Reflecting on the election results, Mark Schmitt gives Thomas Schaller’s Whistling Past Dixie thesis a B:
Obama easily collected enough electoral votes to win without any Southern states. But that Senate seat in North Carolina sure is useful for the new president to have, and those Virginia, North Carolina, and Florida victories certainly reduce the sense of civil war. Tom’s corollary was that Democrats should concentrate on the Mountain West instead of the South, but it turned out there was no tradeoff — Obama won all the viable states in the Rockies, even giving McCain a brief scare in Arizona, while still taking three states of the Confederacy.
Larry Bartels, reflecting on Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas? thesis and the electoral propensities of white people, pontificates:
In the former Confederacy [Obama] gained only slightly over Kerry among white voters, despite making big gains in two key swing states, North Carolina and Virginia. The only states in the country in which he lost more than a point or two of white support were Louisiana, Alabama, Arkansas, and Mississippi.
The notable resistance of southern whites to Obama’s candidacy continues a half-century trend sparked by the demise of the unnatural southern Democratic monopoly of the Jim Crow era. From 1952 through 2004, the average level of support for Democratic presidential candidates fell by more than 15 points among white southerners while increasing slightly among whites in the rest of the country. This year’s pattern reinforces that long-term shift, underlining the extent to which the Democratic Party’s much-discussed “culture” problem is really a regional problem rooted in white racial resentment.
…
Judging from last week’s election results, then, not much seems to be the matter with Kansas; but Louisiana may be another story.
(I love that last line).
As to the 2008 election’s implications for the relative importance of the southern electorate, it’s a complicated mix of things:
- Barack Obama would not have been the Democratic nominee if not for the South. He racked up delegates by winning massive victories in Alabama (+14), Georgia (+35), Louisiana (+21), Mississippi (+24), North Carolina (+14), South Carolina (+28), and Virginia (+29).
- Obama would be president without winning any southern states. Give Virginia, North Carolina, and Florida to John McCain, and Obama still wins in the Electoral College, 310 to 228.
- It’s still possible for Democrats to win Senate and House seats in the South, something that is probably significantly less likely if they don’t compete there at all on the presidential level. Mark Warner would have won regardless of Obama’s Virginia push, but how would Kay Hagan have done without national party interest in the usually red state of North Carolina? And does anyone seriously think Saxby Chambliss would be heading to a runoff against Jim Martin in Georgia if not for what was an at least somewhat real, albeit exaggerated, sense that Obama might just win Georgia? So far, it’s clear the road to 60 cuts at least partially through Dixie and likely will for the immediate future.
- It’s clear there are important differences between Deep South and Peripheral South states. While the former gave Obama a necessary push in the primaries because only Democrats were voting, the latter show signs of potential victories in general elections. As parts of the South with middle-range black populations and increasing numbers of white migrants from the Northeast start breaking off from “Real America,” they might just fall into Democratic hands.
- But Bartels is right: The Deep South is basically hopeless. Schaller’s sports metaphor of Democrats starting at the 33 yard line because of the black vote but still not being able to make it that 17 extra yards on the backs of white voters sums it up pretty well. What’s the matter with Louisiana, indeed.
