There has been considerable discussion here about whether the Democrats need a Southern Strategy(going at least back to my first diary entry on October 22nd).
Many of us have argued that what we need is a Midwestern and Southwestern strategy, because this is where most of the swing states are. A recent article in the WaPo articulates in much greater detail than I've been able to muster just how extensive the reasons for putting the South on the backburner for Presidential elections are.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A40359-2003Nov14.html
There are two arguments I've heard here to defend a focus on the South for Democrats.
- If we're strong in the south, it makes Republicans divert resources from other places to win those states.
- Strength in the South serves to indicate strength in states that border the South, which includes a lot of the Midwest.
There is something to each of these arguments, but not much, in my view. The first argument is weakened by the fact that if a Democratic candidate is strong in the south, that candidate will be strong everywhere. This is not a reason to focus on the south, but a reason to focus on getting a strong candidate. Not even Bill Clinton at his most charismatic (the 1996 election) did very well in the South. We can have crushing victories with a strong candidate who takes only a couple of Southern border states, and we can win (by a good margin) without any Southern states at all.
The second argument is similarly flawed. Yes, if you've got 50% of the vote in Georgia as a Democratic presidential candidate today you almost certainly have more than 50% in Ohio. But that just means that you are a singularly gifted and appealing politician, or that your opponent is a disaster. It provides no reason at all to focus on themes that appeal to Southerners or to nominate a candidate who is from the South.
Moreover, all this argument does is to show that the real battle is over places like Ohio. If I want to win in Ohio, I'm not going to try to appeal to people in Mississippi (though southern Ohio certainly does have a lot in common with Tennessee and Kentucky).
To bring it around to Dean (like I usually do), we can argue about whether Dean is a good candidate in the general election, but doing so on the basis of how well he does in the South is a big, big mistake.