Why the Democrats Are Winning Back the South

By Bob Moser, Texas Observer. Posted November 5, 2008.

Ed. Note: With the latest wave of Democratic House and Senate victories and Obama's wins in the South, this excerpt from Bob Moser's book gives vital background on the new climate in a formerly Republican stronghold.

This article is excerpted from the first chapter of Texas Observer editor Bob Moser's Blue Dixie: Awakening the South’s Democratic Majority (Times Books, 2008).

There is a party for Caesar, a party for Pompey, but no party for Rome."
-- TOM WATSON, Georgia populist & Democratic senator

The tale of how Republicans "won" the South, and why Democrats gave it up, has been ironed out into a quintessentially American fable of good and evil and reduced to its satisfying essence for retelling every four years, when Democratic strategists and media pundits begin their ritual debate about whether, and how, Democrats should try to reclaim a slice of Dixie with a Southern strategy of their own.

The legend goes like this: The Democratic Party became the unity party of white Southerners -- a political extension of the Confederate States of America -- after the Civil War. (True enough.) From Appomattox through the civil rights movement, the national Democratic Party was really two parties, with an enlightened Northern wing and a Southern wing wallowing in the muck of benighted traditionalism. (The exaggerations begin.) The "good Democrats" of the North swallowed hard and accommodated their Dixie cousins for the very practical reason that without their "solid South" vote in nearly every presidential contest, they would not have been contests. (Right.) Even Franklin D. Roosevelt put up with the racist demagogues of the Southern leadership, the Bilbos and Vardamans and Talmadges, because of political expediency. (Right again.) And even though white Southerners didn't have a liberal bone in their bodies, they kept making an X in the boxes next to Democratic presidential candidates' names. (Well …)

But "with a stroke of the pen," as the saying always goes, the first Southern president since Andrew Johnson, Texan Lyndon B. Johnson, intrepidly signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and brought a sudden and irrevocable end to the Democrats' solid South. Why, even LBJ himself said so; in a quote that has become an inextricable part of the fable, the president worried out loud to one of his aides, the future journalist Bill Moyers, that he had "delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come."

By doing the right thing, we are told, the Democratic Party sacrificed Dixie and purified its sullied soul at last. And as soon as Johnson's pen did its work, the legend continues, Republicans were ready to pounce. With the brilliant Southern strategy brewed to wicked perfection by Richard Nixon and his henchmen, the die was cast. After a quick post-Watergate blip, with Jimmy Carter's election in 1976, the popular presidency of Ronald Reagan and the ascendance of religious right politics cemented the Republicans' new solid South. While the region continued to grow in prosperity -- thanks, of course, to its supposedly militant anti-unionism and the resulting abundance of cheap labor that big business loves -- the South remained what it had always been: backward, xenophobic, racist, and ignorantly susceptible to the rankest emotional appeals to Jesus, miscegenation, and militarism. The only difference was that the parties had switched places, with the Democrats laid as low as the sad old Southern Republicans once were. If anybody needed fresh proof of that, it came along in the 2000 election, when even a Tennessee Democrat, Al Gore, could not break through the brick wall of Caucasian conservatism to win a single state in Dixie. "The South is no longer the swing region," proclaimed political science professor and pundit Thomas Schaller, author of a "non-Southern" manifesto published in 2006 called Whistling Past Dixie: How Democrats Can Win Without the South. "It has swung."

That's the story, and a sweet one it is for both Republicans and -- in a perverse way -- blue state Democrats. For Republicans, this neat little fiction confirms their superior command of political strategy -- the canny ruthlessness with which they appropriated white backlash against '60s liberalism, then rode the angry tide of evangelical politics in the '80s. It also offers them the charming promise of starting every presidential election with one-third (and climbing) of the country's electoral votes already sewn up. Meanwhile, Democrats outside the South -- those who actually believe this Disneyesque version of political history -- can recount the legend and view themselves, and their party, as martyrs for racial justice. The party's sad record in national politics, post-LBJ, has indeed been a cross to bear. But such is the price of righteousness.

But nobody told Southerners they weren't supposed to be Democrats anymore. During the 2006 midterm elections, Gallup pollsters discovered that more folks still said they were Democrats than Republicans in all but three Southern states -- Texas, South Carolina, and Mississippi. In half of the South, it wasn't even close: Democrats led by more than 10 percentage points in six Southern states. It's not just the partisan leanings of Southerners that confound the solid South myths. Southerners are more conservative only if you winnow down American politics to cultural or "moral" issues alone. Southerners still tack the furthest right on gay marriage and abortion and still lead the nation in churchgoing. They also back withdrawal from Iraq and strongly favor progressive populist economic policies -- more spending on social welfare, stronger environmental and business regulations, universal health care -- that are anathema to the GOP and, in many cases, markedly to the left of the national Democratic leadership.

See more stories tagged with: south, election 2008, dixie

Bob Moser is the editor of the Texas Observer.

Liked this story? Get top stories in your inbox each week from Election 2008! Sign up now »