The Campaign Spectator: Southern Winds
Wyman, Hastings
by Hastings Wyman Southem Winds Black voters are changing Dixie politics. T he Republican evolution in the South, beginning with Strom Thurmond s Dixiecrat bolt from the Democratic Party in...
...But Democrats ran well in other statewide contests and in legislative races...
...Moreover, these liberal voters, many of them Jewish, vote at an unusually high rate...
...Jim Gilmore led his party to win control of the House of Delegates, giving the COP top-to-bottom control of state government for the first time since Reconstruction...
...There is, of course, the possibility that events will conspire to polarize the races more strongly in the South once again...
...Two factors--a significant increase in AfricanAmerican turnout in Southern elections and a lessened polarization of white voters around the GOP standard-have combined to create a powerful Democratic counter-punch in the Republican South...
...This Southem bloc, combined with GOP states in the West and elsewhere, appeared to have created what Horace Busby, Lyndon Johnson's former aide, termed a "Republican lock" on the White House...
...cities and a sharply increasing crime rate, played well not only in the South, but with many white voters across the nation...
...They even had hopes of defeating Democrat Cynthia McKinney, the left-of-center congresswoman whose legislator father made anti-Semitic comments about McKinney's Jewish Republican opponent during the campaign...
...So in 1998 , Georgia Democrats enlisted McKinney's help with black turnout...
...There was, however, a large component of low-income white voters, mostly textile workers and hard-scrabble farmers, whose support could be encouraged by paying "haulers" to spend the day shuttling friends and family to the polls...
...In Louisiana's sixth district, which includes Baton Rouge, political heiress Marjorie McKeithen came within an eyelash of defeating seven-term Republican Rep...
...Senate...
...Mike Huckabee actively courted black religious and political leaders, exit polls indicate he won an astounding 48 percent of the African-American vote...
...In sum, the Democratic comeback in the Deep South has weakened the GOP's Southern stronghold...
...But McKinney, a superb organizer, turned out such a large number of her fellow African Americans that not only was she re-elected with ease, but her efforts were credited with putting Democrat Max Cleland in the Senate...
...And in Arkansas, where Gov...
...Moreover, word has it that both the campaigns of Parker and Bill Hawks, the Republican candidate for lieutenant governor, made "walking around money" available at the last minute to get black support...
...Richard Baker...
...The issues that enticed most whites into the COP--the Cold War, economics, and racial conflict--have mostly moved to the back burner, making white voters less inclined to racial polarization and more open to Democratic appeals...
...In any case, Republicans are likely to remain strong in the Outer South, where blacks account for a much smaller share of the vote...
...rather, each African-American household in the state received two pieces of mail...
...Strom Thurmond, and the Christian conservative Bob Jones University have all endorsed removing the Stars and Bars from the statehouse dome...
...The voices of President Clinton, Hillary Clinton, and Jesse Jackson, among others, were used to tout a range of Democratic candidates in Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, North Carolina, and South Carolina...
...The centerpiece of the campaign was not "walking around money...
...Donna Brazile, the architect of the Democratic National Committee's 1998 black turnout operation, is now Al Gore's campaign manager...
...The state's three black members of Congress--Corrine Brown, Alcee Hastings, and Carrie Meek--are all in Gore's corner...
...The GOP's Response The Republicans are still trying to develop a successful response to this Democratic pincer movement-higher black turnout combined with more whites deserting the COP...
...David Beasley was defeated...
...McKeithen's Democratic campaign targeted black Voters for recorded telephone messages from AfricanAmerican former Rep...
...In Texas, George W. Bush got z 7 percent of the African-American vote in 1998...
...Thus, Democrats Hodges in South Carolina, Siegelman in Alabama, and Musgrove in Mississippi all received a higher-than-usual share of the white vote...
...Parker had read the tea leaves from his neighboring Deep South states and made a major bid for black votes...
...This suggests that the backlash among whites against candidates who seek black support has eroded substantially, leaving Democratic campaigns freer to target black voters without causing a major loss of white support...
...T he Republican evolution in the South, beginning with Strom Thurmond s Dixiecrat bolt from the Democratic Party in 1948 , appeared to create a Solid South for the GOP...
...two recorded telephone calls, and a personal phone call from a campaign worker...
...The American Spectator - Mar c h 2 o o o 47...
...Today, however, that dog's ability to hunt has been severely impaired...
...Florida is Bradley's best shot in the South, but Brazile may stop him cold...
...In 199 % Louisiana-alone among Deep South states in recent elections--retained its Republican governor...
...Peach State Republicans were confident-as were several pollsters-that millionaire conservative Guy Millner would join the GOP's Paul Coverdell in the U.S...
...Even after Arkansan Bill Clinton and Tennessean A1 Gore split the South in 1992 , Dixie continued its rightward trend, electing a record-breaking Republican majority of governors, senators, and representatives from the region in the party's a994 tsunami...
...The Florida Democratic primary on March x 4 may be a test of Brazile's skill in maximizing black support for the vice president...
...She's sure to implement similar programs on Gore's behalf both in the primaries and (if he's nominated) the general election...
...white support...
...Beasley and Carroll Campbell, U.S...
...eb Bush campaigned intensively in black communities to take advantage of a racial split in the state's Democratic Party and boosted his share of the African-American vote to 14 percent, up from 9 percent in 1994...
...African Americans account for some z 5 percent or more of the state's registered Democrats...
...The black share of the vote rose from 18 percent in 199o, when popular black politico Harvey Gantt ran for the U.S...
...He hired ex-state Democratic Chairman Ed Cole to coordinate the Parker overture to the minority community...
...With the coming of prosperity and television, the practice waned among whites, but such a cash-and-carry system lived on among low-income blacks...
...All to no avail...
...But Republican hopes, at least in the Deep South, have been, if not dashed, seriously dampened by recent elections...
...Cleo Fields, Sen...
...African Americans, "haulers" were no HASTINGS WYMAN has written Southern longer the key to turning out black votPolitical Report, a nonpartisan biweekly ers any more than they were the key to newsletter, since 1978...
...Indeed, only Georgian Jimmy Carter in 1976 broke the string of GOP near-sweeps in Dixie in 1972, 198o, 1984 , and 1988...
...Such a stance, coinciding with the rise of radical black "demands," riots in major U.S...
...Beginning with Barry Goldwater's Senate vote against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the GOP positioned itself as the party less inclined to support the civil-rights political agenda...
...In North Carolina, black households also received a high-tech treatment on behalf of Senate candidate John Edwards...
...And the Florida battle over affirmative action has so far met with a measured response from the Bush administration and has not engendered a white backlash...
...Kirk Fordice was ineligible to seek reelection, but end-of-campaign poll numbers showed ex-U.S...
...And ironically, one of the key issues that has boosted the GOP in Dixie is proving to be the party's Achilles' heel...
...When the votes were counted, victorious Democrat Ronnie Musgrove carried the usual lion's share, 95 percent plusor-minus, of the black vote...
...In the Outer South, a name sometimes given to the six states surrounding the Southern heartland, some Republican candidates have won a significant minority of black voters...
...Moreover, the Democrats are poised to continue their emphasis on maximizing support among African Americans...
...Mike Parker was likely to hold on to the office for the GOP...
...Boosting Black Turnout In the late 195o's and early 6o's, when I first began participating in politics in my home state of South Carolina, blacks were mostly-not entirely, but mostlyexcluded from voting...
...This past November, for example, Virginia's Republican Gov...
...As a result, black voters who made up 19 percent of the turnout in '94 were a whopping 29 percent in '98-and Georgia failed to elect the state's first Republican governor since Reconstruction...
...John Breaux, and President Clinton...
...In the past few years, however, black political operatives in the Democratic Party realized that in this age of increased education and income among...
...Sometimes the haulers kept all the money for themselves...
...White Voters Becoming Less Polarized The increasing turnout of black voters is only half of the battle facing the Southern COP...
...Bill Jefferson, who was well financed, but had little appeal for white voters...
...The population of Florida is/4 percent black, Texas 1~ percent, Arkansas 16 percent, Tennessee 16 percent, Virginia 19 percent, and North Carolina z2 percent...
...In Florida, Gov...
...The Democratic nominee was African-American Rep...
...Senate against Jesse Helms, to 2o percent in 1998...
...Republican Setbacks The stage had been set in 1996 in Georgia...
...There is still room for substantial Republican growth in the Outer South, but look for hot-and-heavy battles, not COP landslides, throughout the region this November and beyond...
...But Bill Bradley is popular with many of the senior citizens that have flocked to the Sunshine State from New York and New Jersey...
...These trends indicate that the outlook is bright for a continued Democratic comeback in the Deep South, where African Americans account for a substantial share of the population in Louisiana (3a percent black), Mississippi (36 percent), Alabama (z 5 percent), Georgia (z 7 percent), and South Carolina (3 ~ percent...
...Last year, Mississippi's Republican Gov...
...A coordinated system of recorded telephone messages, commercials on black-listener radio stations, and targeted direct mail was built around political figures and issues with appeal to black Americans...
...Democrat Jim Hodges received some 9 z percent of the black vote and incumbent Republican Gov...
...Republicans, especially in the dominant conservative wing of the party, had hoped their new bulwark in the Old Confederacy could be counted on to deliver a bloc of 147 electoral votes to the GOP's presidential nominee on a regular basis...
...Precinct reports indicated that although Jefferson was supported by about 95 percent of blacks, white Louisianians bloc-voted for Foster, giving him some 88 percent of their votes...
...Thus, the 1998 campaigns featured "the first high-tech effort to turn out the black vote," as one Republican officeholder put it...
...But the Confederate flag issue in South Carolina has hardly united whites-such GOP stalwarts as former Govs...
...sometimes they shared it with those who accommodated them by voting for a particular candidate or slate...
...46 March 2 o o o _9 The American Spectator In neighboring South Carolina, the African-American share of the general election turnout increased from zl percent in 1994 to z6 percent in x998--an increase of some 79,000 votes...
Vol. 33 • March 2000 • No. 2
