Politically, South Won’t Rise Again

Only five years ago, many political analysts were ready to concede the Republican Party had a “lock” for virtually the next generation. Not only had the GOP won five of the six previous presidential elections--usually by substantial margins--but the “solid South,” with all its electoral power, was continuing its steady march from Democratic control to Republican.

Now, someone seems to have changed the locks. Even though the nation still appears to be drifting to the right, the Republicans are heading into a presidential election where they may well fail to draw even 40% of the vote for the second election in a row--which hasn’t happened to the GOP since the party first got off the ground in the 1850s.

The GOP can blame H. Ross Perot or the lackluster skills of its recent nominees all it wants, but the main culprit in the party’s startling decline on the presidential level is, ironically, its takeover of the South--so widely hailed as the party’s crowning glory only a few years ago. Capturing Dixie did give the Republicans a formidable political base. But it came with a cost: With that takeover came a corresponding appropriation of the Republican Party by Southerners. Virtually all the GOP’s major congressional leaders are now from the Old Confederacy--Speaker Newt Gingrich from Georgia, House Majority Leader Dick Armey from Texas, Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott from Mississippi. More important, the party’s base is now in the nation’s traditionally most moralistic region--the current home of the Christian Coalition. And on every issue, from gun control and abortion to school prayer and defense spending, Republicans largely reflect the views of their new base in Dixie.

American political history teaches us that this is a near fatal flaw for a party trying to win the presidency. Since the Civil War, with few exceptions, the political party that won the allegiance of the South has consequently found itself losing the support of much of the rest of the country. From 1868 through 1928, the Republicans barely dented the Old Confederacy in presidential races, yet they still won 12 of 16 elections. Only Franklin D. Roosevelt and the unique crisis of the Great Depression allowed the Democrats to unite the South with other regions in an effective presidential coalition.

The electoral maps for 1992 and 1996 look like a mirror image of the maps that defined the country for much of its post-Civil War history. Now, it’s the Republicans who have the South, while the Democrats appear stronger almost everywhere else--including such dyed-in-the-wool, formerly GOP states as New Hampshire, Vermont or Iowa. Meanwhile, Western states with a strong secular tradition, like California and Washington, once closely contested almost every election, have turned into Democratic Party bastions during presidential elections.

As the nation’s most distinctive region, even before it lost a war, the South has always been somewhat at odds with the rest of the country when it comes to politics. In the late 19th and early 20th century, the very things that drew Southerners to the Democratic Party--from its stances on civil rights to its embrace of “easy money”--were positions virtually guaranteed to antagonize northerners or Westerners with different interests and drive them into a camp that took the opposing view.

So it goes today: As Alabama goes, so go Maine and Oregon--in the opposite direction. Despite the common lament that America is becoming homogenized, regions continue to have distinct cultural identities. A few years ago, University of North Carolina Professor John Shelton Reed wrote an essay trying to define the South. What he and others found, among other things, is that the South is still a region with a higher proportion of church-goers; far fewer laws against sex discrimination; a greater reverence for the military and weapons, and a higher ratio of homicides to suicides--not to mention a place of cotton and kudzu, where people tend to like stock car racing, eat grits and prefer bourbon to scotch.

Not all these “traits” have political consequences. Some do, however, and to the extent the Republicans have embraced them, they have inevitably begun to alienate voters in the nation’s other regions--particularly in New England (or places settled by its pioneers), which has never had much affinity, politically or culturally, for anything Southern.

For example, if a gender gap now drives our presidential politics--Bob Dole is still managing to remain competitive with white males but is losing among women overwhelmingly--it is a gap with roots in our distinctive demography. Most state legislatures in the North and West, after all, passed the Equal-Rights Amendment in the 1970s and ‘80s; it only failed because legislatures in the Old Confederacy opposed it just as strongly. Even the way the South Carolina presidential primary has now replaced the Iowa caucus and New Hampshire primary on the GOP schedule as the party’s key test--George Bush lost Iowa in 1988, and Dole lost New Hampshire in 1996, but both clinched the nomination weeks later by winning South Carolina decisively--is a sign of how far south the party’s soul has drifted.

Neither Dole nor Bush were born or bred Southerners, but by the time they cleared all the hurdles to secure their party’s leadership, they might as well have been picking the barbecue out of their teeth and subscribing to “Southern Living.” That means, of course, that many Republicans prominently mentioned as among the party’s strongest potential candidates in 2000--Gov. William F. Weld of Massachusetts, Gov. Christine Todd Whitman of New Jersey, Colin L. Powell, perhaps even Jack Kemp--could no more pass muster with this party’s Southern base then Gen. William T. Sherman could.

Conversely, Bill Clinton and Al Gore hail from the South, but their party has effectively “northernized” them. In fact, any Democrat who can still find great electoral success in the now Republican South has shown himself to be a liberal who can appeal to conservatives, and thus such a potent coalition-builder that he is likely to head to the top of any list of presidential wannabes. That’s the main reason why the Democrats’ only successful presidential candidates in the last generation have all been Southerners.

One hopeful sign for the Republicans is that the South continues to grow in population at the expense of other regions; size can overcome a lot of cultural antagonism. Moreover, most of that growth has come from carpetbagging, transplanted Yankees, who may bring their Northern political attitudes to the Carolinas and Virginia in a true case of regional intermarriage.

Still, for now, Sigmund Freud notwithstanding, demography is destiny in American politics. As the Republicans have headed south, it is no surprise their presidential prospects have gone south as well.