WASHINGTON (UPI) – The first Republican president to try to
change his party's strategy toward the South was Herbert Hoover.
After getting 47.7 percent of the Southern vote in 1928, and carrying five
of the Confederate states, Hoover determined to transfer the base of the
Southern Republican Party from blacks to whites. With this in mind, his
administration kept its distance from the first Northern black Republican
congressman, Oscar De Priest of Illinois, while it transferred Southern
patronage away from blacks and toward the same kind of white Protestant
businessmen who made up the core of the Northern Republican Party.
But Hoover couldn't have picked a worse time to build a Southern white
party. His vote in the South had reached 47.7 percent, or 1.6 million as
compared to just 27.8 percent (700,000) for Coolidge. But with the
great depression, his Southern vote fell to just 18.1 percent (681,828) in
1932. In those three elections, the entire Confederacy together cast 8.7
percent, 9.1 percent and 9.5 percent of the national vote, less than was
cast by New York, although they had 126 electoral votes
to New York's 45.
Franklin Roosevelt's policies were widely popular in the white South:
Of course, as the Northern black component of the Democratic Party grew, this
policy became harder and harder to sustain. In the 1948 election, it
collapsed.
Strom Thurmond, the governor of South Carolina, stormed out of the
Democratic convention after Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota attached a civil
rights measure to the platform. He got only 2.4 of the national vote, or
23.3 percent of the Southern vote, carrying four Deep South states.
Thomas E. Dewey, the governor of New York in the last election in which
New York outvoted the entire South, was more concerned with carrying his home
state (he did) than with the South. He drew the same quarter of the
Southern vote in 1948 that he did four years earlier.
Four years later, Dwight Eisenhower became the first Republican president
since Herbert Hoover, and he built upon Hoover's work: carrying four of
the five states that Hoover had taken in 1928 and getting 48.1 percent of
the Southern vote.
In the 1952, 1956 and 1960 elections, Virginia, Tennessee
and Florida went Republican all three times, while Louisiana went Republican
in 1956, and Texas twice for Ike and once for JFK. In 1956, Ike's Southern
vote edged up to 48.9 percent, and he became the second Republican in
history (after Grant) to get a plurality of Southern votes.
While no Republican since Hoover in 1928 had broken his record of 1.6
million Southern votes, Ike got more than 4.1 million Southern votes. The
return of the South to the national electorate had begun – with the
Southern states casting 13.9 percent of the national vote in each of
Eisenhower's two campaigns. The Eisenhower strategy was built on class, not
race, and he did best in the fastest-growing states of the South with the
most Northern settlers.
In the 1960 campaign against Richard Nixon, Kennedy found an answer to the Eisenhower
strategy by putting Lyndon Johnson on the ticket as his V.P. Despite his
Catholicism, and the loss of Mississippi and half of Alabama to third-party
voters, Kennedy was able to gain Texas and Louisiana back from the Republicans.
The Southern vote was up to 14.9 percent of the nation's, and Nixon got 46
percent of it. Kennedy's narrow popular-vote margin came from the South.
In 1964, the Republicans changed their Southern strategy to a new model – that of direct support for Southern opposition to desegregation. This
strategy cost them the outer South, but gained them the Deep South. It also
severed the party from blacks, and that proved to be permanent.
On the other hand, by getting 48.7 percent of Southern votes,
Goldwater became the first Republican in history to do better in the South
than the North. And the South's share of the national vote rose to 17.4
percent.
Nixon played a careful version of the Southern strategy in 1968,
combining Ike's class strategy with Goldwater's racial appeal. In 1968,
riots in northern cities had nationalized the race issue – so it was
possible to gain Northern as well as Southern votes by a mild racial appeal.
George Wallace took all the Goldwater states except South Carolina (led to
the Republicans by no less than Strom Thurmond) while also taking Arkansas.
Johnson was able to deliver his home state of Texas to his vice president,
Hubert Humphrey. Humphrey got a big infusion from the newly enfranchised
black vote, while losing the great majority of Southern whites and running
third behind Nixon and Wallace in the Southern popular vote.
The South split into almost equal shares for the three candidates, but
Nixon's national margin came from his edge over HHH in the section. And the
enfranchisement of blacks coupled with the counter-mobilization of blacks
took the South's share of the national vote past 20 percent for the first
time since 1876.
It was the desire to win the Wallace vote that shaped a large part of
Nixon's policies and even more his rhetoric in the next four years. After
Wallace was shot in a Maryland parking lot, while the Democrats nominated
George McGovern, Nixon's task was done for him. He carried the South with an
astounding 71.3 percent of the vote, getting more than 10 million votes
there – more than twice as many as 1968. And he did more than 10 percent
better in the South than in the rest of the country.
But Nixon's impeachment, resignation and his replacement by an old-style
Northern Republican, Gerald Ford of Michigan, gave the Democrats an
opportunity in the South. By nominating Jimmy Carter of Georgia, they took
it. Carter carried every Southern state but Virginia, Ford's Southern vote
fell to 44.7 percent of the total, and Carter's national margin in the
popular vote was provided by the South, whose percentage of the national
popular vote was the highest since the Civil War (22.5 percent).
The failure of the Carter presidency on multiple fronts allowed the
Republicans an opportunity to recoup. In 1980, Ronald Reagan used an updated
version of the 1968 Nixon class and race strategy, and it worked. The only
Southern state Jimmy Carter held on to was his home state of Georgia. Reagan
got 51.4 percent of the Southern vote, as compared to 50.5 percent of the
Northern vote, and Southern turnout rose to 23.9 percent of the national
vote.
In 1984, Reagan faced another Northern liberal, and this time he got more
than 14 million Southern votes. His 62.4 percent of the Southern vote was a
bit higher than his national percentage.
In 1988 Northern liberal Michael Dukakis lost the entire South again.
George Bush got 58.3 percent of the Southern vote, which was up to 25.4
percent of the nation's vote.
In 1992 and 1996, the Democrats went to all-Southern tickets, and were
competitive in the South. In 1992, the South was 26.4 perfect of the
national vote. In 1996 it was 27.3 percent.
Ironically, although the Clinton-Gore tickets ran even in the South,
Bill Clinton would have won both his elections without a single Southern
electoral vote.
And, while Bush lost the presidency in 1992, he carried the South with a
narrow plurality of 42.6 percent against a national percentage of 37.4
percent. In fact, the majority of the Republican electoral vote in each of
the last three elections has come from the Confederacy.
The huge Republican congressional gains of 1994 were concentrated in the
South, and it became clear in that election that the Republicans were now a
Southern party.
In the election just past, Southern votes made up 27.9 percent of the
national vote, and Southern whites were close to 30 percent of the Bush
vote. If President Bush lost the national popular vote by 500,000, he carried the
Southern vote by well over 3.1 million.
The South is no longer "in play." It is now the base of one party. But as
a base, instead of a swing element, the South carries disadvantages with it.
The white Southern Republican bloc is larger than the black Democratic
bloc.
But it is relatively monocultural: fundamentalist Protestant. And the end
of welfare, the collapse of crime, the suburbanization of Northern whites
and the rising cultural gap between Northern and Southern whites now makes
it harder for Northern Republicans. States such as California, Iowa and
Vermont, which they carried in all of the close elections between 1960 and
1980, are now solidly Democratic.
Ironically, because the modern American system rewards disloyalty more than
loyalty, the influence of the loyal Southern Republicans of 2001 on their
party is less than that of the disloyal ones of 1980.
As so often happens, the moment of triumph contains the elements of
decline. Florida, the second-largest Southern state in population and soon to be the third-largest state in the union, is barely a Southern state any more. And Texas,
which has been at the center of national politics since the 1950s heyday of
Lyndon Johnson and Sam Rayburn, is unlikely to be as important in the next
half-century as it was in the last half-century.
And the continued rapid growth of Virginia and North Carolina is going to
move them away from the South as it already has done to Florida.
The states that decide national elections now are not those of the South,
but of the cultural border between South and North, those along the Ohio
River. Bush needs a Northern strategy, not a Southern strategy, and although
he knows this, the nature of his party may prevent him from achieving it.
Copyright 2001 by United Press International. All rights reserved.
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