Updated: Can we puh-lease put the Southern Strategy Wars to bed?

Posted by Joshua Holland at 1:35 PM on November 9, 2006.

Over at The Gadflyer, where I share a bit of cyber-space with Tom Schaller, who wrote Whistling Past Dixie, the triumphalism has been ridiculous. One Gadflyer, David Lublin, called the election "fierce vindication" for Schaller's analysis.

And here at AlterNet today we have Bob Moser, one of Schaller's sparring partners, saying that Tuesday's results showed "the South -- aka "Jesusland" -- has a message for those national Democratic wizards: No, fuck you."

Am I the only one growing tired of this?

Of course, after a big election win everyone claims that their favorite theories were validated by the results. But the reality is that Tuesday didn't do a thing to validate -- or refute -- Tom's much-debated book.

First, the Dems didn't follow Tom's advice-- they spread the money and resources around as part of Dean's fifty-state strategy.

Second, Tom was simply wrong when he predicted in his In These Times piece that "The Democrats are going to gain seats in the 2006 midterms, and those gains will come from outside the South."

Dems gained everywhere. In the 11 states of the Confederacy -- Tom's analytic frame -- the Dems picked up four House seats and the Senate seat they needed for a majority, and they held three seats against strong challenges (if the 500-vote lead in Georgia's 12th CD stands up). North Carolina's 8th CD is too close to call, but could turn out to be another Southern pick-up.

And that's only counting the 11 states of the Confederacy; most people think of Kentucky and West Virginia as southern states, where the Dems picked up two more House seats. And they grabbed a governorship, in Arkansas.

Over at the Gadflyer, David Lublin argued that those seats don't count because they were scandal-tainted. That's true for 3 out of 7 (or maybe 8) of them, but it's also a bit of selective analysis from Tom's sometime writing partner. Does anyone believe the seats Dems won in Ohio or Indiana (or anywhere else) weren't in large part due to the Republicans' taint? There were fourteen seats directly threatened by scandal -- the three Lublin mentioned in the South and eleven others elsewhere in the country.

What's more, Lublin noted that the Dems grabbed "only three House seats and one Senate seat" in the "western territory identified by Schaller as fertile for gains." Fierce vindication, indeed.

Of course, you could say that Tom was validated on the flip-side: the Dems certainly consolidated their position in the solid blue states and did well in Schaller's "Four-D Rectangle." But I was taught that correlation -- especially weak correlation -- doesn't equal causation.

The reality is that Iraq, corruption, an economy that's been shitty for the middle class and a fabulously unpopular president (and Congressional leadership) drove this race. Call me crazy, but I think that had a bit more to do with the Dems' victory than the non-Southern strategy that they in fact didn't employ. (Now, if Tom were to write a book called Cringing Past the Trainwreck, in which he posited that Republican rule will always inevitably lead to war, stagnating wages and scandal, I'd buy into it in a heartbeat.)

On the other hand, contra Bob Moser's argument, the fact that Dems had some pick-ups in the South during this particular election cycle doesn't do much to refute Schaller's analysis either. Schaller's argument is often misconstrued -- he says the South is the last place Democrats should look for votes, not that they should never try to win there.

As to the ongoing feud, I think both sides are correct -- Tom showed mathematically that Dems could indeed win without the South and his detractors are right that, normatively, doing so is quite a bad idea for a national party in a two-party "democracy." The Dems shouldn't pander to the most conservative states in the country and, at the same time, even in the "reddest" states there are good progressive people who shouldn't be thrown under the bus.

And, yes there's a tendency for urban coastal types to buy into stereotypes about Southern crackers and all that, but that's always been a two-way street. As Paul Waldman put it:

No number of drop-ins at Waffle Houses, no quantity of grits consumed, no paeans to the glory of Nascar will convince Southern white men that Northerners don't look down on them. There's nothing more important to Southern culture than bitching about how people in the rest of the country don't respect their culture. You can have that chip when you pry it from their cold, dead shoulders.

So both sides are right, both are wrong and while most folks are well-intentioned both have their share of assholes. Can we all be friends now?

Update: Jonathan Weiler weighs in with his usual mature insight.

Tagged as: election06, southern strategy

Joshua Holland is a staff writer at Alternet and a regular contributor to The Gadflyer.