By Dave Anderson:
How weird is the South?
That is the great political question for the 2010 House elections.
If the South is a regional outlier, then the Democrats will lose a net of ten to fifteen seats and a gross of twenty seats concentrated in the South counter-balanced by picking off half a dozen seats in the Northeast, California and the Midwest. Basically, it would be a typical off-year election loss for the party that holds the governmental tri-fecta.
If Southern attitudes are a harbinger of national attitudes on election day, then the Republicans will repeat 1994 and retake the House.
Charlie Cook at Brendan Nyhan's place lays out some data on Southern congressional districts:
anti-Democratic and anti-Congress venom is extraordinary, and with 59
Democrat-held seats in the region, 22 in or potentially in competitive
districts, this is a very serious situation for Democrats. I have had
several Democratic members from the region say the atmosphere is as bad
or worse than it was in 1994.
As we saw in 2006 and 2008, not all competitive Republican incumbent seats were Democratic wins, and not all flips were on the competitive lists. In 2006, Cook listed 54 Republican seats as potentially competitive on Halloween; the Democrats picked up 31 seats, some of which were not on Cook's radar. So using Cook's track record, and assuming a Republican wave of winning the nail biters, the Democrats could expect to lose fifteen or so net Southern seats.
The question is whether or not these Southern problems generalize for the Democrats? If this recent regional break-down of approval of the GOP holds true, I am betting that the South will remain politically weird:
It may not be politically correct to speak the words out loud but there is nothing mysterious about race. I can't speak with authority about other states, but I can assure you that the Georgia districts clearly reflect racial distributions. Charlie Cook's map of House districts illustrates the point well. That tight little cluster which is Atlanta is also solidly black, surrounded by a solidly white-flight populated area. Not "leaning" or "likely" but solid.
ReplyDeleteThe Republican Southern strategy not only worked, it worked well enough that in Georgia the terms Democrat and Republican are almost synonymous with Black and White respectively.
I can think of nothing energizing white voters more than a black president. And at the national level that dynamic lies very close to the surface.
Teabaggers outside the South can cry foul at what I have just written because "some of my best friends..." and all that. But it is for that reason that the birther/Muslim/Weatherman/ACORN associations have such traction in that (also noticeably white) group.
Those of us who have been in this mess for the last forty years don't think it's weird at all. It's just how it is and we keep trying to change it. Hope this helps.
I can only assume it's random chance that your chart looks like it's flipping the bird to those who hold a favourable view of the GOP.
ReplyDeleteThe 2010 election will revolve around the economy, it needs to be improving. The Democrats can simply write off most of the South and the Mormon west states, Utah, Idaho and Wyoming. Long term the South will get smaller. Virginia is almost gone now and Texas will follow as the Hispanics become the majority.
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