According to Adam Nossiter of the New York Times, the Southern Strategy is over because the Democrats won a presidential election without using a Southerner on the ticket. Nossiter acknowledges that Obama won Virginia and North Carolina (he doesn’t acknowledge that he won Florida), but then argues:
Along the Atlantic Coast, parts of the “suburban South,” notably Virginia and North Carolina, made history last week in breaking from their Confederate past and supporting Mr. Obama. Those states have experienced an influx of better educated and more prosperous voters in recent years, pointing them in a different political direction than states farther west, like Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana and Mississippi, and Appalachian sections of Kentucky and Tennessee.
Maybe Nossiter thinks you can’t be Southern and educated at the same time. Maybe he thinks that Virginia and North Carolina have educated themselves right out of the South. Hell, I don’t know what he means. I think Virginia, North Carolina, and Florida were pretty integral to Barack Obama’s plan of victory. Look at how much money he spent to win those three states. It turned out that they were superfluous, but that doesn’t mean that Obama won’t be keenly interested in winning them in 2012. In fact, the Republicans are going to need a strategy to take all three states back if they’re going to have any chance of winning a national election.
What Nossiter notes is that parts of the South, including almost all of Appalachia, gave McCain a higher percentage of their votes than they gave to George W. Bush. The only explanation for that is that the people of that region are racist and believed rumors that the ‘Hussein guy’ is a Muslim. I think they’ll get over that feeling by the second State of the Union address.
The South has not been marginalized as a region. They just become less united, that’s all.
The South has not been marginalized as a region. They just become less united, that’s all.
They’re starting to become more like the rest of the country, rather than the exception to nearly every rule that that region has been since I’ve been politically aware. Which may be what Nossiter means in his article (though I agree it isn’t really clear what he means). The more the South becomes like the messy muddle of the rest of the country, the less of a bastion of guaranteed “conservative” votes the area is and the “swingier” it gets.
As far as him “forgetting Florida” goes – a lot of people don’t consider Florida to be part of the political region we call “the South” since it (1) wasn’t part of the Confederacy and (2) has a large Hispanic population. They tend to forget about the panhandle area where folks are more like Georgians than Miamians. Florida’s perpetual “swing state” nature reinforces the perception that it’s not like the rest of the South.
The only explanation for that is that the people of that region are racist and believed rumors that the ‘Hussein guy’ is a Muslim. I think they’ll get over that feeling by the second State of the Union address.
They could also be racist and believe that the “Hussein guy” was black. If that’s the case then they won’t be getting over that feeling by the second State of the Union address. But that area is known as the “Bible Belt” for a reason, so it could well be that they were turning out to prevent a “non-Christian” from becoming President. Some of them could have bought into the idea that Obama was the anti-Christ (sigh). And perhaps some of them turned out for religious reasons – afraid that Obama was going to turn back the one meager gain that conservatives achieved through Bush – the more conservative bent of the Supreme Court.
Florida was part of the Confederacy. FYI, It achieved statehood in 1845, and seceded in 1861. Its population of 140,000 included 63,000 African-Americans, though not all were slaves. This is a minor historical point, but I think the relevancy is that only the Florida panhandle inherited the mantle of the Confederate legacy–and still retains it. The rest of Florida was mostly unpopulated at the time. Also, Florida may be southern in geography, but in the past 40 years it has not been southern in politics.
Otherwise, I agree with your comment, and would like to extend it. The word “educated” should be substituted with “diverse and more metropolitan.” Nossiter used the wrong demographic measure. I think he’s wrong about “more prosperous,” too.
Huh. Thanks for the correction. Somehow that knowledge just completely slipped out my ears and was replaced with the idea that Florida didn’t get statehood until after the war. I’m not sure where that came from.
But, yeah – diverse and metropolitan is a better phrasing than “educated”. As cities in these states get larger and more diverse, their traditional voting patterns will shift to reflect the same urban/suburban issues that the rest of the country sees. That’s what’s happened to shift Virginia, and I suspect that’s what shifted North Carolina as well, though I haven’t looked at that one in particular to double-check it.
Mark Shields said the same thing on PBS after the election. Something like 75% or more of southern white males voted for McCain across the southern belt of Reagan states. The Southern Strategy is intact.
Wonderful to know that it has become insufficient to bar a Democrat from presidential office. The rednecks are diminishing their power to elect presidents or even dominate the Congress. Johnson was right, but not right about how long the Democrats would suffer from the equality legislation he moved into law.
We will need to reevaluate Johnson’s contributions to liberal democracy eventually. Johnson is a major figure in the development of liberal democracy, in this experiment on people determining the course of freedom in our society. The world is waited to see its outcome, and it was positive: a Black president could be elected in this otherwise racist country.
I agree about the need to reassess President Johnson. The South took a generation longer to come partly back to the fold than he predicted: it took two, not one generations. Part of this was due to Carter’s ineptness in the presidency. For all the good he did, he did not run a tight ship. He got hit with the simultaneous disasters of the Great Peacetime Inflation and the hostage-taking incident. Hard to know what he could have done differently with respect to the hostages, except be luckier; but he might have done better on the inflation front, which sealed the deal as far as the Reagan Dems were concerned.
Anyway, what’s past is past. Things are looking up again.
It has been a yahoo strategy. It just so happened that there were proportionately more yahoos living in the south than anywhere else in the country.
As the yahoos…the old species, to use my evolutionary metaphor…die out and are replaced by a newer species, they will no longer predominate in any areas.
Not in any geographical areas, at any rate.
The new low-end approach?
Instead of the Southern Strategy, call it the Sodden Strategy.
Media-sodden.
Propagate the dread Paris Hilton virus, the Reality TV/Fox News (and yes, MSNBC too) talking head viruses, etc., and stampede the TV zombies into whatever clomp-clomp-clomping direction is necessary to make further obscene profits for the Corpse Corps.
Watch.
Will it work?
We shall soon see.
SarahGirl and Greta van Susteren seem to think that it will.
With the help of a vicious God.
SarahGirl may not be able to predict what will happen even with the help of her Xian Taliban prophecy tutors, but I sure as hell can.
They will keep trying. If they’re smart, they’ll find a new front (wo)man because Sarah Palin simply does not have enough talent to do the job. But no matter what huckster is propped up to front the game…they will keep the spiel going as long as they can do so.
Personally, if I were the RatPub media masters, I’d get this guy on my team as soon as possible.
Now that’s talent!!!
A Rove for the new millenium.
later…
AG
As long as there is a rush on buying AK-47s because “Obama is going to take our guns away” there will be a Southern Strategy.
Or, it’s the low-information voter strategy. There is always going to be a portion of the population that can be made afraid and is gullible enough to be easily lied to.
As long as some people are swept up in the “us v. them” model of civic discourse there will be meth heads with rifles in motel rooms plotting their triangulation of fire.
I have to slightly disagree.
As a born and bred–but no longer living there–Virginian, I think the key is this:
There is no longer a “solid South.” Sure, there’s still a “solid Deep South” and probably will be for quite a while, but the South can no longer be counted on to all sway to the same music.
And that is, frankly, Huge.
I was raised in in the state of Washington in the 50’s and 60’s. My mother was not racist, but many of her siblings were as was my step-father.
I went into the Navy after high school and did not think much about race simply because I did not have much contact with people that weren’t white.
After the Navy I went to work in an industrial plant and in a profession where there were very few non-whites. I’m sure there was some prejudicial behavior, but it was subtle enough to escape my notice.
After a divorce I met a woman that is an intellectual peer – she just happens to be black.
As we dated I began to notice subtle points of discrimination that I had never seen before. And this was in ‘liberal’ Washington state.
We moved to Texas because of career necessities and the incidences of subtle and overt discrimination became more prevalent and easy for a northern white boy to see, and we live in a big city with a huge Hispanic population.
To be clear, the individual acts are not institutional and so overt as to necessitate some sort of legal redress toward some business entity. What I am speaking of are acts of individuals – white individuals.
Prior to marrying my love I would have not seen these sorts of acts – it was under my RADAR.
What constantly amazes me is my wife’s immunity to this crap. We’ve discussed it and her take is that it’s just the way it is – no point in getting upset over attitudes and actions that she can’t affect.
And that’s really my point – these discriminatory and racist attitudes are so deeply ingrained in a significant portion of the white population that seeing a profound change in attitude and voting patterns by November 2012 is so unlikely as to be a stunning development in race relations in the USA.
SAQ
As you correctly point out in your post, the real Republican gains came in the periphery of the South and some areas that were never Southern (i.e. West Virginia).
The various maps showing the increase in Republican votes cuts like a swath through all of Appalachia. The exception is that Democrats held their own in Ohio Appalachia. Here in Scioto County we more or less stayed even with Kerry and in Pike County it was 49 McCain-48 Obama. Both Pike and Scioto County had an unusually large number of third party-including Green votes (note we still don’t have complete information from the county offices). Some of the Green votes are real Greens-some others are psuedo-greens: people who have had no connection to the local Green movement but are just pissed off Hillary supporters who have deluded themselves into believing they are liberals.
The old cotton belt, in contrast, (the “real” south) actually experienced constancy or a decline in votes for Republicans.
Significant groups in Appalachia should be voting Democrat. So one question is why did Obama do so poorly in Appalachia and would Hillary have done better?
I’m not obviously offering a comprehensive analysis of Appalachia here. I’m simply suggesting that writing Appalachia off is a bad strategy and that we need deeper and better analysis of voting behavior in Appalachia.
We can win in Appalachia in two ways, one active, one passive.
Passive: opposition to Obama was mainly based on a combination of irrational fear and misinformation. Simply being a reasonable president will resolve this problem.
Active: tangible benefits for the region, including, but not limited to, universal access to health insurance.
Helping transition the region to alternative energy production could create a popular jobs program, for example.
I sure think North Carolina and Virginia educated themselves right out of the south.