The South: Crucial for Bush but Straying

George W. Bush won’t win the White House in the South. But he could lose it here.

Democratic for decades, then reliably Republican for a generation, the South today is no lock for either presidential candidate.

Mark Haizlip is one reason. Phillip Patterson is another.

Haizlip’s decision to support Bush is simple: “He’s not a Democrat.” Like many Southerners, the 55-year-old Macon construction executive sees the Democrats as the party of big government and loose morals.

But not Patterson. He thanks the Democrats for all the dressers and dinette sets flying out the door of Rhodes furniture store in Jonesboro, 50 miles up the interstate. “I want to keep the status quo,” said the 47-year-old salesman, a Gore supporter.

Lately, the views Haizlip and Patterson represent have come to matter a good deal as the presidential candidates try to plot their paths to the White House. Bush always counted on a strong base in the Mountain West and the South to launch his attack on the big industrial states. But now, with Pennsylvania, Michigan and other targets leaning Gore’s way, the South has become even more crucial for the GOP nominee.

Electoral Votes Not Lining Up

A sweep of the old Confederacy and Kentucky would give the Texas governor well over half the Electoral College votes he needs to win. Today, however, only four of those dozen states appear solid for Bush; one is Texas.

Arkansas, Kentucky and Louisiana are up for grabs along with the biggest prize, Florida, which is an unexpected tossup. Georgia has recently grown more competitive, and Gore has also shown surprising strength in the GOP strongholds of Virginia and the Carolinas.

All of which suggests there is no majority party anymore in Southern presidential politics. “What you have are two competitive minority parties” that rise and fall “depending on what are the hot issues of the moment,” said Merle Black of Atlanta’s Emory University.

The Republican camp is confident the South will go Bush’s way. “The question is why Gore isn’t doing better,” scoffed campaign spokesman Tucker Eskew. “He’s from Tennessee.”

But the political calculation is different for the vice president. With a big Electoral College base in New York, California and the Northeast, “Democrats don’t have to have a solid South to win the White House,” party pollster Mark Mellman pointed out. “We just need to be able to make some places competitive. And it’s quite clear we’re doing that.”

Once the South was the country’s Democratic bastion. The civil rights movement changed that, however, as Republicans exploited black-white tensions and rallied voters under the banner of resistance. At the same time, conservatives recoiled from Democrats’ dovish defense policies and more permissive stand on social issues.

The turnabout was astonishing. In four straight elections from 1980 to 1992, Democrats won only a single Southern state, Georgia, back when Jimmy Carter was in the White House.

But with Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton topping the ticket, Democrats won four Southern states in 1992 and again in 1996. “Bill Clinton learned the lesson that Democrats of the 1980s chose to ignore,” said Charles Bullock, a University of Georgia political scientist. “If you’re going to be competitive in the South . . . you cannot let Republicans brand ‘liberal’ on you and have it stick.”

Clinton styled himself “a different kind of Democrat,” backing capital punishment and welfare reform as part of a personal-responsibility platform that lessened the party’s indulgent image. It also helped that issues such as anti-communism and a muscular foreign policy, which long boosted Republicans, were no longer as resonant at the end of the Cold War.

Racial issues also lost some of their edge, as migration made the South less socially and economically isolated from the rest of the country. It is no accident, many political analysts believe, that segregationists raised the Confederate flag over the South Carolina Statehouse in 1962 and economic interests forced it down in 2000.

Still, the South remains by far the most conservative part of the country, and the embrace of Clinton was never overwhelming. In 1996, four states outside the region gave the president a higher percentage vote than his native Arkansas.

That said, Clinton enjoyed advantages Gore lacks. The president was hugely popular among African American voters, who have yet to show the same enthusiasm for Gore. The vice president’s support for tough environmental regulation and a crackdown on the tobacco industry hurts in Kentucky and Louisiana. Gore’s backing of gun control and bigger government also puts off many white males.

Jay Jones, no Bush fan, has even less use for Gore and a party he believes bribes its constituents--”the poor and uneducated”--with taxpayer-subsidized handouts. “I like helping the less fortunate,” the 36-year-old said as he ducked into a Home Depot outside Atlanta to buy plants for his office. “But not when they make a career out of being on the government dole.”

‘Scared of a Republican President’

On the other hand, there are still plenty of rural Southerners who see nothing wrong with getting a lift from government. Many, like Sidney W. Hughes, the postmaster and mayor of tiny Unadilla, Ga., view the Democratic Party as a champion of sorts.

“We usually think of the Republicans as taking things away from us,” said the 43-year-old Hughes, who hopes Washington will help restore Unadilla’s sagging downtown. A marquee above the Redeeming Word Fellowship hangs over a ramshackle block of buildings like an epitaph, saying simply: “Pray.”

“Most people in this area are scared of a Republican president,” Hughes said.

Even so, the local congressman is a Republican, Saxby Chambliss, who managed to win twice while Clinton carried the 8th Congressional District. To have a shot in Georgia--where Democrats run up big numbers in Atlanta and Republicans rule the suburbs--Gore must carry swing areas such as the 8th District.

Stretching from Macon to the Florida Panhandle, it is the second-leading peanut and timber-producing district in the country and home to the world’s biggest cigarette plant. Macon, home of Georgia’s Music Hall of Fame, also gave the planet Otis Redding, Little Richard and the Allman Brothers Band.

Elected in the 1994 GOP landslide, Chambliss has built a following by protecting Robins Air Force Base outside Macon and fighting efforts to ban peanuts on airlines to spare allergic passengers.

His careful minding of parochial concerns makes him the favorite to beat Democrat Jim Marshall, Macon’s former mayor, regardless of who carries the district in the presidential race. Both sides sense Bush is ahead now, but not as much as he was.

Gore’s hopes rest partly on people like Chuck O’Neal, 55, a Macon insurance salesman who voted for Bush’s father in 1988 but backed Clinton in 1992 and 1996. He supports Chambliss but leans toward Gore, thanks to the economy. “I think the Democrats deserve some credit,” O’Neal said.

That sort of ticket-splitting is common across the South, though it is usually Democrats backing Republicans for president. That helps explain why several states that are either solid for Bush or leaning Republican have Democratic governors.

Southerners have long distinguished between the state and national Democratic parties and between local, state and national races. Lowell Reese, who publishes a campaign newsletter in Kentucky, calls state and local races “the practicality side of politics.”

Ray Strother, a native Texan and veteran Democratic strategist, put it this way: “There are people who govern, the guys who fix the potholes and there’s the people who stand for bigger things in Washington.” A vote for president sends a message, he said, while a vote closer to home “deals with the nitty-gritty of everyday life.”

In recent elections, Democrats have won statewide election by campaigning on those sort of workaday issues, such as education and health care. Bush and Gore are now discussing those same things, with Bush boasting of his ability to work across party lines.

“Most of the Southern states have been home to major education-reform movements,” said Eskew, Bush’s spokesman and a longtime South Carolina strategist. “The most successful of these involve . . . Republicans and Democrats. . . . Al Gore cannot lay claim to any bipartisan mantle and Bush can. It’s an issue contrast that, trust me, resonates across the South.”

But Gore also has one distinct edge. Blacks are a huge presence and Democrats routinely win 90% or more of their vote. If the party matches the high black turnout of 1998--an effort orchestrated by Gore campaign manager Donna Brazile--the vice president could win just 4 in 10 white votes and still carry the handful he needs to deny Bush the White House.

For that reason alone, Republicans can’t be complacent.

“A lot of the South will probably fall to Bush unless something goes haywire,” said Thad Beyle, who teaches political science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “But people are kind of surprised. Gore is making it much more competitive than anybody thought.”

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Unpredictable South

The South was once reliably Democratic, then solidly Republican, but today neither party dominates the region. The 12 states represent 155 of the 270 electoral votes needed to win the White House.

Here’s a look at how the states are lining up behind Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Al Gore, how they voted in recent presidential elections and which parties control the governorships and state legislatures: