The New South Finally Arrives

A coalition of African Americans and economically abused Southern whites has been an elusive dream ever since Reconstruction. The planter class that dominated the South before and after the Civil War did everything in its power to keep such a coalition out of power by playing off poor whites against newly freed Black citizens.

Martin Luther King Jr. expressed the strategy of the white governing class exactly when he said, “The Southern aristocracy took the world and gave the poor white man Jim Crow … And when his wrinkled stomach cried out for the food that his empty pockets could not provide, he ate Jim Crow, a psychological bird that told him that no matter how bad off he was, at least he was a white man, better than the Black man.”

A biracial governing coalition was briefly realized in several Southern states until the corrupt Compromise of 1877 pulled the last of the Union army out of the South. It lingered until the late 19th century in a few holdout cities such as Wilmington, North Carolina, where a violent coup in 1898 displaced the elected biracial city government in favor of a racist one.

In the 20th century, FDR’s weird coalition of Northern liberals and Southern racists enacted the New Deal but barred Black citizens from most of its benefits. Not until LBJ’s alliance with the civil rights movement of the 1960s did the Democratic Party at last redeem the promise of Lincoln. But Johnson forecast, all too accurately, that his successful sponsorship of three great civil rights acts would cost Democrats Southern support for a generation—except it turned out to be two generations.

After Nixon and Reagan pursued their Southern strategy of displacing the Dixiecrats as the party of racism, with a handful of exceptions the Democratic Party in the South became the Black party and the Republicans the white party. And since white voters outnumbered Black, Democrats seldom got to govern.

Against this history, Tuesday’s election results in much of the South signal an epochal change. Democrats got elected in unlikely places in the former Confederacy, not just because Black turnout swelled, but because lots of white people voted for Democratic candidates, white or Black.

Georgia, where the population is 52.3 percent white and 32.3 percent Black, has a Black senator in Raphael Warnock, and a newly elected Black governor in Keisha Lance Bottoms, who won by almost nine points. The other Georgia senator, Democrat Jon Ossoff, who is Jewish, won re-election by more than 18 points. All are economic progressives. An astonishing eight out of the ten statewide elected officials in Georgia are Black women, all Democrats.

Large numbers of white people voted for the Democrat, and not just in Georgia. According to an analysis by The New York Times, white voters shifted toward Democrats by 11 points in Mississippi, 16 points in Alabama, and 18 points in North Carolina.

A review of where those votes came from suggests that a growing percentage were not the stereotypical white liberal professionals but working-class whites. Nationally, white voters with no college degree, the core of the Trump coalition and once the soul of the Democratic Party, shifted back to Democrats by an average of 14 points.

In Mississippi, long the most racist state of the Deep South, a Black Democrat, Scott Colom, is narrowly ahead of his white Republican opponent in the still uncalled Senate race. Mississippi is 33.3 percent Black and 55.2 percent white. The fact that the election is basically tied means that Colom got about a third of his support from white people.

In a continuing legacy of Jim Crow entirely in keeping with Donald Trump’s schemes to purge the rolls, Mississippi’s Republican secretary of state disqualified some 230,000 registered citizens from voting by categorizing them as “inactive,” relying on information from the credit agency Experian. Registered voters identified as having a new address were labeled “inactive” unless they provided their new address. An investigation by Mississippi Today found that incorrect information mistakenly led to the inactivation of numerous legitimate voters.

Thousands of voters who were labeled inactive went ahead and cast provisional ballots, known in Mississippi as “affidavit” ballots. Reportedly, some 17,000 remain to be counted. When these are all validated, Colom could well be the winner. Republicans are demanding extra scrutiny for these ballots. Colom is continuing to raise money to pay for lawyers to mount court challenges so that every vote is counted.

It seemed wildly improbable that Black Democrats could get elected to the Senate in the Deep South—so improbable that neither the Senate Majority PAC nor the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) sent money to Democrats Angie Nixon in Florida or Jamie Davis in Louisiana, and gave Colom only modest support very late in the game. All were massively outspent.

Nixon lost by less than three points; Davis by less than two points.

Davis was so far off political radar screens as a possible pickup that the Prospect literally ran the only national magazine piece on his campaign. Had Nixon and Davis been financially competitive, the Deep South could have had three new African American Democrats in the Senate instead of possibly one, and Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer would be within two or three votes of being able to break a Republican filibuster.

Black turnout rose significantly in this election, because Black leaders, activist groups, and voters were outraged by Republican gutting of the Voting Rights Act, for which so many civil rights workers had bled and died. This anger was compounded by Trump’s war on DEI, which was a cover for denial of basic civil rights enforcement. The capstone was court-approved and Republican-ordered racial gerrymandering.

Although the Democratic wave was so large that it overcame much of this racial repression, these racist actions, all mandated or approved by the Supreme Court, had consequences. Restoration of those rights awaits broader reforms that the Democratic majority needs to deliver on. The old saw is that the Supreme Court follows the election results. Let’s see if that’s true today when it comes to race.

The former slaveholders, who succeeded in ending Reconstruction, called themselves the Redeemers. But the true redemption is happening now, 160 years late.

Massive Black turnout was central to the Democratic wave. The increased willingness of Southern whites to vote for Democrats was just as significant. If Democrats can deliver, for working people of all races, it could finally herald the new South that we’ve been waiting for since Lincoln freed the slaves.