One of my favorite writers, Slate’s Tim Noah, has decided to weigh in on everyone’s favorite political strategy debate: Should the Dems write off the South in 2004?
Noah has come down on the opposite side of me on this, insisting that the Dems would be wise to bypass the region altogether. Looking back at the 2000 race, Noah takes two lessons from the fact that Gore lost every southern state, including his home state of Tennessee. As Noah put it:
Lesson 1: Southerners won’t vote for you just because you’re a Good Ole Boy. But Gore still came within four electoral votes of winning. If he’d taken Florida, which in many ways is not really a southern state, he’d be president. (Some people still argue that he did.) Thus Lesson 2: Democrats don’t really need those southern votes.
Obviously, Noah is right about the arithmetic. It’s certainly possible for the Dems to win without these 13 states (the old Confederacy plus Oklahoma and Kentucky). So long as the electoral votes for these 13 don’t total 270, it will be mathematically feasible for a Dem candidate to win the White House without them.
My argument, on the other hand, has been whether this is a wise/realistic strategy that may have unintended consequences down ballot.
Noah wasn’t done, however. He went on to argue that Dems should blow off the South because they’re really bad people with a long history of “whining and wheedling their way into disproportionate and undeserved power.”
While I won’t defend the region’s past — slavery, segregation, Jim Crow laws, the Civil War, etc. — I will continue to argue that the Dems should concentrate at least some resources on the South.
I think the single biggest problem with this debate so far is characterizing the entire region without appreciating state-to-state differences. I’ve done it before and I think Noah did the same thing at Slate. In other words, Dems shouldn’t treat all Southern states as relative equals in their potential relevance to a successful presidential campaign.
Since I’ve argued that Dems should concentrate on states they’re likely to win, or at least have a chance at winning, I’m left to conclude that it’s incumbent on me to make specific distinctions between, for example, states such as Louisiana and Mississippi.
With that in mind, here’s my list of specific states in which a Dem candidate can and should compete:
* North Carolina — NC has a well-liked Democratic governor, Mike Easley, who is favored for re-election this year. Likewise, the state’s “senior” senator, John Edwards, is a popular Democrat in the state and would have been favored for re-election had he not run for president. In the state legislature, meanwhile, Dems enjoy a six-seat majority in the North Carolina Senate. The state’s voters have proven that they’re willing to support moderate Dems on a statewide level; there’s certainly no reason to assume these same voters would categorically rule out backing a Dem presidential candidate.
* Louisiana — Here’s one of only a few states with a Democratic governor, two Democratic senators, and Dem majorities in both chambers of the state legislature. Plenty of traditional Dem strongholds — including Vermont, Massachusetts, California — can’t say the same thing. Granted, Louisiana Dems are more conservative than the national party, yet the fact that the party has done so well in the state demonstrates the state’s willingness to support Dem candidates. Indeed, Clinton won the state in 1992 by just under 5%, but won it again in 1996 by an even larger margin, over 12%.
* Arkansas — By any reasonable measure, Arkansas should be considered a swing state. It has two Democratic senators, proof of the state’s openness to the party, one of which is strongly favored for re-election this year.
* Tennessee — Volunteers may have rebuked Gore in 2000, but it remains a state that Dems can compete in. Tennessee has a popular Democratic governor, Democratic majorities in both chambers of the state legislature, and Dems hold a majority of the state’s congressional delegation (five seats to four).
* Oklahoma — Even Oklahoma may represent a possible opportunity for Dems in the near future. The state has a Democratic governor, Dem majorities in both chambers of the state legislature, and the state has far more registered Dems than Republicans.
* Florida — And how can we forget our friends in the Sunshine State? Florida, and its 27 electoral votes, is a key electoral prize that Dems would be foolish to ignore. Florida still has more registered Dems than Republicans and was a virtual tie in 2000. Forget hanging chads for the moment; were it not for the “butterfly” ballot in West Palm, Gore would have won Florida by a few thousand votes.
And as the estimable Ruy Teixeira recently explained, “[T]he reality is that Florida has been trending Democratic in presidential politics since 1988, as demographic and economic change move south Florida’s fast-growing hi-tech and tourist areas into the Democratic column. The president’s brother won an easy re-election victory in 2002 not because these changes suddenly reversed themselves, but because it was a great year to be related to a wartime president, because McBride ran a terrible campaign (including failing to choose a lieutenant governor running mate from south Florida) and because in a state election Jeb Bush didn’t have to defend unpopular GOP national positions, like Social Security and Medicare privatization.”
So there you have it. At least five good reasons that Dems should look South of the Mason Dixon line when crafting its Electoral College strategy. There’s no reason to automatically cede these states (and their collective electoral votes) to Bush if the Dems can mount a credible campaign in each of them.