also keeping one eye on the one remaining race that had not been decided in S.C. Even after the media had called the governor's race for Sanford, and Bauer pulled ahead of his opponent, Jim Rex still had an 18,000-vote lead over Karen Floyd. Then, as the upstate and low country precincts started coming in, it dwindled. To 16,000. 9,000. 3,000. 1,200. 300. It was maddening. I went to bed that night with mixed feelings, elated that Dems were taking back the House but concerned that the future of my wife's profession lay in the balance.
A few days later, after all the absentee and provisional ballots had been counted, Rex was certified the winner by less than 600 votes. The mandatory recount changed little, and Rex began assembling his transition team. Relieved, I pulled up the numbers several times just to stare at them, and in doing so, I saw some interesting things in the breakdown.
Unlike the other races for state offices, which had one or two candidates on the ballot, this race for an open office drew six candidates. The libertarian candidate received almost 20,000 votes. Libertarians don't require party allegicance, so in SC, the Libertarian Party (should I even capitalize that?) is little more than a dumping ground for various weirdos -- like their congressional candidate in our district, who promised to abolish abortion if elected, earned the support of freaky groups like the League of the South and Christian Exodus, and was arrested for beating his wife the weekend before the election. In short, given the state of the SC libertarians, one can safely assume that they siphoned many more votes away from Floyd than from Rex.
Just over 6,500 more votes went to the candidate from the Constitution Party. You will note that I linked directly to their website. Don't be afraid to give them some traffic. It'll only encourage them, and that would be a good thing. There is some overlap between them and the SC libertarians, but they are made up mostly of radical anti-tax people (think Montana Freemen) and theocrats. It is safe to assume that virtually all their candidate's votes in this race were siphoned from Floyd.
One might look at the breakdown and think: so what? A roughly equal amount of votes went to the Green and Independence candidates, most of which would have gone for Rex. Yet I would argue that the candidate for the Independence Party -- an outgrowth of the old Reform Party that is equally critical of Democrats and Republicans -- took more votes away from Floyd than the Libertarian candidate took away from Rex. Moreover, with the national Democratic Party strenghtening and the GOP weakening, the Libertarian and Constitution parties have more potential for drawing right-wing votes away from the Republicans than the Green and Independence parties have for drawing progressive votes away from Democrats. Finally, while my research of this is admittedly cursory, it appears that while past SC races with Green and Independence candidates have yielded fairly constant numbers, corresponding totals for Libertarian and Constitution candidates seem to be trending upward.
Thus I believe that this election exposed some chinks in the armor of the GOP in the south by demonstrating that its hardcore right-wing base of fundies, racists, and tax protesters will splinter when provided with alternatives freakier than the Republicans. Splinter they did in this election, to the tune of well over 2% of total voters. This leaves the GOP with the same dilemma in the south that they faced when they controlled the entire nation: try to attract swing voters and alienate their base, or lean hard to the right and knock moderates and independents right off the fence. And yes, there are swing voters in the south; four out of ten voters in this state voted for Kerry in 2004 -- and as some commenters have pointed out in other diaries, many if not most of those voters were white.
The south is where the GOP will make its final stand, and I wish to emphasize the word "final." If a Democratic victory is to be total, it will have to be fought in the south. I am grateful to Kos for emphasizing this, and for imploring progressives not to abandon this region. There are many good, progressive people in the south. Many of us are members of this blog. We have our own reasons for staying -- good ones, numerous ones, and we will not apologize for them. We've taken more than our share of bashing from some of our fellow Kossacks; yet we stay here, because we believe. We're working hard for change, and we're fighting the right where they live. We want the opportunity to be the ones to twist the knife. And like the rest of you, we can't wait until January.
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