South Had Key Role in Bork Rejection : White House Misjudged Black Voting Power, Area’s Senators

Democratic presidential hopeful the Rev. Jesse Jackson recently claimed part of the credit for defeating Supreme Court nominee Robert H. Bork. The Southern Voter Registration Crusade he founded in 1983 signed up 2 million new voters in 1986 “and gave us a Democratic Senate majority,” Jackson declared.

“We defeat Bork not just because of ideas but because we went to the schools, the pool rooms, the plant gates and the churches and put new Democrats on the book,” he said.

Many White House advisers ruefully agree, lamenting that “Bork lost on Nov. 4”--Election Day last year, when voters in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana and North Carolina chose new Democratic senators. On Friday, all of them voted against Bork.

Although both Jackson’s claim and the White House lament may be somewhat exaggerated, it is hard to exaggerate either the importance the South played in rejecting Bork’s nomination or the magnitude of the change in Southern politics that the Bork affair has underlined.

One Vote for Bork

The impact was clear in Friday’s 58-42 roll call vote. In nominating Bork, Administration officials confidently predicted that he would receive the votes of all but a handful of the 24 senators who represent Southern and border states, 17 of whom are Democrats. Had they been correct, Bork would have won handily. But it was Bork’s side that got only the handful, losing all but one of the Southern Democrats, Ernest F. Hollings of South Carolina.

Bork lost a crucial group of moderate Northern Republicans also, but it was the loss of Southerners that took Administration strategists by surprise.

As for the underlying changes that the Bork vote reflects, consider one statistic: Last year, for the first time in American history, turnout rates among young black voters exceeded turnout rates among young whites, and much of that increase came from new black voters south of the Mason-Dixon Line.

The five new Democratic senators elected from the South in 1986 all won huge majorities among black voters. Only one, Florida’s Bob Graham, won a majority of the white vote also.

The changes in the South have major implications both for the Congress and for next year’s presidential elections. They are, said William Schneider, political consultant for The Times, “the single biggest change in the past 25 years in American politics.”

‘Boll Weevil’ Democrats

In the past, the South was the solid anchor of the conservative end of American politics. As recently as the first two years of the Reagan Administration, “boll weevil” Southern Democrats provided the key votes to enact the President’s policies.

Today, said Merle Black, a University of North Carolina expert on Southern politics, the region’s most conservative voters have moved into the resurgent, but still outnumbered, Southern Republican Party. The still-dominant Southern Democrats have become the nation’s “swing voters on a whole range of issues,” mediating between conservative Republicans and Northern liberals.

But those Southern Democrats are an often-shaky coalition of blacks and moderate-to-conservative white voters.

The political differences within the region are sometimes masked when “Southern voters” are examined as a whole. Taken together, they exhibit substantial differences from their Northern and Western countrymen. An extensive recent Times Mirror Co. survey of the personality of the American electorate found, for example, that Southerners are considerably more religious, less tolerant on many social issues, more strongly anti-communist and more aggressive in their patriotism than residents of other parts of the nation.

White House strategists counted on such sentiments to put the President’s choice on the court. Bork was a conservative and the South is conservative, the strategists reasoned, and the two would be a perfect fit. Moreover, they calculated, a tradition among Southern senators of deference to the President would sway any fence-sitters. The ensuing debate showed how seriously they misjudged.

Analysts disagree about what sank Bork in the South. Part of his problem, Black noted, was a cultural gap with Southern whites: to many of them, Bork seemed to be exactly the sort of “wild-eyed professor” against whom Alabama’s George C. Wallace used to fulminate, Black said.

Ineptitude Charged

Another part of the problem, the “principal part,” in the view of Republican political consultant Kevin Phillips, was what he called “the total ineptitude of the Administration’s campaign” for its nominee.

Others, however, point to three specific Administration miscalculations:

--Bork’s supporters underestimated the political power of Southern blacks.

--They overestimated the support he would get from Southern whites.

--They misjudged the Southern senators, a group who are neither as conservative nor as deferential to presidential prerogatives as the stereotypes that White House advisers relied on.

The percentage of blacks is higher in the South than in any other region of the country. In Mississippi, for example, 37.1% of the voting-age population is black, more than three times the national figure, according to the most recent census figures.

Until recently, a heritage of racial discrimination kept that large population from realizing its political power. That is no longer the case.

In the 1966 congressional election, for example, fewer than 4.5 million blacks voted nationally, according to the census. By 1986, that figure was more than 8.2 million. Most of the gain was in the South. Backed by the legal protections of the 1965 Voting Rights Act--parts of which Bork had criticized in the past--and bolstered by voter registration drives led by black churches, the portion of the black voting-age population that voted rose from 33% in 1966 to 43% in 1986, according to a census report issued earlier this month.

Decline in White Voting

By contrast, voter turnout among whites declined during that period, in the South as well as nationally. In the North and West, whites continue to vote more consistently than blacks, but in the South the rates are now about the same.

When Southern voters go to the polls for the Super Tuesday primaries next March 8, black voters are expected to have a major impact on the process again, casting votes that could give a major share of the Democratic convention delegates to Jackson.

Their impact could be even greater because of election rules in most Southern states--Florida being the largest exception--that allow voters to cast ballots in either party’s primary without pre-registering. If, as seems likely, the Republican Party offers a hot contest, many moderate-to-conservative white Southerners may decide to vote in that race.

Outside the presidential arena, however, black voters already have become a major part of the constituency for nearly every elected Democratic official in the South, pulling those officials more toward the center of the national political spectrum. “It is now proper to call the Democrats in the Congress ‘moderates,’ ” Schneider said.

In the Bork debate, for example, one of the first Southerners to announce opposition to Reagan’s nominee was Sen. J. Bennett Johnston of Louisiana. “Here’s Bennett Johnston from Shreveport, the roughest part of Louisiana (on race relations),” Black said. “A senator from Shreveport (taking that position) would have been inconceivable 20 years ago.”

But black opposition to Bork did not translate automatically into equal white support for him. Once, race was the dominant issue in Southern politics. Now both blacks and whites shy away from acts and issues that have the potential for raising racial tensions.

Repeatedly, when Southern senators announced opposition to Bork, they used words similar to those of Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.), who said Thursday that “America simply cannot afford to refight the civil rights battles of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s.”

The need to keep racial tensions low is particularly acute for Democrats, Schneider noted, because “racial tension destroys the Southern Democratic Party” coalition. Many Democrats fear, and some Republicans hope, that Jackson’s campaign will seriously harm Democratic chances in the South next year by raising tensions over race, GOP consultant Phillips noted. “Jackson, himself, is a racially divisive issue,” Schneider said.

Perhaps the most serious White House error in the Bork fight, however, was in misjudging the Southern senators themselves. Whatever truth the stereotype of their deference to presidential prerogatives once had, it does not describe the South’s current representatives.

Turnover in Senate

“We’re getting almost a total turnover in the people who represent the South,” Black said. Reagan lessened what deference remained by extensively campaigning against Democratic candidates in the South last fall, on several occasions explicitly raising judicial appointments as a campaign issue. Not surprisingly, those senators were unimpressed when conservative Bork supporters threatened that their votes against the nominee could become issues in the next election.

“If they try to run against Howell Heflin on that,” Black said of Alabama’s senior Democratic senator, who voted against Bork in the Judiciary Committee and in the full Senate, “he’ll take them to the cleaners.”