The South a Waste of Time for the Democrats

The New York Times


January 20, 2008
The Way We Live Now
South Poll
By MATT BAI

The campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination has thus far been marked by a heightened sense of history and optimism — the former because its two leading candidates are pushing up against societal barriers that were once thought unmovable; the latter because Democrats feel as assured of recapturing the presidency as they have at any time since the post-Watergate election of 1976. Now it’s reality-check time. After early contests in friendlier territories, the nomination fight moves this week into the heart of the Old South, where the inspiring story line of a woman dueling with an African-American will collide, at last, with another side of history. While much of the primary electorate in South Carolina comprises traditional Democrats (black voters, college-town liberals, etc.), the candidates will nonetheless encounter, in a broader way, a less-welcoming political culture in a state that hasn’t voted for a Democratic nominee since Jimmy Carter.

You could offer a lot of reasons why Democrats have held the White House only sporadically over the last four decades, but mathematically speaking, the greatest obstacle has been the South. In signing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Lyndon Johnson predicted that he and the Democrats were also signing away the next generation of Southern voters, and he was right; since that time, the Dixiecrat bloc that once dominated the Old South has tilted away from the party, and the only Democrats who have managed to reach the White House have been native Southerners. In 2004, John Kerry was shut out in the South and lost South Carolina by 17 points, winning only 22 percent of the white vote, according to exit polls.

It has been in vogue throughout the Bush years for Democrats to assert that the South is unredeemable and politically unnecessary. I remember seeing Kerry speak at Dartmouth College in the days before the 2004 New Hampshire primary, when he flatly told the audience that a Democratic nominee could win the presidency without worrying about the South. (He went on to test the formula; it didn’t work out so well.) Two years later, Thomas F. Schaller, a political scientist and liberal blogger, won over a lot of his fellow progressives with an entire book devoted to the premise that Democrats should ignore the South and instead focus their finite resources on the growing and more diverse states in the West and Southwest. In “Whistling Past Dixie,” Schaller marshaled a pile of statistics to argue, essentially, that the region’s long legacy of prejudice left it hopelessly blind to the nobility of the Democratic cause.

Other Democrats, like Mark Warner, the former Virginia governor, short-lived presidential hopeful and now Senate candidate, have argued that if the party aspires to build a real governing majority like the one it enjoyed for much of the 20th century, it will have to at least compete seriously in the South. (After all, recent history would suggest that while it is “possible” for Democrats to win without making any inroads in the South, it’s possible only in the same way that it’s possible to shoot 10 straight free throws with your eyes closed.) These Democrats insist that the party’s problem isn’t Southern voters but the way Northern and coastal Democrats tend to relate to them or don’t. In other words, if you condescend to Southerners or simply don’t show up, then it’s all but impossible to erase the legacy of mistrust left over from the era of desegregation.

This argument seems especially relevant now. The nationwide dismay over the Bush years may be opening a door for Democrats in Southern states. What’s more, as some of the sharper Democratic strategists have realized, reaching voters down South isn’t only about the South. Culturally and ideologically, there isn’t much that separates most Southern, independent white voters from those who live in exurban Ohio or in rural Missouri. (It was the native Southerner James Carville who famously observed that Pennsylvania was, for all practical purposes, just Alabama sandwiched in between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh.) If Democrats want to win those perennial swing states by anything other than the tiniest of margins, then they will probably have to put forth the kind of candidate and argument that will also resonate in much of the South, whether they care about the region or not.

The question, then, is which of the leading candidates can embody that role. Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards have all asserted that they don’t intend to write off votes the way Kerry did. Clinton has cited her successful campaigns in upstate New York to make the case that she is able to connect with farmers and factory workers despite her reputation as a polarizing figure. Obama has said that because he transcends the ideological wars of the past, he can expand the electoral map that has bedeviled recent Democratic nominees.

If politics were static, you would assume that Edwards would have the best profile for campaigning in the South; like Johnson, Carter and Bill Clinton, he is a native Southerner with a healthy drawl and a populist bent. But politics evolves as the generations pass, and America is not the country it was 24 years ago, when Geraldine Ferraro became the first woman on a major party ticket and Jesse Jackson first ran for president. A lot of Southerners, weary of economic and social divisions, seem eager to close one chapter of their history and open another, and no one should dismiss the idea that a black or female candidate could begin to reverse the party’s long retreat from the South. How South Carolinians and other Southerners engage in this Democratic campaign may tell us something not just about the candidates and their theories of the electorate but also about the New South itself.

Matt Bai, who covers politics for the magazine, is the author of “The Argument: Billionaires, Bloggers and the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics.”