GOP Has Lock on South, and Democrats Can't Find Key

WASHINGTON — The generation-long political retreat of Democrats across the South is disintegrating into a rout.

President Bush dominated the South so completely in last month's presidential election that he carried nearly 85% of all the counties across the region — and more than 90% of counties where whites are a majority of the population, according to a Times analysis of election results and census data.

The Times' analysis, which provides the most detailed picture yet of the vote in Southern communities, shows that Bush's victory was even more comprehensive than his sweep of the region's 13 states would suggest.

His overwhelming performance left Sen. John F. Kerry clinging to a few scattered islands of support in a region that until the 1960s provided the foundation of the Democratic coalition in presidential politics. Kerry won fewer Southern counties than any Democratic nominee since the Depression except Walter F. Mondale in 1984 and George S. McGovern in 1972, according to data assembled by The Times and Polidata, a firm that specializes in political statistics.

In Southern counties without a substantial number of African American or Latino voters, Bush virtually obliterated Kerry. Across the 11 states of the old Confederacy, plus Kentucky and Oklahoma, whites constitute a majority of the population in 1,154 counties. Kerry won 90 of them.

By contrast, Bill Clinton won 510 white-majority counties in the South eight years ago.

"We are out of business in the South," said J.W. Brannen, the Democratic Party chairman in Russell County, Ala., the only white-majority county in the state that Kerry carried.

The results underscore the enormity of the challenge facing Democrats as they try to rebuild their Southern support. Most ominously for them, the patterns suggest that under Bush, the GOP is solidifying its hold not just on Southern white conservatives but white moderates as well, a trend also apparent in exit polls of Southern voters on election day.

"As the older white moderates leave the scene, they are being replaced with younger moderates more willing to vote Republican," said Merle Black, a political scientist at Atlanta's Emory University and the author of several books on Southern politics.

Compounding the Democratic dilemma is the growing tendency of Southern whites who vote Republican for president to support GOP candidates down the ballot. In 1984, Ronald Reagan won slightly more counties across the South than Bush did this year; but after Reagan's landslide, Republicans held 12 of the 26 U.S. Senate seats in the region.

After Bush helped the GOP win six open Southern Senate seats last month, Republicans now hold 22 of the 26 Senate seats in the 13 states.

That is the most either party has controlled in the region since Democrats also won 22 in 1964 —ironically, the election in which the white backlash against the Civil Rights Act allowed the GOP to make its first inroads into the South.

Forty years later, under a Southern Republican president, the South has become an electoral fortress for the GOP. Outside the South, Democrats hold more House and Senate seats and won many more electoral college votes than the GOP last month. But the GOP's advantage in the region has been large enough to overcome those deficits and create Republican majorities in both chambers of Congress and the electoral college.

And the magnitude of November's Republican sweep last month suggests the GOP advantage across the region is expanding.

"I don't think that for 50 years we're going to be a Republican section of the country," said former Democratic National Committee Co-Chairman Donald L. Fowler of South Carolina. "I really believe we have the potential to turn a lot of this around in a decade. But it will take constructive, directed, consistent work to do it. It's just not going to happen by itself. We're in too big a hole."

Politically, the South includes 13 states: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia. Together they cast 168 electoral college votes, more than three-fifths of the 270 required for election.

Many political analysts see Bush's commanding performance across the region — and Republican gains in other elections during his presidency — as the fourth wave in the GOP's Southern ascendance.

The GOP, which was founded in the 1850s as a Northern party opposed to the expansion of slavery, won very few Southern states in presidential races for a full century after the Civil War. Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt won every Southern state in all four of his presidential campaigns.

Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower had some Southern success in the 1950s. But the GOP planted its first lasting roots in the region amid the white backlash against the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts under Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson in the mid-1960s.

Opposition to the new civil rights laws, and to such follow-on initiatives as affirmative action and school busing for racial integration, powered the first wave of GOP gains in the South. But the party expanded its appeal by courting Southern whites with conservative messages on such nonracial issues as taxes, national defense and moral values. That second advance reached a crescendo during Ronald Reagan's two elections.

"Reagan's presidency was the turning point in the evolution of a competitive, two-party electorate in the South," Black and his brother, Earl Black, wrote in their 2002 book, "The Rise of Southern Republicans."

For the next decade, Democrats remained competitive enough for Southerner Bill Clinton to capture five Southern states in 1992. But the disenchantment over Clinton's chaotic first two years fueled a third wave of GOP Southern gains. In their midterm landslide of 1994, Republicans for the first time captured the majority of House and Senate seats from the South.

As Clinton pursued a more centrist course after 1994, Democrats stanched their congressional losses in the South and even regained some governorships. In 1996, Clinton again won five Southern states.

In the Senate, Republicans have increased the number of seats they hold in the 13 Southern states from 18 before Bush took office to 22. (The GOP has now won the last 10 open-seat Senate races in the South.) In the House, Republicans have stretched their advantage in the Southern states from 27 seats before Bush took office to 40 today.

"This is a cumulative process that has gained critical momentum in the past four years," said Karl Rove, Bush's chief political advisor.

In 2000, Bush won 1,047 counties across the South and held then-Vice President Al Gore (news - web sites) to 294, according to Polidata.

This year, Bush won 1,124 counties and held Kerry to 216, according to Polidata figures based on preliminary election results. (The South had one fewer county this year than in 2000 because two jurisdictions merged in Virginia.)

Those numbers represent a catastrophic decline for the Democrats since the 1990s, when Clinton won more than 650 counties in each of his presidential victories. Bush has become the first candidate since Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1940 and 1944 to carry more than 1,000 Southern counties twice.

Even those dramatic numbers may not express the full extent of the Democrats' erosion.

Kerry carried 126 Southern counties where racial minorities — primarily African Americans, but also Latinos in Texas — are a majority of the population, according to a Times analysis of census and Polidata figures. That's only slightly fewer than the 142 "majority-minority" counties Clinton won across the South in 1996.

But Kerry won fewer than one-fifth as many majority-white Southern counties as Clinton did. In all, Kerry carried fewer than 8% of Southern counties with a white majority. Kerry won only one majority-white county in each of Alabama, South Carolina and Mississippi; in Texas he carried two of 196.

Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster specializing in the South, said a combination of long-term trends and more immediate factors combined to produce Bush's advantage.

"It's the historic conservatism of the South reinforced by a contest between a Southern Republican conservative and a Northeastern liberal Democrat at a time when the debate was dominated by national security, where the South has historically been very pro-military, with a kicker of cultural values —specifically, gay marriage — where the South has long been the most culturally conservative region of the country," Ayres said. "You put all those factors together, and it's a formula for a Democratic wipeout."

Also contributing to the debacle was Kerry's decision to essentially write off the region, except Florida, after Labor Day. Although he bought television advertising early on in Louisiana, Arkansas, Virginia and North Carolina, and picked Sen. John Edwards (news - web sites) from that state as his running mate, Kerry pulled his ad buys from all of them by early September.

Few Democrats believe the party can — or needs to — be competitive at the presidential level anytime soon in Deep South states such as South Carolina, Alabama and Mississippi, or Texas and Oklahoma in the Southwest.

But many believe that a key lesson of 2004 is that the Democrats need a candidate who can seriously contest at least some Southern states, starting with Virginia, North Carolina and Arkansas, and perhaps Louisiana, Tennessee, Kentucky and Georgia. Democrats also will find it difficult to regain control of the House and especially the Senate if they cannot reduce the Republican advantage in the South.

"The one incontrovertible thing we learned is we are going to have to be competitive in more parts of the country," said Ed Kilgore, policy director of the Democratic Leadership Council, the party's leading centrist group.

Democratic support has collapsed in most of those states to the point that the party has only a meager foundation to build on.

The white-majority counties that Kerry held fall into a few distinctive categories. He won some poor, rural counties, particularly in outer Southern states such as Arkansas, Tennessee and Kentucky. Kerry won some of the few Southern counties with a significant trade union presence, like Jefferson County, Ky., which includes Louisville, and Jefferson County, Texas, around Port Arthur and Beaumont.

Kerry also performed well in college towns, capturing the counties that house the principal state university in Florida, Georgia, Virginia, Texas and North Carolina. And he won the parts of the South most like the North: the southeastern Florida retirement havens of Broward and Palm Beach counties and the northern Virginia suburbs of Washington.

Kerry also showed strength in some relatively affluent majority-white communities with large numbers of public employees and college-educated professionals. These are places such as Mecklenburg County, around Charlotte, N.C., where Kerry won a higher proportion of the vote than any Democrat since FDR in 1944; Fairfax County, Va., which voted Democratic for the first time since 1964; Davidson, Tenn., around Nashville; and Leon County, Fla., around the state capital, Tallahassee.

Those wins, among voters who resemble the affluent and socially moderate suburbanites of the Northeast and Midwest, could offer a path for the party to compete in states such as Virginia and North Carolina.

But mostly the results underscored Kerry's inability to crack the middle-class Southern suburbs, or indeed, virtually any component of the Southern white population.

Bush romped in suburban and exurban areas, from Shelby County, Ala., to Gwinnett and Cobb counties in Georgia. He captured several of the large urban areas, like Birmingham, Ala., and Tampa, Fla., that Kerry typically won outside the South, and virtually swept the table in rural and small-town communities apart from the few Democratic holdouts in the outer South.

The breadth of Bush's success in majority-white counties spotlighted his ability to reach beyond his conservative base.

According to the election day exit polls, Kerry won white moderates only in Tennessee and Florida, and he tied Bush among them in Arkansas. In every other Southern state, Bush not only beat Kerry among white moderates but held him to 44% or less with that group. Kerry won white liberals in each state, but they represented no more than about one-sixth, and sometimes as little as one-ninth, of the white population.

Even many Democrats say the Republican surge among white moderates will force the party back to the drawing board. During the late 1990s, Democrats led by Clinton thought they had constructed a new formula for Southern success by linking African Americans and moderate white suburbanites through messages that muted social issues while emphasizing economic development and improving public education.

"But with the growth of the exurbs, the polarization of the parties and the decline in ticket-splitting, Republicans appear to have put together an overwhelming majority in the South again," Kilgore said. "They are now carrying the suburban vote and totally dominating the rural areas. The question: Can Democrats come up with a new biracial coalition?"

For the near term, at least, Rove remains confident that the answer is no. "If you accept my underlying assumption that this is the result of a trend that has gained momentum over the years and has been reinforced under President Bush, what is the act that is going to stop it and reverse it?" he asked.

"Once these things get set in motion, they require something on the landscape done by one or both parties, or events to intrude, to stop it and reverse it."

You may be looking at two different time frames. It's likely that the GOP will stay pretty much as strong as it is now in the South in 2008 and 2012. A Southern Presidential or Vice Presidential candidate might help the Democrats dislodge a state or two or three, as would some catastrophe or GOP failure, but the basic percentages would remain about the same.

But further out, in 2016, 2020 and beyond, things could look very different. And we may be seeing the seeds of such changes now. If the split in the country is urban/rural, Southern urbanites may come to look at things differently. If Republican percentages go up as Yellow Dog Democrats pass from the scene, they may go down as first generation Republicans follow the Democratic die-hards off the stage, and new voters with weaker regional loyalties take their place.

If Florida or Virginia or North Carolina goes for the Democrats in 2008 or 2012 and are accompanied by Georgia or Louisiana or Arkansas, it will take some of the wind out of redstate/bluestate polemics. So from having been Republican gains in the 1950s and 1960s, picked off from the Solid South, FL, VA or NC may lean Democratic in a majority Republican region. I don't think it has to do any emerging Democratic majority in the country as a whole, but with a certain small sector of the middle class naturally gravitating to the Democrats and putting them over the top in some states.

With migration from abroad and from other parts of the country, Southern politics will change. And plenty of urban Southerners will come to look like their Northern counterparts. But whatever trend there is will take more than four years, or even eight, to really make itself felt.

Baldwin County is a GOP bastion relative to its state, in a state that is a relative GOP bastion to its region, in a region that is a relatively GOP bastion to its nation, at present, so you live in a GOP cubed zone (wall to wall relatively high income WASP exurban Southerners). Can you really stand it not having the opportunity to rub shoulders with worldy secular humanist types? It must be awful. I myself would turn to substance abuse if consigned to that fate. :) Cheers and have a merry one.

Baldwin County, Alabama
Kerry	22.5%	15,599	
 
Bush	76.4%	52,971	
 
Other	1.1%	750

If you told people in 1950 or 1960 that in 40 or 50 years SC, MS, AL and OK would be reliably Republican and VT, ME, NJ and OR solidly Democratic in presidential elections, they'd think you were crazy, but nonetheless, that's what happened.

Even in the 1980s Reagan swept Northern New England. Vermonters might admire their distinguished Democratic governor -- the only one ever elected up till then -- but Democrats still looked like exotic outsiders. And now things are very different. Old parsimonious, Yankee Republican New England is gone. Migration, urbanization, and an appeal to remaining Yankee values on issues like the environment helped move Vermont and Maine into the Democrat column.

And now similar forces are moving VI, FL and maybe NC in the same direction. You could think of it as a continuation of the process that took MD and DE from the old Democratic South into the new Democratic East, or as the second stage of the process that led many Southern states away from the solid South towards a middle American Republicanism in the '50s, '60s and '70s.

By now, Northern Virginia looks more like the East than like the South, and its voting patterns will probably change accordingly, eventually pulling the rest of the state with it at least some of the time. It's not so different from the process that made VT or OR vote like NY.

That's not to say that as areas get more developed they always become more Democratic or more liberal or that the process is irreversible, but if the prevailing divide is urban vs. rural, some areas will give more votes to Democrats as they become more urbanized -- at least until the issues change again.

BTW, if you haven't seen it yet, you might appreciate W.J. Cash's view that the predominant cleavage in American politics would become East-West, rather than North-South, with the Democrats as the Eastern party. Cash was writing in 1928 in response to Prohibition and the Hoover-Smith race, but he's surprisingly relevant today.

"California will always be sui generis to the nation in so many ways. Blame the sun, blame whatever, but it is true."

That's a major reason why I think the famed notion of the 'Emerging Democratic Majority' is inherently flawed. We have to remember that arguments based in part or wholly on political changes in states like California with subsequent comparisons with states like North Carolina and even Virginia are misguided at best. California's social infrastructure is inherently liberal. Even in the days of Ronald Reagan when CA was voting Republican in many (though by no means all) elections, everybody knew CA wasn't a bastion of social conservatism. Thus, it should come as no surprise that California avoids candidates like George W. Bush (even though they gave him nearly 45% of the vote this time). By comparison, the South's social infrastructure is - and always has been - very conservative.

For years, we've been hearing stories about how North Carolina's population is changing, etc, and how that will show up in the state's voting trends. Yet, it doesn't change the fact that NC is still reliably Republican in presidential and many other federal races. Even WITH John Edwards on the ticket, NC went overwhelmingly for Bush, exceeding most expectations.

x,

Your argument is severely lacking from the simple reality of social issues or infrastructure, as I like to call it. The reason VT, ME, NJ and OR have become more or less Democratic states doesn't just have to do with suburbs and other circumstantial elements. No, it has to do with the fact that voters in these states are fundamentally LIBERAL. Vermonters were James Jeffords Republicans just like Georgians used to be Zell Miller Democrats. Maine's popular Republicans are Snowe and Collins. Ideology plays a HUGE role in all this. Oregon and New Jersey have never been very conservative either. The main reason they flipped over is that liberal Republicans have become a dying breed and they don't like the modern Republican politicians. Gerald Ford did well in these states, but not George W. Bush - just like Jimmy Carter did better in the South than John Kerry. Carter wouldn't do well now because he's so much more liberal these days, but in the 1970s he was more conservative.

I'm not saying the South is immune to change, but I don't see a change really soon to the fundamental make-up of the region.

I don't agree with you about voters in Northern states like Vermont or Maine being fundamentally liberal if by "fundamental" you mean "essentially" or "inherently," but I'm going to try to be brief and to the point this time.

Migration and urbanization change things. You can see this in Western states like Arizona, Nevada, and Colorado. Once quite conservative and solidly Republican, they're now swing states. If they become safe states for the Democrats, somebody may say that they were really liberal in culture all along, but that's doubtful.

I doubt Alabama and Mississippi are going to go Democrat in our lifetimes, but given the demographic changes going on now it's likely that Virginia, Florida, and maybe North Carolina are going to be in play for both parties sometime in this generation.

Look at Maryland, in many ways a Southern state, and long a conservative one. Today it's liberal and Democrat, largely because of Baltimore and Washington and government employees. Right now, you can see the same sort of thing going on in Virginia. It won't make Virginia into Maryland or Vermont, but it's bound to have an effect over the next generation.

If it were just the growth of cities, you might have a better case. Cities will probably grow in Utah, and the state will retain its character and political orientation. But migration from other parts of the country or from other countries does accelerate and intensify change.

If Nevada or Arizona can change parties because of growth, why should Virginia or Florida be immune? Whether or not conservatism or Southernness or their relationship to each other will change, some states certainly will be very different in the future from what they were in the recent past.

Those poor Liberals are still suffering from the election defeat flu obtained in the cold November rain. It must be a cold dark place, alone, scared, wondering how to make someone love you when your mind is straining from the thought your only hope is Hillary and her ability to appeal to red state conservatives who already have read the book on her. To know that when your fears subside over another four years of GWB and shadows of Kerry still remain you will always have your special time as a Deaniac to reflect back on when times were good for you until.....YEEEEAAAAAHH! perched on his lips and flew away leaving you with Kerry as your only hope which died an ugly death despite conflicting early voter exit polls that must have pushed you to the very edge of euphoria only to come crashing down harding than Ted Kennedy drying out at the Betty Ford Clinic. The red states are getting more red while the blue blots are turn light blue. LOL

Here is a paragraph was a just posted article from The New Republic:

"White Southern liberals still exist, but they are too rarely a viable political or social presence, particularly in the Deep South of Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina, and rural Georgia. Back home in Nashville, I had lunch with one such rarity. David Carlton is a history professor at Vanderbilt University (and a Presbyterian church elder) who grew up in a South Carolina mill town before escaping north to Amherst. But he was drawn back, both by his intellectual pursuits and his regionalist pinings. Over sandwiches and coffee, he foretold of dark times. "I don't believe the political realignment of the region is complete yet," he said. "What appears to be an increasingly toxic blend of traditional conservatism and 'Christian' moralism continues to gain strength."

YMMV. Mine certainly does. :)

Carlton sounds like a gentry liberal, part of the problem for Democrats rather than a solution. Democrats are only going to win in the South when their voters can still be "regular guys," rather than repentant noblemen. And that may be what separates the blue states from the red ones.

That's why newcomers in places like Northern VA or Southern FL are so important to the Democrats. They're outside of the existing tribal paradigm and not bound by its categories and restrictions. The same was true of some of the Republicans who led states like FL, VA, or TX from the Democrats in the '50s, '60s, and '70s. At least some of those voters and organizers and candidates were outsiders -- like G.H.W. Bush -- who were more comfortable with the Republicans than most native Southerners.

You can see something of the same pattern in Northern states where the traditional divide wasn't so much Black-White as Catholic-Protestant. It's the outsider, who doesn't fit neatly on one side of the divide or the other, who can get around tribal chasms and change things, and the newcomer who leads the way in voting for a minority party on the rise.

I don't want to underestimate the contributions of those on the inside who buck existing trends, and I'm not rooting for the Democrats, but sometimes the people who can best break with taboos and tribal hostilities are those who aren't aware of such things or who can't take society's divisions so seriously.

X,

I think that you're missing the point, at least in part, to what I am saying. I am speaking of social conservatism and its prevailing influence in the South. In that regard, Vermont and Maine simply don't line up. If Vermont or Maine ever had Alabama or North Carolina values, it certainly wasn't recently. True, they're more conservative than Canadians or the French, but still socially liberal by American standards (just ask Howard Dean).

As for Arizona, Nevada and Colorado, you're making a pretty sweeping assumption with those states, too. Arizona was once a solidly Republican state but it was so in the mould of Barry Goldwater. But Goldwater wasn't socially conservative like the current GOP is. Goldwater's conservatism ran in different veins and it's telling of Arizona today that John McCain is probably the most popular politician in the state. I've read convincing arguments that AZ has become less reliably Republican in recent years because many traditional Republican voters there aren't really wild about the modern southern-oriented GOP. That said, the Prez still took the state with 55% of the vote this year and conservative Republicans do exist in the state, though strange things exist like the fact that the only openly gay GOP congressman hails from that state.

Colorado and Nevada are similar to this, too. Many of the Western states have a 'cowboy' style of conservatism with that rugged, individualistic approach to life - a characteristic that doesn't play well with Democrats. Nevada, in particular, is a flawed example in that it has never been a conservative bastion, considering that it the home to Sin City, an element you won't find much of in most southern states.

The point I'm making here is that, even though demographic changes HAVE impacted these states, their turning away from the Republicans has also been for social reasons. In 2000, for instance, exit polls in Nevada and Arizona showed that voters who had moved to those states since 1990 were MORE likely to vote Bush than the ones who had been there before 1990.

Finally, your argument that Maryland has left the South is flawed simply because Maryland was never part of the South in the first place! It's not like Maryland has gone from being reliably Republican to Democrat.

"If Nevada or Arizona can change parties because of growth, why should Virginia or Florida be immune?"

Truth is, Nevada and Arizona haven't changed parties in recent years (considering that both states are still majority Republican) - just have become more competitive. But, like I just said, this is not just because of growth but is very largely due to the prevailing ideology in these states that isn't quite as conservative about things like homosexuality, abortion and other hot button issues that fell Democrats all over the South.

So, will North Carolina become like Nevada or Maryland? I don't think so, because I believe they are imperfect comparisons. Will North Carolina become more competitive soon? Possibly, but, as we've seen in this most recent election, the state is fiercely difficult to move from its traditional voting trends. It's still the home state of Jesse Helms and I believe it will be for some time to come. I just believe your argument is flawed in that, talking about urbanisation and migration, you have forgotten that most of the states you mentioned were going to leave the modern GOP with or without these changes due to a conflict of social values.

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