Re: A Route for 2004 That Doesn't Go Through Dixie

[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Colonel) wrote in message news:<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>...
> washingtonpost.com 
> Sunday, November 16, 2003
> 
> A Route for 2004 That Doesn't Go Through Dixie 
> By Thomas F. Schaller
> 
> 
> Solid Republican victories in the Kentucky and Mississippi governors'
> races, coupled with Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean's
> clumsy overture to Confederate flag-waving Southerners, have raised
> anew the question of whether the Democrats can compete in the South.
> 
> They can't.
> 
> And precisely because they can't, they should stop trying. Moving
> forward, the Democrats would be better served by simply conceding the
> South and redirecting their already scarce resources to more promising
> states where they're making gains, especially those in the Southwest. 
> 
> I can imagine the laughter of party strategists -- and the ire of
> Southern Democratic officials -- who subscribe to the prevailing
> wisdom that presidential elections are decided in the South. Indeed,
> pundits love to shout into the echo chamber that the last three
> Democratic presidents have come from the South.
> 
> This thinking is not only superficial and retrospective, but it could
> trigger a partisan realignment that would relegate the Democrats to
> minority status for a generation. Trying to recapture the South is a
> futile, counterproductive exercise for Democrats because the South is
> no longer the swing region. It has swung: Richard Nixon's "Southern
> strategy" of 1968 has reached full fruition.
> 
> Bill Clinton's two presidential victories create the misleading
> impression that the 12 states in the South (Maryland and West Virginia
> are generally excluded from Southern strategizing) are more
> competitive than they are. Yes, Clinton carried Arkansas, Kentucky,
> Louisiana and Tennessee twice, plus Georgia in 1992 and Florida in
> 1996. But a closer look shows that Clinton-Gore lost ground in the
> South during the 1990s -- despite a growing economy, a listless 1996
> opponent, an infusion of centrist policies and the two incumbents'
> Southern roots.
> 
> The numbers tell the story. As Reform Party candidate Ross Perot
> dropped 10 percentage points nationally between 1992 and 1996,
> Clinton's share of the popular vote share grew 6.3 points (from 42.9
> percent to 49.2 percent) and increased in all 50 states. Among the 12
> Southern states, however, Clinton eclipsed that nationwide standard
> only in Florida (solidly, at +9.0 points), and in Louisiana and Texas
> (barely, at +6.4 and +6.8 points). In Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia,
> Kentucky, North Carolina and Tennessee, Clinton improved by less than
> half that 6.3 point benchmark. His lowest popular-vote gain -- a mere
> half of 1 percentage point -- came in his home state, Arkansas.
> 
> Note, too, that the South is where insurgents and independents go to
> die. Protest presidential candidates John McCain, Ralph Nader and
> Perot all bombed in the South. Of the 10 states where Perot fared
> worst in 1992, all were in the South. Of the 47 states where Nader was
> on the ballot in 2000, nine of his 10 worst showings came in the
> South. And remember how quickly the humidity of the 2000 South
> Carolina primary melted McCain's sugary tongue?
> 
> Yet some Democrats remain fixated on the notion that the presidency
> hinges on recapturing the region. It doesn't. In 2000, Gore lost his
> native Tennessee and every other Southern state, and still came within
> four electoral votes of the White House. Sure, winning any of the 12
> Southern states would have made Gore president -- but that's also true
> of the other 18 states he lost.
> 
> Gore campaign manager (and Southerner) Donna Brazile says that two
> months before Election Day, the Gore team began to divert resources
> from every Southern state except Florida. The close outcome there
> validated that decision -- the last time around. But the president's
> brother won reelection as governor in 2002 by 13 points, and
> Republicans also control both chambers of the legislature. If Florida,
> with its snowbird, transplanted population, eludes the Democrats, what
> Southern battlegrounds remain?
> 
> The first rule of electoral politics is: Don't Try to Win the Last
> Election. Why, then, do some Democrats seem bent on reviving a
> disintegrated New Deal coalition in order to replay, and somehow win,
> the 1968, 1972, 1980, 1984 and 1988 elections all at once? The bitter
> truth is that the Florida recount was the Democrats' last stand in the
> South for the foreseeable future. Gore capitulated at the vice
> president's residence in Washington. Appomattox would have been the
> more fitting location.
> 
> Farther down the ballot, Democratic fortunes in the South are only
> slightly less gloomy. With each passing election, there are fewer
> state and local Democratic officials to legitimize the party's brand
> name, mobilize resources and serve as surrogates for the national
> party.
> 
> With the recent election results, Republicans hold nine of the 12
> Southern governorships. With incumbent senators retiring in Florida,
> Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina, the Democrats are likely
> to lose at least three Senate races in the 2004 election, which would
> give the GOP an impressive 18 of the South's 24 seats. The Republican
> advantage in the House is much smaller, with 57 percent of the 133
> Southern seats. But if the re-redistricting of Texas goes as House
> Majority Leader Tom DeLay hopes it will, that share will increase next
> year and create yet another GOP congressional delegation majority. At
> present, only Arkansas, Tennessee and Texas are majority-Democrat
> delegations, with Mississippi's four seats evenly divided.
> 
> While the Democrats can claim a slight lead in Southern state
> legislatures -- 13 of 24 House and Senate chambers -- that margin is
> dismal compared with the overwhelming one they had three decades ago.
> The GOP has taken over the North Carolina, Georgia and Kentucky
> Senates, and both houses in Florida, South Carolina, Texas and
> Virginia -- chambers that, not long ago, Republicans only dreamed of
> controlling. After the 1974 elections, the Democrats held 37
> legislatures, the Republicans four, with eight states divided. Thanks
> in part to Southern gains, Republicans now control 21 legislatures to
> the Democrats' 17, with the remaining 11 divided.
> 
> Racial politics has accelerated the party's Southern demise. For
> Democrats, the African American vote in presidential and statewide
> contests is most effective as part of a multi-ethnic coalition, as it
> is in states like Illinois, Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey, New York
> and Pennsylvania. But in the South, racial politics create a
> "blacklash" of white countervoting in favor of GOP candidates. Exit
> polling in Mississippi on Nov. 4 estimated that GOP governor-elect
> Haley Barbour got 77 percent of the white vote.
> 
> Gerrymandering exacerbates the problem. American University professor
> David Lublin has chronicled the GOP's use of redistricting to pack
> black voters into Democratic districts to help elect Republicans
> elsewhere. Here's proof that Democratic voters are too condensed:
> Despite besting Bush in the popular vote, Gore carried only 196
> congressional districts while Bush took 239, according to calculations
> by Democratic data guru Mark Gersh. 
> 
> Gerrymandering also suppresses black turnout in presidential elections
> because majority-black districts are general-election cakewalks for
> minority candidates. In 2002, the 36 voting members of the
> Congressional Black Caucus won reelection with an average of more than
> 80 percent of the vote. In our forthcoming book on black state
> legislators, political scientist Tyson King-Meadows and I report a
> similarly astonishing fact: In 2000, 90 percent of black state
> legislators won with 60-plus percent of the vote, and 60 percent won
> with 90-plus percent of the vote. Facing a ballot full of
> non-contests, black voters have less incentive to turn out, and black
> elites have less incentive to turn them out. Low turnout may not
> threaten the election of black legislators, but it severely damages
> the chances of Democrats running for statewide offices and for
> president.
> 
> When one of the Senate's most racially polarizing figures, Mississippi
> Republican Trent Lott, wins comfortably in the state with the nation's
> largest African American population, relying on Southern black votes
> to win statewide races or electoral votes is, like second marriages,
> the triumph of hope over experience. Just ask the most popular woman
> in America, Hillary Rodham Clinton, the junior senator from Arkan --
> er, New York.
> 
> Lest Republicans rejoice, Gore's 2000 performance also reveals that
> there are plenty of votes to be won elsewhere. Consider, for example,
> the dramatic changes underway in what might be called "the new
> Southwest."
> 
> Between 1988 and 2000, the Democratic margin of defeat plunged from
> more than 21 percentage points to less than 6 points in Arizona and
> just 3 points in Nevada. Combine Nader's votes with Gore's and these
> states have gone from GOP blowouts to tossups in just three election
> cycles. In Colorado, Gore did worse than Michael Dukakis did in 1988,
> but better once Nader's vote is included. Taking a longer view, New
> Mexico went consecutively for Nixon twice, Gerald Ford once, Reagan
> twice, and George H.W. Bush once -- but has gone Democratic since
> 1992. And population growth gives the Southwest four more electoral
> votes in 2004 than in 2000.
> 
> One key to a Democratic Southwest is the growing influence of Latinos,
> who in 2002 became the nation's largest ethnic minority. Two surveys
> conducted last summer, one by pollster Sergio Bendixen and another by
> CBS News/New York Times, indicate that the GOP is losing ground with
> the ethnic group that Karl Rove believes is critical to a Republican
> realignment. And there's more to the story than ethnicity. As
> electoral scholars John Judis and Ruy Teixeira show, these
> Southwestern states feature the progressive-centrist "ideopolis"
> cities of Tucson, Denver, Las Vegas and Santa Fe.
> 
> Future presidential contests get a whole lot easier if Democrats can
> successfully employ a Southwestern strategy. Add the solidly
> Democratic Northeastern and Pacific Coast states. Stir in
> post-industrial, Midwestern Rust Belt states such as Illinois and
> Michigan. If Democrats solve their solvable Ohio problem, they can win
> the presidency without carrying any states south of Maryland and east
> of the Mississippi River. Non-Southern coalitions worked for the GOP
> for decades: William McKinley, Teddy Roosevelt, Warren Harding and
> Calvin Coolidge all coasted to victory without the South.
> 
> A decade ago, Democratic strategist Paul Tully wondered if his party
> should abandon the South and build a national majority elsewhere. No
> less than Tully's sudden and tragic death during the 1992 campaign,
> Clinton's victory that year muted this sentiment.
> 
> Maybe Tully's ghost is channeling to Joe Trippi, Dean's campaign
> manager. Trippi likes to remind reporters that winning all the Gore
> states plus New Hampshire would put Dean in the White House. Because
> the Bush states gained seven electoral votes as a result of the 2000
> Census, Trippi's math is a bit off -- in 2004, that combination only
> yields 264 electors, six shy of the magical 270 threshold.
> 
> But Trippi has the right idea. If the Democrats can hold the Gore
> states -- a big "if," but they have to start somewhere -- plus capture
> newly competitive Arizona's 10 electors, that's exactly 270. A
> non-Southern strategy isn't the only path back to the Oval Office. But
> it may be the shortest.
> 
> --------------
> 
> Thomas Schaller is assistant professor of political science at the
> University of Maryland, Baltimore County. He lives in Washington.

Southern White Males (and their Tammy Wynettes) are the last redoubt
of White Race nationalism.  With the rise of Jews, East Asians and
South Asians to the pinnacles of power - the rest of the U.S. is
fairly rapidly defusing the whole question of race.  Another potent
factor is hispanics - who span the whole spectrum of "race" as
traditionally defined - White Versus Black.

The Repubilcain Party is now the White Race party (plus some deluded
Ayn Randians who believe the Republicans are the party of pure free
enterprise) - but then Southern White Males control everything - which
would mean that it behooves the rest of the country to vote Democratic
- for PURELY POCKETBOOK reasons.  Non-Southern republicans cannot
bring home the pork - the South takes the choicest pickings first.

The de-industrialization of the NorthEast and MidWest and the
migration of Crypto-Southern Northern White businessmen to the South
for its "healthy Bidness climate" has run its course - at any rate
even the South cannot keep low wage industry due to globalization.

Northern businessmen now look beyond the South for low wage labor and
lack of regulations - so that its neanderthal racism need not be
overlooked anymore.

Progressives can start with California/NorthWest/new York/New
Jersey/Massachusetts/Maryland etc as their base and then battle it out
in Illinois,Ohio, Pennsylvnia etc. for their magic number.

Pennsylvania is astounding for having elected the execrable Santorum -
sometimes even the "progressive" NorthEast can bite one in the balls.