A Solid South

...Glaser's campaign narratives are scrupulously even-handed and dispassionate, even when candidates engaged in repellent negative campaigning (as some of these did...

...Key described 56 years ago, where (a few mountain areas aside) whites didn't vote Republican and blacks were rarely allowed to vote at all...

...Glaser thinks he might have run a much stronger race if he'd had the resources, but we'll never know...

...In 2004, he won Fritz Hollings's old seat to become South Carolina's junior senator...

...In the words of the late Big Jim Folsom, kiss my ass if that ain't a show...

...But change doesn't always mean loss of distinctiveness...

...Hayes's seat is apparently safe for now...

...This despite an American Conservative Union rating of 65...

...he also examines the persistence of time-honored traditions like populist rhetoric and appeals to localism, as well as the continuing effects of run-off primary systems adopted in the days of the one-party Democratic South...

...She said, "I don't date men...

...Glaser reveals how Shows used black churches and radio stations to deliver subtly different messages to black and white audiences...

...It appears that they attract more candidates—possibly a good thing—and, apparently, "come-from-behind" candidates who win run-offs after finishing second in the first primary tend to fare better in general elections than those who win first primaries outright or, especially, those who win run-offs after leading in first primaries...

...no non-southern state does this...

...and even when they do win, they need to watch their backs...

...After a tough fight in the Republican primary against a former University of South Carolina quarterback advised by Ralph Reed, formerly of the Christian Coalition, Jim DeMint coasted to victory in the general election, holding his Democratic opponent (a Krispy Kreme doughnut franchisee) to 40 percent of the vote, which was better than expected...

...When he does venture, briefly and somewhat incongruously, into logistic regression and related arcana, he actually comes back with a couple of interesting findings about run-off primaries...

...He also played the home-boy card against the Republican nominee, a wealthy Catholic tax lawyer, and he won in 1998...

...Finally, the 1998 contest in the Greenville-Spartanburg area of South Carolina shows how things work in a district where the real contest, if there is one, is between conservative Republicans backed by the Christian Right and conservative Republicans backed by the Chamber of Commerce, and the only elites with Democratic leanings are union leaders and trial lawyers...

...The times they are a-changin' in John Shelton Reed is the Watson-Brown Visiting Professor of Southern Studies at the University of South Carolina...

...Certainly when it comes to politics they are...

...Even as a Republican he is anchoring the right wing of his party...

...My, my...

...now, after the Republican breakthrough in the 1994 elections, it has become the most Republican part (except for some of the mountain West, but nobody lives there, so who cares...

...DeMint kept his promise to serve only three terms in the House of Representatives...

...She said no again...

...But even Democrats who win can seldom relax and enjoy their incumbency...

...In short, Republicans now have the upper hand in most of the region...

...Since the district was 41 percent black, Shows needed only to turn out these voters and pick up a fifth or so of the white vote...

...After voting to impeach the president in 1998, he became an independent...

...it isn't even past.' BY JOHN SHELTON REED Not long ago my wife and I were eating lunch in a greasy spoon in a small South Carolina county seat...

...Four years later, though, when redistricting changed the composition of his district and put him in a race against a Republican incumbent, he lost...

...He picked five races for open congressional seats in 1996 and 1998, hung out with the candidates and their entourages, spoke with voters and local journalists, read up on the histories of the districts, and reports what he observed and what he takes it to mean...

...He won handily...

...It helped that his East Texas district had a long history of populism, to which Sandlin appealed (his argument that government should be kept out of decisions on abortion sounded less pro-choice than antigov-ernment...

...citizens by birth...

...He persisted...

...Democrats who get lucky with their district's racial composition, with personal wealth or weak opponents, can sometimes give them a good race...

...She said no...

...Just so, in Mississippi's Fourth District in 1998, Democrat Ronnie Shows began with a demographic head start: The vast majority of the district's black population would vote Democratic if they voted at all...

...He shows that they can, but the circumstances must be very special...

...He asked why not...

...Glaser doesn't put it this way, and might not, but I will: That's because the parties have changed even more than the South has...

...I braced myself for her reply...

...But an unspoken subtext of his book is the question, Can Democrats still win congressional races in majority-white southern districts...

...In 1998, in the North Carolina district that includes Charlotte, it was Republican Robin Hayes who had the common touch, despite being an heir to the Cannon Mills fortune...

...He was chatting up the white waitress (tattoos, short cropped hair) and when he asked her for a date, I started eavesdropping even more intently...

...But a personal fortune that allowed him to outspend his opponent by better than three to one also helped, as did the fact that his opponent bore an unfortunate resemblance to Grou-cho Marx...

...Southern Republicans learned how to play hardball well from all those years of seemingly hopeless opposition...

...His opponent made it easy for him ("Why does he tell people he went to school at Harvard...

...The new Solid South isn't as solid as the one V.O...

...A black guy in work clothes (name embroidered over his shirt pocket) came in to pick up a take-out order...

...The other two districts Glaser examines are even more comfortably Republican...

...Hayes's district was redrawn to his disadvantage by North Carolina's legislature (still Democratic), but he survived in 2002 and 2004, largely thanks to his mastery of the classic conservative Democratic formula of conservative social policies and liberal pork-barrel spending...

...Observers complained that it was hard to tell where he stood on the issues, but when it was clear, he was so clearly conservative that Republican efforts to link him to Bill Clinton were unavailing...

...In 1996, Democrat Max Sandlin won, for example...

...All but 2 of the 13 southern states oblige the top two vote-getters in a primary election to run in a second primary if no one gets a majority in the first...

...Similarly, the "majority-minority" congressional districts imposed on the South by the Justice Department have precedents that go back to the days of white supremacy: Then, as now, concentrating black voters in a few districts strengthened the hands of conservative white candidates in other districts and gave them little political reason to respond to the interests of black voters...

...But after that he became Congress's most conservative Democrat, less aligned with Clinton than four of Virginia's five Republicans (and tied with the fifth...

...For the foreseeable future, the South is the Republicans' to lose...

...Glaser summarizes the major arguments of the three heavyweight books that should be read by anyone seriously interested in understanding southern politics—V.O...

...Goode made the most of that, and campaigned vigorously and personally in the best Strom Thurmond tradition...

...His many books on the South include (with Dale V. Reed) 1001 Things Everyone Should Know About the South...

...In 2002, he ran as a Republican, and it looks as if he'll be in Congress as long as he wants to stay...

...Key's classic South-^irn Politics in State and Nation (1949) and two by the brothers Earl and Merle Black, Politics and Society in the South (1987) and The Rise of Southern Republicans (2002)—but his own aims are modest and so is his "methodology" (to use ironic quotation marks of the sort that, by the way, he is a bit too fond of for my taste...

...Southside Virginia in 1996 presents a story with a somewhat different outcome, though no more encouraging for Democrats...

...Add to Hayes's folksy appeal to the district's smalltown and rural voters the fact that Charlotte's suburban growth was filling the district with new country-club Republicans, and a GOP victory appeared to be such a foregone conclusion that the hapless Democrat had trouble raising money...

...Glaser's account also reveals other continuities that he points out less explicitly...

...one of his aides complained...

...I know it's a New South, but this town seemed to me the sort of place where maybe they hadn't got the memo...

...Dixie...

...Democrat Virgil Goode, a man as down-home as they come, faced a Republican opponent who had moved from California not long before...

...His point is not just that conservative white folks still usually call the shots (although that, too...

...The dominant party in the South is still doing its best to redistrict the minority into near-oblivion, although that party is now Republican...

...At least he thinks so: I see that he recently voted for CAFTA, deeply unpopular in the old textile towns of the Carolinas...

...The South used to be the most Democratic region of the country...

...Recently, I read, he has been working to amend the Constitution to prevent children of illegal immigrants from becoming U.S...

...Glaser's narrative ends with Sandlin still in Congress, but, in 2004, the Republican state legislature redis-tricted him into a race against a Republican incumbent from a neighboring district, in which he got only an embarrassing 38 percent of the vote...

...Moreover, change doesn't even mean loss of continuity.In this new volume, James Glaser, a political scientist at Tufts whose last book was the award-winning Race, Campaign Politics, and the Realignment in the South (1996), expands on his earlier argument that the dramatically changed surface of southern politics conceals—no, reflects—some enduring themes...