NDN friend, frequent panelist and contributor Tom Schaller had an excellent op-ed in yesterday's New York Times. The op-ed, entitled, The South Will Fall Again, argues that the South will not be returning to the Democratic political fold anytime soon. Schaller, a very well-respected political scholar at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, has wriiten extensively on this subject, including at length in his book, "Whistling Past Dixie: How Democrats Can Win Without the South."
Schaller is in good company.
As Simon wrote in January of this year in his essay, "On Obama, race and the end of the Southern Strategy," this election is the first post-Southern Strategy election since 1964. The Southern Strategy was the strategy used by Conservatives and the GOP to use race and other means to cleave the South from the Democrats. This strategy – welfare queens, Willie Horton, Reagan Democrats, tough on crime, an aggressive redistricting approach in 1990 – of course worked. It flipped the South (a base Democratic region since Thomas Jefferson’s day) to the GOP, giving them majorities in Congress and the Presidency. 20th century math and demography and politics dictated that without the South one could not have a majority in the United States. But the arrival of a “new politics” of the 21st century – driven to a great degree by the new demographic realities of America - has changed this calculation, and has thankfully rendered the Southern Strategy and all its tools a relic of the 20th century.
Simon and Peter Leyden also wrote about winning the presidency without the South in their winter 2007 Mother Jones article, The 50-Year Strategy.
Most recently, NDN issued an important report, Hispanics Rising II, which presents critical voting and demographic data showing that southwest states with heavy Hispanic populations such as Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada and Arizona could be the new key to electoral victory for the Democrats.
This is not to say that the South does not matter. As Schaller noted yesterday, Virginia is very much up for grabs. But Democrats should no longer pin any hopes on a region of the country that has been solidly red for decades when so many opportunities to recolor the electoral map are opening up thousands of miles away.
