Posted on 12/22/2004 10:11:13 AM PST by metalmanx2j
To No Dems 2004:
I believe Torie is basing his assumption on the book called the "the Emerging Democratic Majority". This book brags about how RATS will have an electoral lock on America in the near future. It assumes that as more people graduate from college, the more liberal they become. Also the increase in immigration will provide an endless supply of new voters for the RATS. The authors assume the whole nation will follow in CA's footsteps.
The trends I am talking about are masked by what southernnorthcarolina refers to as the bubba vote, which has particularly in rural areas of the South, largely completed its abandonment of voting for Dems for president. But now that that is completed, as the percentage of the coming out of the South from larger metro areas increases, the absolute numbers will change, all things otherwise being equal. That is my prediction. A huge caveat of course is that the black vote will remain a Dem block vote in the South.
Darn, I forgot to ping you.
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.
That is exactly what I am saying. I am looking a generation out for the erosion to reach the point that the states are really in play.
Baldwin County, Alabama Kerry 22.5% 15,599 Bush 76.4% 52,971 Other 1.1% 750
Now tell me again how Hillary is going to get elected president?
Easy! Just run her against someone who's slightly less favorable, like Scott Peterson.
I can see your point. However, there are many variables, such as the black vote which has been softening somewhat in its intensity for the Dems. Personally, I don't see the South changing all that radically for quite a while. In a generation, politics may be totally different, but I think people are making a big mistake to think that the South will become like California. I just don't think it's going to happen.
California will always be sui generis to the nation in so many ways. Blame the sun, blame whatever, but it is true.
In 2002 GA elected its first GOP governor in 130 years. This year GA Senate and House will also be controlled by GOP.
This week the rural Dem lawmakers in GA have announced they're forming their own caucus of conservative Dems. They're going to try to move the state party to the right. It's not going to work. The national party will never let Dems like Zell have a say in how the party is run.
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.
If demographics were a constant, that argument might be true. However, the liberal states will continue to lose electoral votes to the south as population continues to shift making the blue states more blue and the red states more red.
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
"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. :)
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.
Excellent post all around. I agree with it, except the bit about Maryland. But it flipped about 40 years ago. The point I have been making, and I think x, is that there is a real prospect that the South's social conservatism in many places, particularly the larger metro areas that are growing slowly more dominant, will dilute over time and tend to regress to the mean. But it will take a generation for the trend to really be felt, because the biggest impact will be a generational rather than a migratory one.
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