Whistling Past Dixie : How Democrats Can Win Without the South

by Thomas F. Schaller

• ISBN13: 9780743290159
• ISBN10: 0743290151
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2006-10-03
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Summary

Two generations ago Kevin Phillips challenged Republicans to envision a southern-based national majority. In Whistling Past Dixie, Tom Schaller issues an equally transformative challenge to Democrats: Build a winning coalition

Author Biography

Thomas F. Schaller is associate professor of political science at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

Table of Contents

1 Partisan Graveyard	1	(20)
2 The Southern Transformation	21	(47)
3 Blacklash and the Heavenly Chorus	68	(48)
4 Go West, Young Democrats	116	(54)
5 Diamond Demography	170	(48)
6 A Non-Southern Platform	218	(50)
7 The Path to a National Democratic Majority	268	(31)
Acknowledgments	299	(4)
Notes	303	(22)
Index	325

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Excerpts

1 Partisan Graveyard [A]nyone who believes Democrats can consistently win the White House without puncturing the Republican dominance across the South is just whistling Dixie. --Los Angeles Timescolumnist Ronald Brownstein For Democrats, the South has become the Sahara of the Electoral College. Give it up. --Slatecolumnist Timothy Noah The Democrats are in disarray. National politicians are unsure what to say about everything from gay marriage to late-term abortion, and what to do about everything from tax rates to Iraq. The party is losing a manufactured culture war and watching its labor union base lose a very real manufacturing war. Rank-and-file Democrats from coast to coast are increasingly frustrated with the party's lack of a coherent message, and they are not alone: Fewer than half of all Americans agree that Democrats "know what they stand for." In presidential elections especially, the party somehow seems to self-destruct, picking bad candidates who run poor campaigns based on myopic advice from overpaid consultants. Desperate and fearful of being relegated to minority status for decades, some Democrats reflexively think back to the halcyon days of party dominance and conclude that the only solution is for the party to somehow restore its lost glory in the South -- the most solidly Democratic region since the end of the Civil War, the backbone of the New Deal, and home to the party's three most recent presidents. To become a national majority party again, they insist, the Democrats must compete in Dixie. Strategists Steve Jarding and Dave "Mudcat" Saunders, both southern Democrats, articulate this view most forcefully in their 2006 book,Foxes in the Henhouse. "Democrats cannot afford to keep writing off the South," they write. "If you don't start getting a message there, if you don't start listening to people there, if you don't start spending time, energy and money there, you can say good-bye to any notion of realigning political power and instead say hello to the numbing reality that you are relegating yourself to the status of a permanent minority party." The truth is that the geographic coalition the Democrats forged during the New Deal has come undone. The dramatic economic, social, and political changes of the past half century can be neither rewound nor ignored. The old "three-party" model of regional American partisanship -- with northern and southern Democrats outvoting western Republicans -- is now defunct, replaced by a new three-party model that pairs southern and western Republicans against urban-based Democrats of the Northeast, Midwest, and Pacific Coast states. Simply put, the South is no longer the "swing" region in American politics: It has swung to the Republicans. That said, Democrats should forget about recapturing the South in the near term and begin building a national majority that ends, not begins, with restoring their lost southern glory. Most of the South is already beyond the Democrats' reach, and much of the rest continues to move steadily into the Republican column. White southerners used to be among the most economically liberal voters in America but are now among the most conservative. The South is America's most militaristic and least unionized region, and the powerful combination of race and religion create a socially conservative, electorally hostile environment for most statewide Democratic candidates and almost all Democratic presidential nominees. Meanwhile, there are growing opportunities for Democrats to improve their electoral fortunes in other parts of the country, where demographic changes and political attitudes are more favorable to Democratic messages and messengers. Citizens in the Midwest have been decimated by globalization and are looking for economic salvation. In the Southwest where white and,

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