How Democrats can take back the South

The author of "Blue Dixie" says don't give up on the region -- but don't pander to it with Clintonian centrism.

Editor's note: Read Thomas Schaller's response to Bob Moser here.

By Bob Moser

Read more: Democratic Party, South, Opinion, 2008 election, Bob Moser

Aug. 19, 2008 | When a couple of fellows in North Georgia started hollering last week that they'd bagged a Bigfoot, I couldn't help sniffing out a big, ungainly political metaphor. With apologies in advance, it goes like this: As I've chronicled in my new book, "Blue Dixie: Awakening the South's Democratic Majority," Democrats have been stalking an elusive beast in Dixie every four years since the Voting Rights Act broke apart the dominant old Democratic Party in the South. The beast has gone by several different names: the Social Voter, the Reagan Democrat, the NASCAR Dad, and the just plain White Swing Voter. It's been viewed, by many a non-Southern liberal, as somewhat akin to a Bigfoot, in that nobody could be sure that the phenomenon really existed -- and if it did, it was likely only half-human. But the hunt for this ghostly creature still struck most Democratic strategists and consultants as absolutely essential, because you supposedly couldn't win Southern elections (no matter the region's sizable numbers of black voters and progressive whites) without capturing a fair amount. Also, of course, because no Democrat in U.S. history has won the White House without carrying at least five states in Dixie, a historical pattern that seems particularly relevant as we head for what looks like a close presidential election.

The Democrats' hapless pursuit of the Southern Sasquatch yielded its fair share of tabloid-worthy farces through the years: Jimmy Carter's ill-conceived Conference on American Families, which ended up turning evangelicals against him; Michael Dukakis' holding forth atop a hay bale in South Carolina to extol his Massachusetts Miracle; Bill Clinton's shameless Sister Souljah moment. It motivated any number of Democratic candidates to take heavily photographed hunting detours from the campaign trail, feign an appreciation for stock-car racing, learn to work the word "family" into at least every other sentence, and babble about their sincere regard for "states' rights." And it spawned the once-powerful Democratic Leadership Council, whose co-founder Clinton helped reshape the party into a Wall Street-friendly, free-trading, Bible-quoting, culturally moderate shell of the New Deal coalition -- every last compromise justified by the pressing need to woo those crucial Southern whites.

What the Democrats' various Sasquatch strategies did not produce, however, were victories. Unless a close relative like Carter or Clinton was on top of the ticket, the creature evaded capture -- so much so, in fact, that no other Democratic presidential candidate since 1968 has carried a single Southern state (with the exception of the border state of West Virginia, one of Mike Dukakis' few electoral accomplishments in 1988). By 2000, the situation had become so grim, in the view of the frustrated strategists, that Al Gore ran no fall campaign in any Southern state but Florida -- no ads, no staff, and almost no sightings, even in his home state of Tennessee. In 2004, John Kerry also conceded every Southern state but Florida -- more than 140 electoral votes -- without bothering to spend a cent after August, even in his vice presidential nominee's home state of North Carolina. Nationally, Kerry lost the white vote by 16 points; in the South, it was even worse, as George W. Bush swept the region with 70 percent of all white votes.

Clearly, these people were simply unreachable. And not surprisingly, calls for Democrats to "whistle past Dixie," in Tom Schaller's terms, leaving the region a Republican backwater while forging a Democratic majority elsewhere (mathematically possible, though difficult), only became louder. But those leading cheers for a "non-Southern" Democratic strategy were ignoring a reality that Southerners themselves couldn't miss: Bigfoot was changing colors and evolving into a whole new animal.

Thanks to a historic "re-migration" of millions of African Americans back South, combined with the country's fastest growing Hispanic population, the political potency of Southern whites has started to shrivel. From 1990 to 2005, the white population percentage dropped in every Southern state -- and in many places, the change portended revolutionary political shifts. The state of Texas is now officially "majority minority," with large chunks of the South following suit. Georgia went from more than 70 percent white to less than 60 percent just between 1990 and 2005. Nashville, of all places, has been dubbed America's "new Ellis Island" due to its large influx of not only Hispanics, but Kurds and Somalians (among others). These seismic demographic shifts, which the Census Bureau expects to accelerate over the next few decades, mean -- among a world of other things -- that the Democrats' "threshold" of white votes needed to win Southern states (in Mississippi, for instance, it's 31 percent with average black turnout) will keep falling for the foreseeable future.

Next page: The Republicans' Southern juggernaut shows every sign of losing steam -- if not breaking apart