4 Mississippi Legislators Switch to GOP; Action Reflects Trend

Sunday there were 22 Republicans in the 174-member Mississippi Legislature. Monday there were 26.

The shift took place the way it often does in the South these days--not in a voting booth, but at a news conference. Four state house Democrats simply announced that they had switched jerseys. “I’ve been a Democrat all my life but it seems like every time I turned around, I was voting for a Republican,” explained state Rep. Daniel Guice Jr., 36, whose district is along the conservative Gulf Coast.

In the 15 months since President Bush was inaugurated, two members of Congress and more than 200 state and local elected officials nationwide have switched from Democratic to Republican. The switchers are sheriffs, county commissioners, town councilmen, city aldermen and state legislators--trophies in a Republican campaign to change the face of electoral politics from the bottom up.

All but two dozen of the switchers live in the South, where historic patterns of political alignment have been changing fundamentally. This is a region that has formed the core of the so-called Republican electoral lock in presidential elections for the past quarter-century, but it’s also a region where every chamber of every state legislature is controlled by Democrats.

Slowly, that local hegemony is eroding. A decade ago, just 15% of Southern state legislators were Republican. Today, 25% are. Most of these gains have come through the ballot box.

The switcher program has made its biggest dent here in Mississippi, where more than 60 elected Democratic officials have jumped ship in the last year. “They invite ‘em over to the University Club (in downtown Jackson), and they wine ‘em and dine ‘em with the thickest steaks you ever saw,” scoffed Frank Barber, the Democratic secretary of the state Senate.

GOP state chairwoman Evelyn McPhail said more is involved than a good cut of steak. “These legislators represent the strong tide moving within our state among conservative Democrats who are being run out of the Democratic Party by its liberal leaders,” she said.