Dems, It's Time to dump Dixie

[Street Knowledge]

DEMS, IT’S TIME TO DUMP DIXIE

Edmund D. Fountain/The Washington Post/Getty
I don’t remember a much sadder sight in domestic politics in my lifetime than that of Mary Landrieu schlumpfing around these last few weeks trying to save a Senate seat that was obviously lost. It was like witnessing the last two weeks of the life of a blind and toothless dog you knew the vet was just itching to destroy. I know that sounds mean about her, but I don’t intend it that way. She did what she could and had, as far as I know, an honorable career. I do, however, intend it to sound mean about the reactionary, prejudice-infested place she comes from. A toothless dog is a figure of sympathy. A vet who takes pleasure in gassing it is not.

And that is what Louisiana, and almost the entire South, has become. The victims of the particular form of euthanasia it enforces with such glee are tolerance, compassion, civic decency, trans-racial community, the crucial secular values on which this country was founded… I could keep this list going. But I think you get the idea. Practically the whole region has rejected nearly everything that’s good about this country and has become just one big nuclear waste site of choleric, and extremely racialized, resentment. A fact made even sadder because on the whole they’re such nice people! (I truly mean that.)

With Landrieu’s departure, the Democrats will have no more senators from the Deep South, and I say good. Forget about it. Forget about the whole fetid place. Write it off. Let the GOP have it and run it and turn it into Free-Market Jesus Paradise. The Democrats don’t need it anyway.

Actually, that’s not quite true. They need Florida, arguably, at least in Electoral College terms. Although they don’t even really quite need it—what happened in 2012 was representative: Barack Obama didn’t need Florida, but its 29 electoral votes provided a nice layer of icing on the cake, bumping him up to a gaudy 332 EVs, and besides, it’s nice to be able to say you won such a big state. But Florida is kind of an outlier, because culturally, only the northern half of Florida is Dixie. Ditto Virginia, but in reverse; culturally, northern Virginia is Yankee land (but with gun shops).

 

[Street Knowledge]

So Democrats still need to care about those two states, at least in presidential terms. And maybe you can throw in North Carolina under the right circumstances. And at some point in the near future, you’ll be able to talk about Georgia as a state a Democrat can capture. And eventually, Texas, too.

But that’s presidential politics. At the congressional level, and from there on down, the Democrats should just forget about the place. They should make no effort, except under extraordinary circumstances, to field competitive candidates. The national committees shouldn’t spend a red cent down there. This means every Senate seat will be Republican, and 80 percent of the House seats will be, too. The Democrats will retain their hold on the majority-black districts, and they’ll occasionally be competitive in a small number of other districts in cities and college towns. But they’re not going win Southern seats (I include here with some sadness my native West Virginia, which was not a Southern state when I was growing up but culturally is one now). And they shouldn’t try.

My friend the political scientist Tom Schaller said all this back in 2008, in his book Whistling Past Dixie. I didn’t want to agree with Schaller then, but now I throw in the towel. He was a man ahead of his time. Look west, Schaller advised the Democrats. And he was right. Now it’s true that many states in the nation’s heartland aren’t winnable for Democrats, either. Kansas, Nebraska, Wyoming, Idaho, and Utah will never come anywhere close to being purple. But Colorado already is. Arizona can be. Missouri, it’s not crazy to think so. And Montana and South Dakota are basically red, of course, but are both elect Democrats sometimes. (Did you know that both of Montana’s senators right now are Democrats?!) In sum, between the solid-blue states in the North and on the West Coast, and the pockets of opportunity that exist in the states just mentioned (and tossing in the black Southern seats), the Democrats can cobble together congressional majorities in both houses, under the right circumstances.

 

[Street Knowledge]

The main point is this: Trying to win Southern seats is not worth the ideological cost for Democrats.

But it’s not just a question of numbers. The main point is this: Trying to win Southern seats is not worth the ideological cost for Democrats. As Memphis Rep. Steve Cohen recently told my colleague Ben Jacobs, the Democratic Party cannot (and I’d say should not) try to calibrate its positions to placate Southern mores: “It’s come to pass, and really a lot of white Southerners vote on gays and guns and God, and we’re not going to ever be too good on gays and guns and God.”

Cohen thinks maybe some economic populism could work, and that could be true in limited circumstances. But I think even that is out the window now. In the old days, drenched in racism as the South was, it was economically populist. Glass and Steagall, those eponymous bank regulators, were both Southern members of Congress. But today, as we learned in Sunday’s Times, state attorneys general, many in the South, are colluding with energy companies to fight federal regulation of energy plants.

It’s lost. It’s gone. A different country. And maybe someday it really should be. I’ll save that for another column. Until that day comes, the Democratic Party shouldn’t bother trying. If they get no votes from the region, they will in turn owe it nothing, and in time the South, which is the biggest welfare moocher in the world in terms of the largesse it gets from the more advanced and innovative states, will be on its own, which is what Southerners always say they want anyway.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/12/08/dems-it-s-time-to-dump-dixie.html

 

[acri1]

Politically, this is probably a good idea for the Democrats. But on the other hand, it can't be good for a country to be so starkly poitically divided among racial and geographic lines.

 

[Regular_P]

Politically, this is probably a good idea for the Democrats. But on the other hand, it can't be good for a country to be so starkly poitically divided among racial and geographic lines.

We should let those states secede. They're holding up progress for the rest of us. It'll never happen, but it'd be best for everybody.

 

[observe]

Remind me what's Dixie again..I know it's some cac shyt during the civil war I forgot

 

[TravexdaGod]

I dunno. It doesn't seem like a good idea to write off such a large portion of the country, and one of the fastest growing parts of the country at that. The South is picking up congressional seats while the Northeast and Midwest are losing them. Maybe the Democrats need to do a little soul searching of their own and modify their strategy and their positions if they want to expand their base in the South and hold onto what they do have. Politics in this country have become far too polarized, anyhow.

 

[☑︎#VoteDemocrat]

Don't leave off Georgia

 

[TLR Is Mental Poison]

Politically, this is probably a good idea for the Democrats. But on the other hand, it can't be good for a country to be so starkly poitically divided among racial and geographic lines.

Weve been here before

http://www.archives.gov/federal-register/electoral-college/map/historic.html#1972
http://www.archives.gov/federal-register/electoral-college/map/historic.html#1984

shyt swings back and forth

 

[Domingo Halliburton]

the smugness in that article...

 

[88m3]

Politically, this is probably a good idea for the Democrats. But on the other hand, it can't be good for a country to be so starkly poitically divided among racial and geographic lines.

never loved us

 

[superunknown23]

Obama proved that you can easily win the presidency without the redneck vote (twice!)
The democrats' habit of "balancing" their ticket with southerners is now obsolete.
Besides, losing in the poorest and least educated region of the country ain't much of an indictment.

What states are they gonna flip against Hillary anyway?
Republicans have a clear disadvantage in presidential elections now. Mitt Romney won the South by comical margins among white voters and it didn't matter one bit. Obama lost in the white vote in Mississippi 90-10 percent (it was 87-12 in Alabama)!
Nationwide, Romney won the white vote by the same margin as Ronald Reagan in 1980 but still lost.
The GOP's southern strategy has ended at the presidential level, after 40 years of dominance.

Now democrats start presidential elections with at least 210 votes guaranteed (no need to even campaign in those states). Obama still would've won despite losing Ohio, Florida and Virginia!
Remember that Hillary will perform way better than Obama did with white voters (especially white women).

 

[superunknown23]

We need a 1 president per family rule though.
This rehashing of political families is kinda embarrassing.
Who's next... Another Bush, Chelsea, Malia?