Southern Re-realignment?

Last week, the Wall Street Journal had a very interesting article on its frontpage on Democrats' efforts to re-capture both specific congressional seats and broader political influence in the Southern states. Focusing on a handful of states and races, the article discussed how national Democrats had begun running more conservative candidates in red states, in striking contrast to past cycles where Democrats routinely put up hapless liberal candidates who were bad fits for their respective districts, but well in sync with the tenets of the national party. This is a broader theme we have looked at at various times in the last couple of months, and it led to the Democrats being totally unable to get so much as a toehold in most Southern enclaves.

The article got me to thinking about this issue of a possible "re-realignment" of the the South. In other words, I began to wonder whether the WSJ piece -- as well as some similar analysis on the same subject over the last few months -- was on to something, and that the Democrats were on the road to undoing the Southern Realignment that began in earnest during the 1960s when Lyndon Johnson and Congress pushed into law landmark civil rights legislation, and really only ended in many states in 2004, when most of the last sitting electable Southern Democrats retired in one final wave.

Certainly, Democrats' chances in winning a host of House and Senate seats in Southern states are better than they have been in a very long time, and Senator Obama's strong prospects in a handful of Southern states is also extremely noteworthy. Still, it is one thing to be just competitive in one cycle, and it is another to actually win some big races, and it is another still for a long-minority party to re-establish its presence and majority in a state over a prolonged period of time.

That, in a nutshell, is what we are interested in figuring looking at in some detail. Are Democrats poised to score big wins this fall and at the same time establish a critical bloc of political influence in the South? Or, win or lose this fall, is a re-realignment of the South just too far-fetched based on existing conditions?

The way we are going to do this is break down the South, state-by-state, and look at the relative current and potential future strength of the current Democratic Party in each of the states. This will entail not just looking at the races this year, but the level of Democratic strength at the state level, including voter registration statistics (in the handful where there is registration by part), Democratic prospects in the state legislatures and in governorships, and several other factors that are applicable in assessing whether a state has potential for Democratic re-realignment.

Parameters

Before we begin our substantive break-down, it is important to set down the parameters of our analysis and the broader subset of states. The term "South" describes the group of states in the southeastern part of the United States. Because of its generality, it might mean several things to different people. For our purposes, the following states are considered part of the South, and they will be the ones that we are concerned with here

Louisiana
Mississippi
Alabama
Georgia
Virginia
South Carolina
North Carolina
Tennessee
Kentucky
West Virginia
Texas
Arkansas
Florida

This gives a total of 13 states, just over an even dozen. I decided not to include either Maryland or Oklahoma in this discussion, though both of them could be considered part of the South. For some time, Maryland has not really fit within the basic rubric of Southern states, at least from a political standpoint. Because of both its large black population, its large percentage of educated voters, and its vicinity above the Mason-Dixon dividing line, it is not appropriate, at least in my opinion, to place Maryland into the broader category of Southern states.

For geographic reasons, I chose not to include Oklahoma on the list. Certainly, as far as politics goes, Oklahoma has followed the same trajectory of many other Southern states: for a time, Democrats did extremely well in Oklahoma at all levels, but in recent decades, Democrats have been badly beaten in nearly all of the House and Senate races in the state. Still, given the state's location, I simply do not consider it a Southern state, even if its precise political makeup is so similar to the other states in the Deep South.

What do we mean by re-realignment?

It is equally important to define what is the very basis of our overall discussion -- re-realignment. Most of us, even the most basic students of politics, should know what the term Southern Realignment refers to. Rather, than get too much into the weeds on this, here's a very abbreviated version of it.

In the aftermath of the Civil War, the South became overwhelmingly, if not entirely Democratic at the presidential and congressional levels, if not everywhere. Furious at President Lincoln, the North, and Reconstruction, Southerners became Democrats by overwhelming numbers. With very few exceptions, nearly all Southern Members of the House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate were Democratic in the generations immediately following Reconstruction.

Now, the Democrats who represented the South over these years bore little resemblance to Democrats today, even modern Southern Democrats: they were generally staunchly segregationist, against Federal intrusion into many state affairs, and even relied on virulently racist rhetoric to appeal to their constituents. Nevertheless, Southerners made up a huge part of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal coalition, and remained loyal to the Democratic Party through FDR's tenure in the White House. In ensuing decades, things began to get dicey.

Cracks in the Southern Democratic coalition were readily apparent in 1948, when Senator Strom Thrumond of South Carolina walked out of the Democratic presidential convention in protest and formed a third party, the Dixiecrat Party, and ran under its banner in the 1948 presidential election, losing badly but winning the Deep South. Things got more fractured in the 1950s when vigorous attempts were made to pass broad civil rights legislation, many of which were stopped cold because of filibusters and control of key committee chairmanships by old Southern Bulls. The matter came to a head with the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act in 1965, and the proverbial dam broke in 1968 when Richard Nixon was elected President with the strong support of many Southerners. Propelled into the White House through the support of the so-called "silent majority," Nixon's Southern support was based not just on opposition to the passage of civil rights legislation in Congress, but also what many deemed to be America's urban decay as exemplified by the race riots of the 1960s, as well as the imposition of the Bill of Rights onto the states by the liberal Warren Court.

Thereafter, the Southern bloc of states that had once been unshakably Democratic for 100 years flipped, becoming a new electoral bulwark for the GOP. Furthermore, these states began to send Republican representation to Congress in greater and greater numbers. While it took decades to come to complete fruition, by the end of 2004, nearly every last statewide remnant of the Democratic South was gone. Both John Kerry in 2004 and Al Gore in 2000 failed to win a single Southern state, losing most of them very, very badly. While it had been accepted for some time after 1968 (or even 1964, to an extent) that the South was the GOP's firewall, the 2004 elections seemed to seal once and for all that Democrats were dead in the South and the realignment that had begun so many years earlier was finally complete.

Where that leaves Democrats today is, quite frankly, the very bottom. While Democrats are not extinct in the South in either the technical or even the political sense, as Democrats still control several southern governorships, state legislatures, and a healthy number of congressional seats, the Democratic Party remains wholly unable to win all but one or two states in presidential contests, and incapable of regularly winning Senate seats in all but a small handful of the Southern states. Those Senate seats which the Democrats do hold right now, are likely to be gone when the sitting incumbents retire, as 2004 powerfully demonstrated.

Consequently, how we define re-realignment here is important. For the purposes of this post, and the subsequent posts and analysis, I define the term as follows: a state should be considered re-realigned if state and national Democrats are able to elect Democrats at all levels in the state, culminating in the installation of Democrats in safe U.S. Senate seats. This is a very tall order indeed.

From the outset, it is important to note that our definition does not mean that re-alignment entails that a state becomes winnable at the presidential level for Democratic candidates, clearly the highest level in politics. The reasons for this are pragmatic, as this goal is, in all fairness, impossible given the internal dynamics of the national Democratic Party. With the exception of a small handful of our 13 Southern states, all but a handful are incredibly socially and culturally conservative -- a bad mix for a national party whose presidential candidates are almost always the exact opposite. The type of national candidate it would take to win states like Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, et al., in a presidential contest would be unable to make it through a Democratic primary, as he or she would be anathema to voters in California and New York. Of course there are some southern states like which are more winnable than others in presidential contests (or winnable period, for that matter), such as Arkansas and now Virginia, but they are few and far between at this moment in the foreseeable future (i.e. at least the next generation).

But all of this okay politically. Democrats should not be too ambitious, and from my personal perspective, winning United States Senate seats is the next best thing to taking a state's electoral votes; in fact, it might be even better. Scoring victories in red congressional districts with conservative Democrats is a big step towards achieving re-realignment in the form of statewide wins, and it is something Democrats have been able to continue doing even today, but it is only a part of the puzzle. Therefore, to my mind, being able to win Senate seats in Southern states is the true (as well as most reasonable) test of re-realignment of the South, and whether a state has reversed its status as a Republican state.

Again, this is not to say that winning U.S. Senate seats is the only measure of success in a Southern state's political status; merely that it should be the end goal for Southern state Democratic parties apparatuses. In the last decade, all but two of the 13 southern states have had Democratic governors, and right now, six of them have Democrats sitting in their governor's mansions. Many of them also have Democratically-controlled state legislatures as well. In my view, holding a governorship or state house or senate is just a starting point and sign that a state has realigned for a second time. Short of winning these states in presidential contests, which, as we noted, is a goal just too out of reach, winning Senate seats should be the true final goal for Democrats in the South.

State-by-state models

In order to get the best sense of re-realignment, we are going to try to draw a sketch of each of the 13 Southern states. We will look a little bit at each state's political history, but focus more on recent history and developments. We'll look at a host of relevant issues including congressional and Senate races this election cycle, governorships and state legislatures, and any other important political developments that may bear on the equation. Our objective is to figure out how far along, if at all, each of the 13 Southern states are in the process of re-realignment. After looking at each state, we will give a verdict as to each one's Democratic political status and current and possible future development, with some suggestions of where Democrats should look to build.

In order to cut down on extreme length, I am going to look at each state separately, and then close with a broad outlook of whether Southern re-realignment is happening and to what extent, or if it is not really occurring contrary to what some seem to be suggesting, what the future holds and whether true re-realignment is even plausible to a narrow extent.