Southern Comfort

by digby

Paging Rick Perry: How a Southerner Could Sweep to the G.O.P. Nomination

By NATE SILVER

Being a Southerner conveys certain advantages upon a Republican presidential candidate.

Yah think?

Not meaning to make fun of Silver, who is talking about a 2012 nomination strategy and why Perry needn’t fear a late start, but a headline that says being a southerner is a GOP advantage is right up there with one that says the Sun rises in the east. Indeed, it wasn’t that long ago that it was assumed Democratic presidential aspirants needed to be Southerners too in order to offset this in the general election. I literally have an entire shelf filled with books devoted to this specific subject.

Here’s the 2000 electoral map where Florida was the toss-up:

Here’s the 2004 electoral map:

Here’s 2008:

Here’s the 1860 electoral map:

I’m fairly sure you can certain consistencies there. The fact is that the two tribes of America (and the parties that represent them) have tended to fall along the same basic lines from the beginning. Always? No, obviously. But the bases have always been fairly stable. Certainly not much has changed since 1968 when strategist Kevin Phillips wrote The Emerging Republican Majority positing that the ending of Jim Crow was going to precipitate a switch and the Republicans would become the Southern party.

There’s also a cultural identification that goes beyond the region. The Southern/Western Republican dominance and the migration of the Southern evangelical religions to other parts of the country has given the party a specific flavor that is very recognizable to their voters wherever they live. (Kevin Phillips discussed this interesting phenomenon in his more recent book American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century.) Why it wouldn’t be an advantage for a GOP candidate to be a Southerner would be a far more intriguing proposition.