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DEBUNKING THE SOUTHERN MYTH. If I may add a footnote to Charles� post below, I am particularly sensitive to the pervasive �conventional wisdoms� about Democrats and the South. One of the most annoying of these analyses -- so common that I wonder if it�s one of those cut-and-paste paragraphs journalist pre-write and insert into their stories about the South -- closed the very piece Charles links to:
�The last three Democrats to win the presidency--Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter and Lyndon Johnson--came from the southern states of Arkansas, Georgia and Texas, respectively.�That statement is true, of course: All three came of age and made their political chops in Southern states. But Clinton is different from Carter and Johnson in a fundamental way: He won his ticket to the White House outside the South.Here come the numbers, folks: Carter�s margin over Gerald Ford in 1976 was9.5 points higher in the South than his margin over Ford in the non-South (which Ford carried narrowly). Just four elections and 16 years later, Clinton�s margin over transplanted Connecticut Yankee George H. W. Bush was 9.5 points lower in the South than the non-South, making the Big Dog the first Democratic candidate since the Civil War to win the White House despite losing the South. That�s a net 19-point swing in the two parties� Southern v. non-Southern fortunes, and yet Clinton still won, making him what we might call the first Northern Southern Democratic president in American history. (N.B: Clinton did carry the South in 1996, by a whopping eight-hundreths of a percent; but, thanks to his bigger surge outside the region, his Non-South/South gap widened to 11.6 points.)Most telling is the fact that Carter did better in the South than the non-South in both winning the White House in 1976 and losing it in 1980. Clinton did better outside the South in both elections and won twice. The next Democratic president may or may not hail from the South, but s/he will not be elected from there. For my money, the best bet is to nominate a Southerner to win the presidency outside the South (see, e.g., Al Gore, who won the national popular vote without carrying a single southern state).
--Tom Schaller
