Explain why - or is this another baseless assertation.
Last I checked, the confederate flag as an issue was on the winning side of statewide elections in three different southern states.
In Mississippi citizens overwhelmingly voted to keep it in their state flag. For the record, Mississippi consistently votes for the GOP presidential candidate and sends two republicans to the senate.
In South Carolina citizens threw out a Democrat governor who orchestrated a plot to remove the confederate flag from the capitol. For the record, South Carolina consistently votes for the GOP presidential candidate, has sent a Republican to the senate for almost half a century, and is about to replace its aging democrat segregationist leftover Fritz Hollings in 2004.
In Georgia citizens threw out a Democrat governor who removed confederate symbols from the state flag. Most analysts are in agreement that the unexpected GOP upset turned on the flag issue. For the record, Georgia is an up and coming Republican state that just elected a GOP governor and senator and also supported the Republican candidate for president.
That makes three states, Partisan, where Dixie has won and your PC mongering ilk has lost the popular vote. I have little doubt that were it put to a vote in any of the other CSA states similar results would follow.
It is not any of us who "overestimate" the politics of southerners around here. It is you who consistently underestimates them, just as Jim Hodges, Roy Barnes, Ronnie Musgrave, the DNC, the NAACP, the leftist media and everybody else who got it dead wrong in the Georgia, Mississippi, and South Carolina elections underestimated them.
As it stands right now you are 0 for 3 at the southern ballot box, yet you persist in telling those of us who live here that you know our electorates better than we do! Why is that, Partisan? What do you know about our electorate that we don't? And why, if what you say is true, has the exact opposite happened in three out of three elections where the confederate flag was a major issue? Many of us grew up here and have been involved in local politics for years if not decades. We know our states and we know their electorates. You do not.
You may know your own northern state's electorate and you may even succeed in predicting it. If you do, fine! I'm happy for you and happy that the GOP has one more voice in Maryland or Illinois or wherever you may be to help them guide that state in our direction. But don't think that what you know up there will work down here. Despite popular belief among those who reside there, yankeeland does not know everything. If you try to export what works up there to the south, if you try to run our campaigns and elections the way you run your own, if you give us candidates who reflect yankeeland values and not our own, and if you mess with Dixie, you will lose. You will continue to lose elections involving the flag just as you have lost all of them to date. And if you push us hard enough you will lose the votes that are not only beneficial but also now NECESSARY for a Republican to win the white house. The choice is yours.