WEEK 6: PARTIES IN THE MODERN SOUTH

The South is not only a region that we at MSU live in, but it has been a very important region in terms of political parties. The South loved Andrew Jackson, and his concept of democracy by the common man is reflected in southern states electing so many statewide officials rather than having gubernatorially-appointed state executive officials (like the Presidential model). After the Civil War, the South was a largely one-party system, as Democrats dominated politics and African Americans were disfranchised (discussed in V.O. Key’s classic, Southern Politics). Southern Democrats gained great prominence when Democrats because the majority party in America thanks to FDR’s New Deal, and held many leadership positions in Congress. When Democrats lost their majority status in 1968, for the rest of the century only southern Democrats were able to be elected President (Carter from Georgia, and Clinton from Arkansas). The South is a real battleground today, as the demographic and ideological differences between the parties nationally also exist in the South, and as competition is becoming more intense between the parties. Obama and Biden, despite being northern liberals, were able to win two or three southern states. Our textbook discusses how at least five southern states may be tossups in the next Presidential election.

So how did the Republican Party become competitive in the one-party Democratic South? Well, it was a Top-Down process, whereby the two national parties became more ideologically distinct, so white southerners began voting for the more conservative Republican presidential candidates, but still voted Democratic for other offices. War hero moderate conservative Eisenhower made gains in the 1950s for the presidential GOP in more urban Rim South states, while staunch conservative Barry Goldwater did well in 1964 in the more agricultural Deep South states (more racially conscious due to the larger numbers of African Americans). Racial liberal Hubert Humphrey carried only President Johnson’s home state of Texas in 1968, while Republican Nixon did well in the Rim South and Third-Party conservative segregationist Alabama Governor George Wallace did well in the Deep South. Democrat McGovern was so liberal in 1972 that he lost the entire South and the nation. Southern centrist Jimmy Carter was able to win back the South (except for Virginia) in 1976 with a black-white coalition. Facing more liberal candidates in the 1980s, Republicans Reagan and Bush 1 swept the South (except for Georgia in 1980, Carter’s home state). Bush 2 also swept the South (even Gore’s home state of Tennessee), but Clinton before him was able to carry 4 southern states in both of his elections.

Republican gains in Dixie began to trickle down so that the GOP won a majority of congressional seats (House and Senate) in the South in 1994, which helped them gain control of both houses of Congress for the first time in 40 years. The first three Republican Senate victories in the South since Reconstruction were in the 1960s: John Tower won in Texas in 1961 as liberal Democrats refused to support a conservative Democratic nominee; conservative Democrat Strom Thurmond from South Carolina switched parties in 1964 due to ideological concerns; young attractive Howard Baker won in Tennessee in 1966. Dividing a 100-point ideological roll call voting scale into five categories, in the 1970s southern Democratic Senators had a median score of “moderate conservative,” very similar to that of the average southern voter. As late as 1979, for example, Mississippi Democrats Senator John Stennis and 1^st district congressman (House Appropriations Chair) Jamie Whitten were both moderate conservatives (p. 230, The New Politics of the Old South). By the 1990s, though, the average southern Democratic Senator now boasted a “moderate liberal” voting record. By the turn of the century, two of the few right-of-center Democrats were Mississippi Congressman from the Gulf Coast Gene Taylor, who voted to impeach Clinton and was knocked off by a conservative Republican in 2010, and Georgia Senator Zell Miller, who blasted the national Democrats in his book for being too liberal and therefore A National Party No More. The remaining minority number of southern Democrats were even more liberal in the House, as in 2016 thirty-four of House Democrats from the South were “liberal” and the other three were “moderate liberal.” Liberal southern Democrats may have disliked the moderate-to-moderate conservative voting records of departing southern Democrats, but those retiring Democrats were replaced by Republicans who were even more conservative. In 2016 fully 95 of House Republicans from the South were “conservative,” with the remaining 5 being moderate conservative and 1 being moderate. All of Mississippi’s Republican congressmen and Senators have cast “conservative” voting records in the most conservative one-fifth of the ideology scale. (Source: table 15-1a in https://sds17.pspa.msstate.edu/classes/southern/ch15.htm)

This trickle-down process finally even filtered down to the state and state legislative levels. Though the GOP gained a majority of Governor’s positions in the South in the 1994 Clinton first midterm election disaster, it wasn’t until 1996 that the GOP won control of both legislative chambers of any southern state (Florida, which led to that state legislature threatening to end the 2000 disputed presidential election by just appointing electors who would back Bush). In 2000 they added South Carolina and in 2002 they won both legislative chambers in Texas (leading to a mid-decade reapportionment of U.S. House seats that gave the GOP control of the state’s congressional delegation). By 2014 in Obama’s second midterm year defeat, Republicans controlled both state legislative chambers in every southern state (though Virginia has switched back and forth in party control). A similar trickle-down process has affected statewide elected offices other than governor. After the 2006 elections, Republicans held a majority of these sub-gubernatorial statewide offices in 7 of the 10 states having such elections. By 2008 even Louisiana had joined the GOP side. Arkansas joined the GOP after the 2014 elections, and North Carolina after the 2016 elections. Virginia is so competitive party-wise that it has switched back and forth, with Republicans winning back the governorship and the other two statewide offices in 2021. (Source: tables in https://sds17.pspa.msstate.edu/classes/southern/ch3.htm)

While Republicans remain dominant in today’s South, Democrats have made some noteworthy gains in some southern states. In Obama and Biden’s three elections, Democrats won Virginia all three times, Florida twice (Obama both times), and North Carolina and Georgia once. Both of the major textbooks on southern politics in our field talk about this emerging more competitive South. In The New Politics of the Old South, 7^th edition, 2022, University of Georgia distinguished Professor Charles Bullock III has a new division of southern states- Growth States versus Stagnant States, with Democrats becoming more competitive in the growth states. In addition to the four states listed above that Democrats have carried at least once, South Carolina and Texas are listed as growth states. Growth states are characterized by a near doubling of population over the last fifty years, about 40% of the population having at least some college education, and about half of the population migrating from another state (pages 20-22). Growth states have more diverse and progressive populations, leading to recent Democratic gains. The other 5 southern states are regarded as Stagnant states, but three of those states show some potential for Democratic Party gains. They include Louisiana (which just had retired re-elected Democratic governor, John Bel Edwards), Mississippi (where GOP Governor Tate Reeves had two close elections), and Tennessee (which until recently saw the parties alternating with two-term governors).

The other major southern politics textbook is our textbook, The 2020 Presidential Election in the South, and it finds a similar new geographic division of the South, plus this book is very interesting and very relevant to a Political Parties class. They find the same 5 growth states (minus South Carolina) as states where Democrats are becoming more competitive. The diversity of state populations is reflected in the significant percentages of Hispanics in Texas and Florida, and the Washington D.C. suburbs of government workers in Virginia. North Carolina has the Research Triangle of universities, and Georgia has a booming Atlanta population. They find that all of these more competitive states are high in diversity (evenly split multiple racial groups), high in percentage of college degree holders, high in the New Economy scores (Information Technology and Innovation Foundation scores), and high in voter turnout in 2020 (textbook pages 306-310). The textbook also has gems about the importance of the political parties in the South scattered throughout. For example, Biden had lost the first three nominating contests, but finally came back to win the first southern contest, South Carolina; his endorsement by the state’s Democratic congressman, African American James Clyburn, the House Majority Whip, won him the state, and winning there easily led him to sweeping most other state contests (text, p. 42-43, 134). In the Alabama chapter we learn that Democrats were able to briefly elect a Democratic Senator, Doug Jones, after Republicans nominated an alleged child molester, and that Democrats are hurt by racial and generational splits in their party. In the Georgia chapter we learn how both parties engaged in massive campaign efforts in the two U.S. Senate runoff elections which saw Democrats score a twin victory and control of the U.S. Senate in 2020 (p. 88). Numerous candidate visits and much party door-to-door canvassing helped Republicans win in Florida (p. 180-181). The North Carolina chapter has a great discussion of how party turnout is affected by voting methods with Democrats preferring mail-ins and Republicans election day in-person voting (p. 238-239). The Virginia chapter mentions how Republicans sometimes go back to the old convention method to nominate candidates (p. 289-290).

Despite the GOP advantage in the modern South, the Democratic recapture of both U.S. Senate seats in Georgia in 2020 and their retention two years later provides some interesting lessons for both parties. Republican Governor Kemp had appointed businesswoman (WNBA Atlanta Dream co-owner) Kelly Loeffler to a vacant seat, thereby passing over a more controversial conservative Trump loyalist leader Congressman Doug Collins (who had fought against Trump's impeachment on the House Judiciary Committee). The other candidate who made the special election runoff in 2020 was an African American and senior pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church (Martin Luther King's home), Raphael Warnock. In the other senate election runoff, Republican incumbent David Perdue faced Democrat Jon Ossoff, a former journalist and media company owner, who had money and name recognition thanks to a recent unsuccessful congressional campaign. Both Republicans in the early January runoff blasted their Democratic opponents as socialists with Loeffer calling herself "the firewall for stopping socialism" and Perdue labeling himself as "the last line of defense against this radical socialist agenda" (Miao, 2021). Democrats emphasized such popular issues as Medicaid expansion, criminal justice reform, and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act. President Trump campaigned both Republicans, raging that the presidential election had been stolen from him, with some party officials afterwards claiming that he had inadvertently discouraged Republicans from voting. Indeed, exit polls found that Republicans had only a 1% edge over Democrats in the runoff election, a clear decrease from the 4-5% advantage that they had enjoyed in the first elections. With both Democrats polling 2-3% higher among their own partisans than were the Republicans, and with both Democrats winning 52% of Independents, the Republican dropoff became decisive in the twin 51-49% Democratic runoff victories (https://www.cnn.com/election/2020/exit-polls/). Democrats overcame the GOP exit poll advantage in 2022 as well, as incumbent Raphael Warnock won a narrow victory in the election runoff. Warnock "steered clear of Biden ... emphasizing bipartisanship" (Bluestein 2022). Indeed, Warnock had co-sponsored a successful senate resolution with Mississippi Republican Cindy Hyde-Smith honoring Gold Star Families, which he touted on his Senate website (itself titled: Reverend Raphael Warnock, U.S. Senator for Georgia). As his Republican opponent, Trump-backed football legend Herschel Walker, faced allegations of abuse of his ex-wife and other women and of paying for a woman's abortion (despite his pro-life posture), Warnock stressed that the election was about "competence and character." Walker's rambling campaign comments even led him to talk about a fright movie and whether vampires or werewolves were stronger, prompting a campaigning Obama to jokingly remark: "Since the last time I was here, Mr. Walker has been talking about issues that are of great importance to the people of Georgia... Like whether it's better to be a vampire or a werewolf... This is a debate that I must confess I once had myself- when I was 7. Then I grew up." (Folmar 2022). While 95% of Republicans nevertheless stuck with Walker, Warnock won 97% of Democrats and 53% of Independents (to only 42% for Walker). Indeed, the outgoing Republican lieutenant governor even admitted that he had left his ballot blank in the Senate runoff election (see references page).