1.

1.

Safety
2.

Editorial

Another Baseless Attack on Health Law

3.

Gail Collins

Dinner Party Political Primer

4.

Joe Nocera

Prosecuting Insider Trading

5.

Roger Cohen

The Way Back to Iran

6.

Dispatch

The Talk: After Ferguson, a Shaded

Conversation About Race
7.

Editorial

Keeping the Mentally Ill Out of Jail

8.

Editorial

Uruguays Guantnamo Gesture

9.

Editorial Observer

Mr. Obama Considers the Nationwide Protests

From Three Points of View
10.

Op-Ed Contributor

Why Japanese Voters Feel Hopeless

11.

Contributing Op-Ed Writer

Is It Bad Enough Yet?

12.

Taking Note

Supreme Court Revisits Life Sentences for

Juveniles
13.

Quick History

A Partisan Divide in the Face of Our National

Shame
14.

Gray Matter

How Social Status Affects Your Health

15.

Taking Note

Not Everyone Said Yes to Torture

16.

Taking Note

Senate Committee Bothered to Authorize War

Against Islamic State
17.

Opinionator | Fixes

Big Ideas in Social Change, 2014

18.

Op-Talk

Does the U.S. Need a New Approach to Putin?

19.

Contributing Op-Ed Writer

Abundance Without Attachment

20.

Op-Ed Contributor

Joy to the Packaging People

21.

Room for Debate

A Global Court's Effectiveness

22.

Op-Docs

Toys of War
23.

Letters

The Torture Report: Voices of Outrage

24.

Letter

The Odyssey of the Greek Marbles

25.

Letter

Act on the Climate, and Brush Off the Deniers

26.

Patrick Chappatte

Doublespeak on Torture
2. Loading...
See next articles
See previous articles

Opinion

Should Democrats Write Off the South?

By John Guida
December 10, 2014 3:33 pmDecember 10, 2014 3:33 pm
Photo

Credit William Widmer for The New York Times

Southern Democrats are becoming a political endangered species. And with the defeat of
Mary L. Landrieu last weekend in a Louisiana runoff election, Democratic senators from the
Deep South have gone extinct.
The outcome was yet another sobering reminder of their partys declining prospects in the
South, a region they dominated for much of the 20th century, Richard Fausset writes at The
New York Times.
In the House of Representatives, there are no white Democrats from the Deep South, and
Republicans now control most state legislatures and governorships in the region.
The political scientist Thomas F. Schaller is not surprised. In 2006, he wrote the book on
giving up on the South. That book, Whistling Past Dixie, urged Democrats to develop a
non-Southern national electoral strategy.

Now the situation for Democrats in the South, he writes at The Baltimore Sun, is more bleak,
even as their national prospects remain solid.
The number of Southern Democrats as a whole is shrinking, he says, and the loss is led by
the disappearance of whites from the party.
Still, he says, At this point, with Democrats having hit rock bottom in the South and
nowhere to go but up, Im almost persuaded its time to re-invest there. Almost.
But for Michael Tomasky, at The Daily Beast, its time for Democrats to say good riddance
to the region.
Well, like Mr. Schaller says, almost. He makes exceptions for certain states in presidential
politics: Florida and Virginia, plus North Carolina and, eventually, perhaps Georgia and even
Texas. (Which of course leads to the question: What is the South?)
But otherwise, he says, dont lift a finger: At the congressional level, and from there on
down, the Democrats should just forget about the place.
They should spend no money and expand no effort, Mr. Tomasky writes. This means every
Senate seat will be Republican, and 80 percent of the House seats will be, too. He points out
that Democrats will retain their hold on the majority-black districts, and theyll occasionally
be competitive in a small number of other districts in cities and college towns, and between
that, the blue states in the North and on the coasts, and the pockets of opportunity that exist in
other states (especially in the West), the Democrats can cobble together congressional
majorities in both houses, under the right circumstances.
He bases this view on what he sees as the intransigence of Southern culture, and what
Democrats would give up by appealing to it. He writes: Practically the whole region has
rejected nearly everything thats good about this country and has become just one big nuclear
waste site of choleric, and extremely racialized, resentment. A fact made even sadder because
on the whole theyre such nice people! (I truly mean that.)
So trying to win Southern votes is not worth the ideological cost for Democrats, he says:
The Democratic Party cannot (and Id say should not) try to calibrate its positions to placate
Southern mores.
But Jonathan Bernstein at Bloomberg View does not see such heavy costs: Trying to shift
the entire Democratic Party so its center of opinion is equal to that in South Carolina or
Mississippi would be a bad idea. But accepting a diversity of candidates, with national
Democrats willing to support centrists or mild conservatives in conservative states, is good
politics that costs the rest of the party little.
Still, Mr. Tomasky prefers a hard line: If they get no votes from the region, they will in turn
owe it nothing, and in time the South, which is the biggest welfare moocher in the world in
terms of the largesse it gets from the more advanced and innovative states, will be on its own,
which is what Southerners always say they want anyway.
Timothy P. Carney, at Washington Examiner, also points to culture though from a
decidedly different viewpoint as a breakup point for Democrats and the South.

Democrats waged a culture war against the South, trying to force Southerners to stop
clinging to their guns and to God, he writes.
Mr. Carney argues that the left can blame a rampantly racist Southern culture all it wants, but
doing so overlooks the election of, for example, Senator Tim Scott, an African-American
Republican from South Carolina, or Nikki Haley, the Indian-American re-elected governor of
South Carolina.
In his eyes, President Obama and his party waged a culture-war crusade with glee and
failed, but not before making it clear that they disapproved of the way Southerners live.
And the Democrats have made it clear that they are willing to use government to impose
their morality on others, Mr. Carney adds. Through the courts, the Left has banned prayers
at high school football games and forced states to remove the Ten Commandments from
public grounds.
Its simple, he says: Democrats and the Left have tried to outlaw Southerners way of life.
Harry Enten at FiveThirtyEight takes issue with the argument that the South is a goner for
Democrats. Certainly not in Virginia, Florida and North Carolina, he notes in agreement with
Mr. Tomasky though he does acknowledge that its a little harder to be an optimist about
the Deep South.
Yet he thinks that Blue Dog Democrats, under more favorable circumstances such as in 2012,
may return. And indeed, the next wave election which are happening more frequently
in the Democrats favor could also tilt the field.
At Politico, James Hohmann, in seeking out advice from Southern politicians for Democrats
willing to engage the region, points to pocketbooks issues, particularly related to the middle
class, including a revival of the more populist economic message that resonated during the
first half of the 20th century.
He also enumerates: finding hope in demographics, including the increasing size of the
African-American populations in Florida, Georgia, Texas and North Carolina; talking less
about social issues and more about economic issues, stressing a populist tone; and building
deeper benches in Southern state legislatures.
The key is to win state races, which tend to be less polarized than federal ones, and have
candidates prove themselves there, Mr. Hohmann writes. There is a hunger and appetite for
fresh faces, including business people whove never held office, after several Democratic
dynasties showed their limitations this year.
Still, Jonathan Chait at New York magazine takes a long view of the South and political
parties. For him, The real anomaly is that the Democrats managed to hold out in the Deep
South so very, very long.
He sees two American political traditions: One tradition bore intense suspicion of
centralized government, venerated farmers and rural life, believed the Constitution forbade
Congress from all but a handful of specifically enumerated fields of activity, felt comfortable
with aggression and violence in both domestic life and foreign affairs, and defended existing

social institutions against racial minorities and their allies. This political coalition has always
had its strongest base in the Deep South. It is right-wing.
The other tradition advocated a stronger federal government (and deemed this expanded role
Constitutional), considered public investment and education the best method of securing
prosperity, was more averse to territorial conflict with neighbors, and was more solicitous of
racial minorities. This coalition has always had its strongest base in New England. It is leftwing.
He highlights a map of the countrys divisions in 1860 one red block in the North, a blue
one in the South, the party labels reversed from our time. Well into the middle of the 20th
century, he says, the liberal party had its base in the Deep South.
If the mid-20th century forms your frame of reference, the Obama years represent a
regrettable turn away from normality, he adds. But an even longer view of history leads to
the conclusion that the trends of the Obama years have simply brought the two parties back
into their natural resting position. The amazing thing about southern Democrats is not the
scale of their fall, but the heights they were able to sustain in the face of all logic.
It also, he concludes, signals the appropriate, full resumption of the major argument of
American history.