The Nation's Pulse/Slim GOP Pickin's in Dixie
Wyman, Hastings Jr.
THE NATION'S PULSE SLIM GOP PICKIN'S IN DIXIE by Hastings Wyman, Jr. A t the beginning of this decade, the Commonwealth of Virginia was a Republican stronghold. Ronald Reagan had carried the...
...One is a side effect of the Republican party's success in winning the White House...
...For various reasons— provisions of the Voting Rights Act, the greater likelihood of electing black candidates to office because of the heavy concentration of black voters, a strong commitment to the political process because so many were denied access to it until the mid-1960s—Southern blacks vote at a much higher rate than blacks elsewhere...
...In 1986, Rep...
...The Republican party may also have been hurt by the relative ease with which it can raise large sums of money...
...Southern voters have also begun to elect Republicans to secondary statewide offices in Louisiana, North Carolina, Florida, and Texas...
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...But today, the GOP has only seven senators from the South 30 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1989 WRITERS AND RESEARCHERS: LEND US YOUR MESSY DESKS, CLUTTERED DRAWERS, AND STUFFED BRIEFCASES FOR JUST 8 MINUTES A DAY...
...While two-thirds of white voters in the South might easily agree that Michael Dukakis had no business supporting a program that allowed Willie Horton out on parole, Southern Democratic candidates for lesser office are quite willing to distance themselves from such policies...
...This meant the GOP relied on a candidate who, though well known, had never run for office before and stumbled when he appeared unconcerned about the effects of Japanese exports on East Texas jobs...
...In Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Texas, previous GOP governorships lasted one term and left little imprint on their states' political landscape...
...In the First District of Texas, when the special election was called in 1985, not a single officeholder was a Republican...
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...Unfortunately, the easier way has allowed the GOP to win a number of highly visible elections without building the kind of organization that produces victories over the long haul...
...After the 1978 elections, the Republicans held 13 percent of the seats in Southern legislatures...
...q THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1989 31...
...Tivo factors suggest the longterm prospects for Republicans in the South may be brighter than the recent trends suggest...
...And the legislature—with ninety-three Democrats and forty-four Republicans—is about as Democratic as it was in 1980...
...Both Reagan in '84 and Bush in '88 had won the district with 60 percent of the vote...
...In a special election last April, Republicans nominated state senator John Rice, who had switched parties only months earlier...
...Fifteen years ago, Tennessee sent two Republicans to the Senate, including Majority Leader Howard Baker, and a GOP governor sat in Nashville...
...Don Fuqua (D), from Florida's Second District, unexpectedly decided to retire...
...That kind of local and down-ballot percentage provides the party not only with experienced candidates for the future but organizational muscle as well...
...he faces a tough Democratic challenge in 1990...
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...Phil Gramm (R) had urged the appointment because it would create a congressional vacancy in the First District, deep in the heart of "Dixiecrat" East Texas...
...The Democrats won a narrow but highly publicized victory...
...Senate seat, and Harry Byrd, Jr., a conservative independent, held the other, to be replaced by a Republican in 1982...
...Is the party that carried every Southern state in the 1988 presidential election permanently powerless in congressional races...
...While local considerations entered into each of these races, election results for the South as a whole confirm that its congressional delegation is not moving inexorably into the Republican column...
...Nine of Virginia's ten congressional seats were occupied by Grand Old Partiers...
...But the GOP didn't even contest the race, so Democrats kept the seat by default...
...Ronald Reagan had carried the state by a sizeable margin in 1980...
...But the best laid plans...
...The Democrats nominated Jim Chapman, a savvy former district attorney...
...Republicans held one U.S...
...The Democrats now control half the U.S...
...A few more such efforts and the GOP's long dormant and much ballyhooed Southern strategy may at long last bear fruit...
...Bill Nichols (D) of Alabama's Third District died...
...Today, both senators are Democrats, including presidential aspirant Albert Gore, Jr., and Tennessee's governor is a Democrat likely to face, at best, token GOP opposition in 1990...
...And although most local offices were still held by Democrats—the state legislature had ninety-seven Democrats and only forty-two Republicans—it was considered only a matter of time before the GOP would consolidate its power in this conservative stronghold, in this conservative decade...
...And in 1988, when Bush, as heir apparent, swept the South, the GOP gained one Southern Senate seat and lost a Southern House seat...
...House delegation...
...Compare that performance to the 1960s, when Republicans gained twenty congressional seats in the South, or to the 1970s, when they gained twelve...
...There are several reasons for the GOP's sluggishness in Dixie...
...House Whip Newt Gingrich founded GOPAC to lend financial and organizational support to local-level Republican candidates...
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...tr ip O'Neill wisely said that all pol1 itics are local...
...The GOP's failure to win local office has had significant repercussions in congressional and statewide races...
...Moreover, numerous contests for open seats in districts with strong Republican voting histories on the presidential level have been won by Democrats (who then keep the seats for as long as they want—the incumbent reelection rate is now 98 percent...
...For twelve years Republicans had occupied the governor's mansion in Richmond...
...Louisiana's Fourth District did elect a Republican after Buddy Roemer, a Democrat, was elected governor, but districts in Tennessee and Virginia also held special elections in 1988, and though both districts had backed Reagan—by 57 and 65 percent respectively—Democrats won both seats...
...And state and local issues like taxation, education, highway programs, and lotteries seldom divide voters ideologically to the point where the GOP can count on the 60 or 70 percent majority of the white vote Republicans need to win...
...is publisher of Southern Political Report...
...In 1985, President Reagan appointed Texas Congressman Sam Hall (D) to a federal judgeship...
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...After the 1980 Reagan landslide, the Republicans held thirty-nine of the South's House seats, the Democrats, sixty-nine...
...The Democratic primary was won by Glen Browder, Alabama's secretary of state, a former political science professor and a selfproclaimed moderate with strong teacher/labor backing...
...The paucity of local Republican officeholders usually means as well that "the courthouse crowd"—the sheriff, the clerk of court, the county treasurer, their employees, relatives, friends, and neighbors—is in the Democratic corner...
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...In 1980, when Reagan defeated Carter, Southern Republicans won nine House seats and four Senate seats...
...House and Senate races, the Republican share of state seats has doubled in the last decade, to 26 percent...
...Box 228, Somerville, MA 02143 (although there are again five Republican governors—in Alabama, Florida, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Texas...
...The GOP ran a campaign long on stridency but short on specifics, trying to stick Browder with the liberal label, even though he had only a brief voting record—one year in the legislature—to provide the evidence...
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...A second factor has been the determined political activity of Southern black voters...
...The GOP can find little solace elsewhere in the South...
...Some thirty-seven years after Dwight Eisenhower broke the Democratic monopoly on the South, for example, only 13 percent of Southern sheriffs—probably the region's most influential politicians— are Republicans...
...The winner, Bill Grant, did switch parties, incidentally, in early 1989...
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...Excepting 1976, when Southerners voted their accent, the Democrats since 1964 have carried only two Southern states—Texas in 1968 (in a three-way split with George Wallace) and Georgia in 1980 (Carter again...
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...Browder won by a whopping 65-35 majority...
...In Texas, the counties of Dallas, Tarrant (Fort Worth), and Bexar (San Antonio) all have Republican sheriffs...
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...Similarly, since 1964, when Barry Hastings Wyman, Jr...
...Paul Trible, the Republican senator elected to replace Byrd, declined to seek re-election in the face of a powerful challenge from a Democratic ex-governor, who won the Senate seat almost by default...
...The pattern is not limited to Virginia...
...Thus Democratic candidates in the South start out with an average 20 percent of the voters, needing only about 40 percent—and in some states much less—of the white vote to win...
...the Dallas County courthouse is occupied almost entirely by Republican officeholders...
...Similarly, the GOP is making significant gains in other local races...
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...I s it over for the GOP in Dixie...
...If you've got the money, your inclination is to hire a campaign—political consultant, media expert, telephone banks—rather than develop an organization of volunteers...
...In the 1988 election, the Bush-Quayle ticket ran stronger in the South (59 to 41 percent) than in the rest of the country (52 to 48 percent...
...Goldwater's nomination made the GOP's Southern strategy official, at least twenty-three congressional districts, in every state of the South—that is, the eleven states of the old Confederacy— have elected Republican congressmen only to replace them later with Democrats...
...The GOP spent a fortune, and Lee Atwater—then the Reagan White House's top political operative— spent weeks in Texarkana overseeing the effort...
...Ten of the South's twenty-two senators (not counting Virginia's Byrd) were Republicans after Reagan's 1980 landslide carried four of them to unexpected victories...
...In contrast to the GOP's stagnant record in U.S...
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...The district was ripe for conversion to the GOP: Reagan had carried it with 61 percent in 1984...
...Along with the Republican governorships, the advances in the state legislatures could win Republicans more favorable treatment in congressional and legislative redistricting after the 1990 census...
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...As the 1980s draw to a close, Democrats have held the Virginia governorship for eight years and could make history in November by electing the state's first black governor...
...Southern voters don't "turn the rascals out" if they're not angry...
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...While Democrats have majorities in both houses of every Southern state legislature, the Florida GOP is on the verge of winning the state senate, and in the North Carolina house and the Tennessee senate Republican minorities have joined conservative Democrats to elect legislative leaders...
...In 1988, Republicans elected seven new sheriffs in South Carolina, including in many of the state's largest counties...
...The GOP has also peaked in the election of Senate seats...
...Below the presidential level, moreover, candidates and issues are seldom philosophically and racially polarizing, and this too helps Southern Democrats...
...At least one key national Republican has recognized the importance of these races...
...The district, which includes Tallahassee, had given Reagan 62 percent only two years earlier...
...Almost a decade later, after the 1988 Bush landslide, the Republicans still held thirty-nine to the Democrats' seventyseven...
...Early this year, Rep...
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...Three recent congressional races—one each in Texas, Florida, and Alabama—illustrate the GOP's problems in the South...
...And because the Republican party has, since 1964, been hostile or indifferent to much of the national civil rights agenda, Southern blacks are solidly Democratic (more than 90 percent...
...He has been as good as his word in his own district in Georgia, where Republicans elected thirty-six of their seventy local candidates in 1988, a 119 percent increase for the district...
...In their excellent book, Politics and Society in the South (Harvard University Press, 1987), Earl and Merle Black point out that both workingand middle-class white Southerners are much more attuned to the political attitudes of the Republican party than of the (national) Democratic party...
...What's more, on the local level and in "down-ballot" statewide races, the GOP continues to grow...
...the Republicans chose Edd Hargett, a former professional football player...
...Such strong preferences will continue to provide other, lower-level Republican candidates, if not long coattails to grab on to, at least a favorable hearing...
...In 1984, with Reagan running to succeed himself, the GOP won seven House seats in the South and lost one Senate seat...
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...The GOP has often made gains in House and Senate races in the South when a Democrat occupied the White House and Southern voters had someone to react against...
...And these gains ran counter to the trend in the rest of the country...
...The inclination is understandable, for going into a community cold and persuading people to help create a new political party is not unlike selling vacuum cleaners door to door: it can be done, but there's got to be an easier way...
Vol. 22 • August 1989 • No. 8
