Democratic South finally falls

Democratic South finally falls

Jonathan Martin
Politico.com
November 28, 2010

For Democrats in the South, the most ominous part of a disastrous year may not be what happened on Election Day but what has happened in the weeks since.

After suffering a historic rout — in which nearly every white Deep South Democrat in the U.S. House was defeated and Republicans took over or gained seats in legislatures across the region — the party’s ranks in Dixie have thinned even further.

In Georgia, Louisiana and Alabama, Democratic state legislators have become Republicans, concluding that there is no future in the party that once dominated the so-called Solid South.

That the old Confederacy is shifting toward the GOP is, of course, nothing new. Southerners have been voting for Republican presidents, senators and governors for decades.

But what this year’s elections, and the subsequent party switching, have made unambiguously clear is that the last ramparts have fallen and political realignment has finally taken hold in one of the South’s last citadels of Democratic strength: the statehouses.

Protected by a potent mix of gerrymandering, pork, seniority and a friends-and-neighbors electorate, Democratic state representatives and senators managed to survive through the South’s GOP evolution — the Reagan years, the Republican landslide of 1994 and George W. Bush’s two terms. Yet scores of them retired or went down in defeat earlier this month. And at least 10 more across three states have changed parties since the elections, with rumors swirling through state capitols of more to come before legislative sessions commence in January. Facing the prospect of losing their seats through reapportionment — if not in the next election — others will surely choose flight over fight.

Democrats lost both chambers of the legislature this year in North Carolina and Alabama, meaning that they now control both houses of the capitol in just two Southern states, Arkansas and Mississippi, the latter of which could flip to the GOP in the next election.

The losses and party switching, one former Southern Democratic governor noted, “leave us with little bench for upcoming and future elections.”

“There's little reason to be optimistic in my region,” said this former governor, who did not want to be quoted by name offering such a downcast assessment. “We can opportunistically pick up statewides every now and then, but building a sustainable party program isn't in the cards. I suppose the president has bigger concerns now, but it’s not healthy for the Democrats to write off our region and not have any real strategy to be competitive.”

Part of the reason for this pessimism is that the Democrats who were defeated and those who are changing parties are overwhelmingly of the same type: rural white males who are more conservative than their national party.

With a few isolated exceptions, it now seems that the party’s rural Southern tradition is a thing of the past — even at the statehouse level, where familiar faces were able for years to make the case that they were a different kind of Democrat.

“What we’re seeing is what Lyndon Johnson alluded to [after passage of the Voting Rights Act], said Rep. Charlie Melancon (D-La.), referring to the former president’s prediction that he was turning over the South to the GOP by pushing through civil rights legislation. “White male Democrats in the South are becoming extinct.”

According to Melancon, who lost by nearly 20 points to scandal-plagued Sen. David Vitter this year, and other politicians and scholars in the region, the challenge that Southern Democrats face is the result of a mix of demographic changes, difficulties posed by the national party and technological changes that are consigning the all-politics-is-local axiom to history books.

Perhaps nowhere in the South did Democrats suffer such extensive losses on Election Day as they did in Alabama, where the House and Senate went from overwhelmingly Democratic to overwhelmingly Republican.

Included in the casualty list were such pillars as state Sen. Lowell Barron, the powerful former president pro tempore and a 27-year veteran from rural northern Alabama. And last week, four Democrats in the state House switched parties, two of whom were from the same region. It’s no coincidence. Thanks to organized labor, the Tennessee Valley Authority and the allegiances spawned by each, northern Alabama has always been a Democratic stronghold — even as it has voted overwhelmingly Republican at the presidential level in recent elections. Until Rep. Parker Griffth (R-Ala.) changed parties last year, the congressional district representing the region had been represented by a Democrat since Reconstruction.

But the passage of time has resulted in fewer voters with a fondness for the New Deal and more transplants, to places like Huntsville, who are standard-issue conservative Republicans.

“That was the last stronghold of the Alabama Democratic Party as far as white Democrats are concerned,” said University of Alabama political science professor William Stewart of his state’s northern reaches.

Now, 26 of the 39 Democrats left in the Alabama House are African-Americans, a reflection of how the two parties are increasingly stratified along racial lines in the South.

“We’re moving to a more segregated system,” lamented Stewart.

It’s much the same next door in Georgia, where five Democratic legislators have become Republicans since Election Day.

“Democrats have now become the party of the [Atlanta] metro area and of blacks,” said state Rep. Alan Powell, one of the party switchers and a veteran northeastern Georgia pol. “That’s not to be derogatory. It’s just what it is.”

The shift toward Republicanism at the federal and state level has also changed the nature of the local primary process.

Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, who has been involved in Southern politics since leaving Ole Miss early to work on Richard Nixon’s 1968 presidential campaign, recalled that in the past, “white, conservative Democrats were afraid to run in the Republican primary.”

“Why? Because they were afraid they’d lose the Republican primary because nobody voted in it,” Barbour said. “So I go over there and some guy with a big family turns out 106 votes, and I lose because all my friends voted in the Democratic primary. Now, all of a sudden, people are saying if I run as a Democrat all of my friends are voting in the Republican primary.”

In an opinion piece in his local paper explaining his decision to become a Republican, Powell wrote that there was no other local party when he became a legislator.

“When I was first elected in 1990, the Democrat[ic] Party was institutionalized, the only ticket to run on in rural Georgia. That has changed with the demographic changes in our state. Georgia’s results in the recent general election brought an effective end, at least for the foreseeable future, to the two-party system in state government.”

Realignment, Barbour noted, has been “evolutionary” in the South. But it accelerated this year in part because of how national Democratic policies and leaders are perceived in the region.

“The Obama administration's liberal policy agenda — especially Obamacare — has made it almost impossible for white Democrats at the local level to be seen as moderates or centrists,” said Emory University political science professor Merle Black. “Just being a Democrat immediately puts many of the white Democratic politics on the defensive.”

Republicans sought to exploit this by nationalizing statehouse races and portraying moderate or even conservative Democrats as enablers of their national party.

Democrats sought to push back, in some cases supporting symbolic resolutions opposing their own party’s policies on health care reform or cap and trade.

“When Washington said everyone would have to accept Obamacare, Sen. Lowell Barron stood up and passed a bill through the Senate that would allow Alabama to say ‘no thanks,’” said an ad for the former Democratic titan.

Part of the revulsion toward Washington Democrats is cultural. President Barack Obama and Speaker Nancy Pelosi, in particular, are lightning rods among many Southerners.

“Most people in north Alabama cannot identify with Nancy Pelosi” is how incoming Alabama House Speaker and state GOP Chairman Mike Hubbard put it.

But it also has to do with the narrative Republicans have ceaselessly driven.

“Democrats are the party of entitlement and of more government intrusion,” said Hubbard, calling health care reform “socialistic.”

And while Southern Democrats once could’ve avoided being painted with that brush thanks to personal relationships and influential newspapers in their region, the explosion of new media has made it more difficult for them to differentiate themselves from the national brand. How people get news about politics, and much else, has fundamentally changed.

Melancon, a Blue Dog Democrat, recalled how people would approach him in the final weeks of his Senate campaign to ask why he voted for health care reform. He hadn’t.

“I’d ask folks, ‘Where did you hear that?’ and they’d say, ‘I don’t know,’” he recalled.

Often, they would cite a forwarded e-mail.

“I have to tell my own friends to not forward me that gobbledygook unless they’ve fact-checked it,” Melancon lamented. “If you’re going to forward it without taking the time to figure out if it’s true, then you’re as bad as the person who sent it.”

The rise of partisan cable news outlets, talk radio shows and websites has also reversed Tip O’Neill’s famous maxim about politics.

“Campaigns have become so highly nationalized,” said Jeff Yarbro, a Tennessee Democrat who narrowly lost a state Senate race this year. “People don’t just read their local paper to figure out what’s happening in politics. They watch Fox News or they watch MSNBC.”

Hubbard, the new Alabama House speaker, said, “The world is definitely a lot smaller now.”

“You know everything that’s going on in Washington,” he said.

For all the bad tidings, there is one important development that could bode well for Democrats in some Southern states. While they may never get back the rural areas that once served as their bulwark, Southern Democrats are now competitive in some fast-growing suburbs in states that have a significant number of transplants. There was a reason why Obama won Virginia and North Carolina in 2008 — both are filled with newcomers who are open to supporting either party.

“The more metropolitan a state has become, the more resilience that gives Democrats,” said Ferrel Guillory, an expert on Southern politics at the University of North Carolina.

So even as Democrats lose long-held seats in places like rural eastern North Carolina, they can potentially make up the difference by capturing districts around Charlotte and the Research Triangle.

“As those metro areas continue to grow, Democrats can find a new base of support,” Guillory said.