Washington — The white Southern Democrat — endangered since the 1960s civil rights era — is sliding nearer to extinction.
After this week’s elections, the Democratic Party barely holds a presence in the region outside of majority-black urban areas such as Atlanta and Memphis. The carnage for the party was particularly brutal in the Deep South, where just one white Democrat survived across Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina.
The Republicans’ effort to win over the South, rooted decades ago in a strategy to capitalize on white voters’ resentment of desegregation, is all but complete.
“Right now in most of Dixie it is culturally unacceptable to be a Democrat. It’s a damn shame, but that’s the way it is,” said Dave “Mudcat” Saunders, a campaign strategist for conservative Democrats such as Jim Webb of Virginia, one of the few remaining Southern Democratic senators.
The losses were particularly disappointing for the party after the baby steps it made in the South in 2006 and 2008, when it picked up a host of Republican-leaning House districts and won Senate seats in North Carolina and Virginia. Many thought the party had learned its lessons and had begun to reverse recent history by nominating conservative candidates who hit the right notes on divisive social issues such as abortion and smaller government.
None of it mattered Tuesday.
Democrats didn’t just see most of their recent gains obliterated, they lost at least 19 Southern House members and a senator, Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas. Even some of the most conservative Democrats such as four-term Rep. Jim Marshall of Georgia and 10-term Rep. Gene Taylor of Mississippi couldn’t withstand the wave. It also snared such veterans as John Spratt of South Carolina, the 14-term chairman of the House Budget Committee, and 14-term Rep. Rick Boucher of Virginia.
When the new Congress convenes in January, there will be at most 16 white Southern House members out of 105 seats in Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, the Carolinas, Virginia, Tennessee and Kentucky. Two races in Virginia and Kentucky were still too close to call, so the total could be as low as 14.
The setback continues a four-decade decline for Democrats in the South, where they once dominated. The slide began after the civil rights movement, when Republicans under President Richard Nixon began employing a Southern strategy to retake the region by appealing to white anger over desegregation. The GOP later highlighted liberal Democratic positions on social and welfare issues.
Most of the losing Democrats this year were moderates representing Republican-leaning districts. And the challenges could get even tougher for Southern Democrats as legislatures begin redrawing congressional districts from the 2010 census.
With some exceptions, including Mississippi and Louisiana, Republicans control statehouses across the South. They picked up North Carolina and Alabama on Tuesday.
The legislatures are likely to loop more conservatives into swing districts that still vote Democratic, making it even harder for white Southerners to hold on in the future.
The party’s conservative Blue Dog coalition, which was founded in part by Southerners after the last Republican landslide in 1994, lost more than half of its 54 members, many in the South but others in swing states such as Pennsylvania and Ohio, as well as conservative-leaning Western states.
John Anzalone, an Alabama-based Democratic pollster who specializes in swing-state races, saw six of his House clients lose and said the wave was unavoidable in conservative districts given the economy. He called the election a temporary setback from which Democrats will gradually recover.
“It’s about a very activist agenda in a very difficult time. That makes people queasy,” he said. “These are the guys who didn’t vote for the activist agenda yet they were penalized. ... They were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
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just_another_bozo_on_this_bus (anonymous) says…
They might as well rename the Republican Party the Southern White People's Party.
pub123 (anonymous) says…
Bozo might want to brush up on his history.
African-American advancement flourished with Lincoln, a republican, and was on a steady march forward, thanks to republicans breaking the democratic filibusters of the civil rights act and the voting rights act. Proportionally, more republicans voted for these landmark measures than democrats. And of course, Brown v. Board of Education would not have prevailed were it not for the death of the democratic segregationist supreme court justice the summer before it was heard. He had vowed to prevent a positive outcome. Republican replacement Earl Warren made upholding Brown his primary purpose in his first term and engineered a unanimous verdict. Warren's driver when he was governor of California was an African-American from Louisiana and they had long discussions about conditions in the south while travelling.
What republicans seek to do is undo Lyndon Johnson's so-called great society. A set of programs that has devastated African-American progress and given rise to race hustlers and poverty pimps. Before Johnson's federal vote-buying project was implemented, the African-American family was strong, education and economic progress was advancing faster than ever before seen. Since Johnson's programs, the African-American family unit has been all but destroyed along with the significant advancements in education and economic progress.
Republicans want to reverse that downward trend and set forth hand-up rather than hand-out policies that will restore African-American progress to what it was before democratic policies destroyed that progress.
just_another_bozo_on_this_bus (anonymous) replies…
You can't cling to ancient history forever.
BerlGoetz (anonymous) says…
AP's Ben Evans is writing to an imaginary readership. Whites don't need liberal concessions to be who we are. Our political aspirations are wholly legitimate and worthy. We have a right for representation in this country the same as anyone else.