http://conservativeactionalerts.com/blog_post/show/1590For Democrats in the South, the most ominous part of a disastrous year may not be what happened on Election Day but what has happened in the weeks since.
After suffering a historic rout — in which nearly every white Deep South Democrat in the U.S. House was defeated and Republicans took over or gained seats in legislatures across the region — the party’s ranks in Dixie have thinned even further.
In Georgia, Louisiana and Alabama, Democratic state legislators have become Republicans, concluding that there is no future in the party that once dominated the so-called Solid South.
That the old Confederacy is shifting toward the GOP is, of course, nothing new. Southerners have been voting for Republican presidents, senators and governors for decades.
But what this year’s elections, and the subsequent party switching, have made unambiguously clear is that the last ramparts have fallen and political realignment has finally taken hold in one of the South’s last citadels of Democratic strength: the statehouses.
Protected by a potent mix of gerrymandering, pork, seniority and a friends-and-neighbors electorate, Democratic state representatives and senators managed to survive through the South’s GOP evolution — the Reagan years, the Republican landslide of 1994 and George W. Bush’s two terms. Yet scores of them retired or went down in defeat earlier this month. And at least 10 more across three states have changed parties since the elections, with rumors swirling through state capitols of more to come before legislative sessions commence in January. Facing the prospect of losing their seats through reapportionment — if not in the next election — others will surely choose flight over fight.
Democrats lost both chambers of the legislature this year in North Carolina and Alabama, meaning that they now control both houses of the capitol in just two Southern states, Arkansas and Mississippi, the latter of which could flip to the GOP in the next election.
The losses and party switching, one former Southern Democratic governor noted, “leave us with little bench for upcoming and future elections.”
“There's little reason to be optimistic in my region,” said this former governor, who did not want to be quoted by name offering such a downcast assessment. “We can opportunistically pick up statewides every now and then, but building a sustainable party program isn't in the cards. I suppose the president has bigger concerns now, but it’s not healthy for the Democrats to write off our region and not have any real strategy to be competitive.”
Part of the reason for this pessimism is that the Democrats who were defeated and those who are changing parties are overwhelmingly of the same type: rural white males who are more conservative than their national party.
With a few isolated exceptions, it now seems that the party’s rural Southern tradition is a thing of the past — even at the statehouse level, where familiar faces were able for years to make the case that they were a different kind of Democrat.
“What we’re seeing is what Lyndon Johnson alluded to [after passage of the Voting Rights Act], said Rep. Charlie Melancon (D-La.), referring to the former president’s prediction that he was turning over the South to the GOP by pushing through civil rights legislation. “White male Democrats in the South are becoming extinct.”
According to Melancon, who lost by nearly 20 points to scandal-plagued Sen. David Vitter this year, and other politicians and scholars in the region, the challenge that Southern Democrats face is the result of a mix of demographic changes, difficulties posed by the national party and technological changes that are consigning the all-politics-is-local axiom to history books.
Perhaps nowhere in the South did Democrats suffer such extensive losses on Election Day as they did in Alabama, where the House and Senate went from overwhelmingly Democratic to overwhelmingly Republican.
Topic: Democratic South finally falls (Read 992 times)