Hard Out There for a Democrat
Adam Nossiter’s New York Times article on the Mississippi Senate race features a blunter-than-usual look at the source of Democratic Party troubles in the South:
The numbers in this state, which has perhaps the most racially polarized electorate in the nation, do not favor the Democrat: whites, a majority, overwhelmingly vote Republican, and 85 percent of them voted for President Bush in 2004. Even if there is a record black turnout, Mr. Musgrove would have to receive about 30 percent of the white vote to win.
And of course it’s no coincidence that Mississippi is both racially polarized and one of the states with the largest African-American population. Writing a long time ago about a very different era in the United States, V.O. Key observed in his classic Southern Politics in State and Nation that the so-called “black belt” of heavily African-American counties in Dixie was the stronghold of the white south’s peculiar brand of rightwingery. The advent of the Voting Rights Act has, of course, substantially altered southern political dynamics but the overall pattern in which blacker areas produce white voters ever-more-interested in checking black political power remains the same.
Where you see breakthroughs for Democrats is in places like Virginia and perhaps North Carolina that combine a substantial African-American population with increasing numbers of white educated professionals who don’t exhibit this same pattern and can form viable political coalitions with African-Americans.
14 Responses to “Hard Out There for a Democrat”
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October 19th, 2008 at 1:46 pm
That’s a good point.
The effects you are talking about really are significant. It’s a bit scary how well the presence of black people can explain White support for Democrats.
Someone did a mathematical analysis on this a couple of days ago using 2004 data.
October 19th, 2008 at 2:20 pm
Matt, you’re right in one respect: V. O. Key was writing about a very different era in southern politics. And that’s precisely the problem with your reliance on Key; it completely misses the story on southern Republicanism, which came out of the suburbs and is still largely based there [check out Matt Lassiter's Silent Majority on this]. When I was growing up in SC, the Republican Party was using race to make inroads, but it was based in the fledgling suburbs and upper-crust neighborhoods of cities, and largely run by well-heeled migrants from your neck of the woods. To be sure, as the suburbs mature–as they become more demographically diverse and develop problems that require active government to solve–that’s beginning to change in some places, such as Northern Virginia and the Research Triangle–but not in others. Here in Music City, for instance, Nashville proper is solidly in the Obama camp, but the ring around it is sometimes virulently right-wing Republican. The shift to the Republicans actually came fairly late to the Black Belt, and even now has shallow roots there [Mississippi actually has a Democratic General Assembly]. You northeasterners seem to think southern Republicanism is some sort of redneck-Boss Hogg deal. In fact, what gives it its potency is its middle-classness; voting Republican is a way that ex-Rednecks show they’ve arrived. Real rednecks, in my experience, are a bit more skeptical of a party that’s still tainted with the “country club” image it had in my youth. To be sure, the Republicans have worked hard to identify their “brand” with white southern culture, and do quite well far down the white socioeconomic ladder when they can frame a [usually presidential] election as a protest vote against some persnickety outsider. But they’re still basically a middle-class party; their great strongholds are places like Williamson County, Tennessee; Cobb County Georgia; Lexington County, SC; De Soto County, Mississippi; etc. In short, the South ain’t what you think it is, and it would really help if you could take a look at some of the recent historical literature, and not rely on a book that’s nearly sixty years old and descriptive of a one-party, disfranchised, Jim-Crow South that hasn’t existed since the 1960s.
October 19th, 2008 at 3:10 pm
Hey, waddaya mean “perhaps” North Carolina? Look, I’ve been working my ass off in North Carolina, and I’m not in the ‘fun’ areas like the Research Triangle area. I’m in deep red, down East, North Carolina.
But I’ve helped get people registered, and I’ve helped get people to the polls. And, as an attorney, I’ve volunteered w/the Obama campaign to watch the polls to make sure that anyone who wants to gets to vote. And I’ve contributed more money to this election than I can realistically afford.
Screw it. I’m telling you Matt . . . . North Carolina is gonna be BLUE this year!
October 20th, 2008 at 7:50 am
David,
I believe that you are correct. Northern Virginia has become more Democratic not only because of massive amounts of non-white immigrants but that the whites left in Northern Virginia are very affluent. The increase in immigration and affluence and pushed out the middle class whites in Northern Virginia.
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