Whistling towards Dixie
by Tom Sullivan
A week ago I wrote about a suspected lynching under investigation along the coast in North Carolina. Eerie stuff. Up here in the mountains, we’ve got this Scot-Irish thing happening that defines local attitudes (the kind of thing Sara Robinson has written about for years). But things are hardly static. Inmigration is changing the South. In the wake of Michael Tomasky’s recent “dump Dixie” column, Chris Kromm at the Institute for Southern Studies counters with why that’s a bad idea.
Southern clout is expected to grow with population, he writes. “Southern states are projected to gain another five Congressional seats and Electoral College votes in 2020. Ignoring the South just isn’t an option if Democrats want to be relevant in national politics.”
And the South is not Democrats’ biggest problem. Democrats’ Senate candidates may have lost by an average of 18 points in the South, but they lost by an average of 26 points in the Great Plains. “But for some reason,” Kromm writes, “we’re never treated to post-Election Day screeds from Northern pundits about the Great Plains being a cesspool of ‘prejudice’ and ‘resentment.'”
Thirdly, “Nearly half of all African Americans in the country live in 13 Southern states.” And that population is growing, a “two-decade trend of return migration of blacks to the South.” Those people are a large chunk Democrats’ base voters. Abandoning them is to cut off one’s nose to spite the face. And besides those, Kromm writes, “Southern states also have among the fastest-growing Latino and Asian communities. The South ranks at the top for both migration from other states and immigration from abroad. The number of counties in the South that are majority people of color is projected to double within a generation.”
But demography is not enough. The left may gloat over the point spread by which women favor Democrats over Republicans, but when Democrats are losing white, working-class voters by 30 points in off-years when young voters generally stay home, the result is 2014.
Undoing that (and the redistricting post 2010) will not be quick or easy. The NC Supreme Court just yesterday upheld the GOP’s 2011 redistricting maps. Because of a computer glitch on Election Night 2008, our local Board of Elections had trouble uploading vote totals to Raleigh. Barack Obama had already won, but John McCain still led in North Carolina by 3,000 votes. The only county left to report with any votes in it was ours. A colleague fresh from the Board downtown slid up to me at the watch party and slipped a printout into my hands: 17,000 votes net for Obama. We’d won every race in the county. In 2014, when Democrats everywhere else across the South lost ground, we gained it here.
