Advice to Democrats: For now, let South go

Review Politics

Whistling Past Dixie: How Democrats Can Win Without the South

Thomas F. Schaller

Simon & Schuster / 336 pages / $26

Southern voters have been an important component of Republican and Democratic presidential victories for more than four decades.

Since the 1964 passage of the Civil Rights Act, GOP presidential candidates have actively courted white Sutherners and convinced them that the party supports their economic and moral positions. Employing what has come to be known as a "Southern Strategy," party nominees have regularly carried such states as Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and South Carolina as presidents from Richard Nixon to Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush won the White House.

The Democratic effort has been more happenstance: Nominate a Southern politician and pick off his home state while cobbling together an electoral majority centered in the Northeast and upper Midwest. That recipe led to the four victories of our previous three Democratic presidents - Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas, Jimmy Carter of Georgia and Bill Clinton of Arkansas (twice).

But Thomas F. Schaller, a political science professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, has surveyed the electoral landscape and determined that the Democratic path to victory no longer runs below the Mason-Dixon line.

In his new book, Schaller offers a comprehensive argument that the national Democratic Party should all but ignore the 11 states of the South in national elections and instead concentrate on "a group of swing states in the pan-Western polygon formed by connecting Ohio, Montana, Nevada and New Mexico."

The South, and particularly the Deep South, is all but lost to Democrats, Schaller has determined, because of the region's distinctive views on religion and race. He painstakingly documents how the region thinks and votes differently than the rest of the country and, in his view, has taken over the Republican Party.

"This is why Republican National Committee chairman Ken Mehlman ... had the luxury of apologizing in 2005 for his party's relentless use of race to win Southern (and many non-Southern) votes during the previous four decades," Schaller writes. "Because they own the white South, the Republicans need not pay the region's racial rents any longer."

Having identified the Democrats' Southern problem, Schaller moves on to solutions, marking the geographic terrain where the party should concentrate its efforts and the "demographic coalition" that should be assembled for victory.