NEWS ANALYSIS : Outlook Grim as Democrats Assess South

To add injury to the insult of last November’s election results, which relegated her to the unaccustomed role of minority member of the Wake County Board of Commissioners, Democratic incumbent Betty Lou Ward then had to undergo foot surgery, leaving her on crutches.

“But what I should have said to people,” she told a party gathering here earlier this month “was that I got stepped on by an elephant.”

She wasn’t the only one. The Republican stampede through the South last fall trampled Democratic officeholders on every rung of the political ladder. And the meeting that Ward addressed here was part of a massive, agonizing and ongoing Dixie-wide reappraisal, as Democrats from the grass roots to the White House scramble to figure out what went wrong and how to set matters right in time for the next election.

Exacerbating their difficulties is the escalation of the divisive political debate over affirmative action, bound to go up another notch in the wake of last week’s Supreme Court opinion that cast doubt on the legality of race-based preference programs. A continuing focus on affirmative action threatens Southern Democrats most of all because it polarizes the racial tensions that have kept them on the political defensive for almost three decades.

Democrats in this region also have to come to terms with a ticket headed by President Clinton, who, despite his own Southern heritage, is viewed more negatively below the Mason-Dixon line than anywhere else in the country. A Times Poll this month showed Clinton’s approval rating over 50% in every region except the South, where his support reached only 39%.

The stakes are high for the President and his party. What political analysts call the Greater South, which includes the 11 states of the Old Confederacy plus Oklahoma and Kentucky, supplies nearly one-third of the nation’s electoral votes.

“Clinton has to come out of the South in 1996 with a certain amount of support or he won’t win nationwide,” said Mark Gersh, who has been helping plot political strategy for the White House.

Looking further ahead, Democrats fear that unless they can reverse the GOP advance in the South in the next election, Republicans will have established such a powerful foundation that they will dominate the region’s politics at all levels well into the next century.

“My opinion is that we are at a true crossroads,” said Wayne McDevitt, chairman of North Carolina’s Democratic Party. But McDevitt and other Democratic leaders say they see no easy way out of their current morass.

Added Merle Black, an Emory University professor who is a leading authority on Southern politics: “It’s the worst picture for the Democrats in the South that I’ve seen for 30 years.”

Black notes that as recently as 1990, Democrats held 77 of the 116 House seats in the Old South. But today, with the number of seats in those Southern states increased to 125, it is the Republicans who for the first time since Reconstruction have a majority--65. The GOP gained 19 Southern seats in last November’s vote, then picked up another with the subsequent defection of former Democratic Rep. Nathan Deal of Georgia.

The Democratic Party is “out of touch with mainstream America,” Deal said when he broke ranks.

What worries Democratic strategists is that there are other Southern House members who are pondering making the same shift Deal did. Some may do so in hopes they will avoid being swept out of office in 1996, when Black and others believe that the Republicans stand a good chance of picking up another 10 to 15 House seats.

The effort by some Southern Democrats to distance themselves from their party was illustrated late last week, when four House members--two from Louisiana and one each from Mississippi and Texas--quit the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. The four complained that the committee does not tolerate differences of opinion within the party.

All this makes it hard to remember that for nearly the first half of this century, the Democratic Party owned the South from the Florida Everglades to the Texas prairie.

Democratic power was derived from the party’s defense of white supremacy and administered by a crew of cunning demagogues, among them Tennessee’s Edward Crump, who once said of a political opponent: “In the art galleries of Paris there are 27 pictures of Judas Iscariot. None look alike, but all resemble Gordon Browning.”

The rupture of the ties binding the once-solid South to the Democratic Party began with the drive to end segregation laws, launched by a border-state Democratic President, Harry S. Truman of Missouri, and fulfilled by a Southern Democratic chief executive, Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas.

The consequences of this were first seen in presidential races, as white Southerners started deserting the Democrats in droves. From 1968 to 1988, with one exception, Democratic presidential candidates were virtually shut out in the South, often failing to carry a single state in the region. The exception occurred in 1976, when Jimmy Carter, in his initial presidential campaign, swept every state in Dixie except Virginia.

And though the combination of Clinton, the former Arkansas governor, and Vice President Al Gore, the former Tennessee senator, carried four Old South states--Arkansas, Tennessee, Louisiana and Georgia--in 1992, that success probably will turn out to be a similar aberration. Instead of leading a Southern renaissance for his party, Clinton is blamed by many Democrats and independent analysts for helping the Republicans in 1994 to finally transfer the dominance they had long enjoyed in presidential politics to local and congressional races.

“In every year since 1964, the Republican vote for House seats [in the South] has been going up and the Democratic vote has been going down,” said Curtis Gans, head of the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate. “That trend climaxed in the last election, and it essentially took the perception of an unpopular and failed President for it to happen.”

Resentment of affirmative action and other civil rights policies favored by the national Democratic Party is only one of the reasons for the antipathy to Clinton, analysts say.

As Black sees it, Clinton started off on the wrong foot by backing the move to allow gays to serve openly in the military, a proposal that for many Southerners challenged their attitudes about patriotism and moral standards.

The President’s push for health care reform worsened his standing among the region’s middle-class voters, Black said. “Most thought they would be paying more and getting less,” he said.

Misgivings about Clinton’s character compounded differences on policy questions. “A lot of Southern whites looked at Clinton and thought he wasn’t being straight with them,” Black said. “They decided he doesn’t have the kind of moral stature they expected in a President. They think he is really a liberal, and when he takes conservative positions they say he’s a phony.”

Many analysts say they believe that such feelings about Clinton will hasten the Democrats on the road toward political impotence in the South, with the party restricted to a narrow base of blacks and a relative handful of white liberals.

While Democrats are plagued by the problem of racial polarization everywhere in the country--no Democratic presidential candidate since Johnson has won a majority of the national white vote--racial lines are drawn more sharply in Dixie.

In the 1994 elections, exit polls by the Voter News Service showed that the Democrats took 41% of the white vote nationally but only 36% in the South. In 1992, the news service found that Clinton won 39% of the white vote nationally but only 34% in the South.

“White males are our biggest problem,” said Chris Scott, head of the North Carolina branch of the AFL-CIO, the nationwide labor organization that once could deliver huge vote totals to Democrats. He added that for many of these voters, disenchantment with the party is due not only to racial matters but to issues such as gun control and abortion.

North Carolina offers a good example of how the trend against Democrats accelerated in the 1994 elections. Clinton targeted the Tarheel State in 1992 and came within an eyelash of winning it. But last November, Republicans scored a net gain of four seats in House races, giving them control of the state’s 12-member delegation for the first time in more than a century.

In addition, the GOP picked up 39 seats in the state Legislature’s lower house (giving the party control there for the first time in more than 100 years), 13 seats in the state Senate and 56 seats on boards of county commissioners. The latter gains included four seats here in Wake County, which transformed the status of Betty Lou Ward.

Facing reelection in 1996 with some trepidation, Ward is nevertheless more reluctant than others in her party to blame Clinton for the November rout.

“My opinion is that, for whatever reason, a lot of people felt angry and disillusioned and upset,” she said. “And I think it has probably less to do with Bill Clinton than with the world at large.”

As for Clinton’s prospects next year, most Democrats privately concede that he will have a hard time matching even his modest Southern success of 1992, barring another White House try by independent Ross Perot or a similar candidate who would drain away white voters from the Republican standard-bearer.

Gersh, the White House strategist, says he believes that Clinton’s best possibilities for wins in the South are in Arkansas, Louisiana and Kentucky. He also says the President has plausible shots at carrying Tennessee, Georgia and even Florida.

But no Southern state looks easy for Clinton, not even Arkansas. Indeed, Republicans there are gloating over a newspaper poll last month indicating that only 36% of the state’s voters were prepared to support their native son’s reelection, while 35% would vote to replace him.

Still, some believe that Clinton will boost his stock once he gets back on the campaign trail. “He’s one of the most inadequate presidents we’ve ever had, but one of the best campaigners,” Sen. Ernest F. Hollings (D-S.C.) remarked with characteristic bluntness.