Obama camp thinks Dems can rise in South

Southern Democrats have often felt left out of their party’s presidential calculations. From Reconstruction to the 1960s, the South was essentially a one-party region: Democratic. But voters’ allegiance was rocked in the 1960s by the Democrats’ leadership in passing civil rights legislation, and whites began to move to what Republicans asserted was their more natural ideological home.

This was exacerbated, many Southern Democrats believe, by the national party’s habit of nominating Northern liberals who campaigned little in the region. But the Democrats who ran those campaigns said they had to devote their resources to the states where polls showed they had the best chance of prevailing.

“We started out with a pretty broad playing field, with the intention of putting more states in play than had been put into play before,” said Mark Mellman, a Democratic pollster who worked for Mr. Kerry in 2004, noting that the Kerry campaign competed early on in Virginia.

“At a certain point, we needed to make a decision on whether to continue to compete in states that weren’t likely to pay off and drain money from states that could,” Mr. Mellman said.

But this time, the resources argument would be less compelling because Mr. Obama is expected to have a sizable financial edge over his rival, given his decision to forgo public campaign money and the spending limits that accompany it. And, some Democrats who work in the South argue, writing off a region is simply the wrong thing to do.

“How do you tell 102 million people who live in the South that they don’t matter?” said Steve Jarding, a Democratic consultant who has worked on several Southern campaigns. This year, he added, the region should be open to a Democratic argument on economics.

But some contend that the building blocks of a Democratic electoral majority lie elsewhere, notably the Southwest. That argument was laid out in 2006 in “Whistling Past Dixie: How Democrats Can Win Without the South,” by Thomas F. Schaller, a political scientist at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

“The notion that the Democrats have to win in the South is just a fiction,” Dr. Schaller said.

Some Democrats say the Obama registration drive could have unintended consequences, spurring a higher turnout among whites planning to vote Republican. But Charles Bullock, a political scientist at the University of Georgia, said he considered that unlikely.

“Older whites who are most likely to have traditional racial attitudes are probably already registered and may have records of consistent participation,” Dr. Bullock said.

As Mr. Mabus put it, “I’m sure some won’t vote for him because he’s African-American, but I’m pretty sure those people wouldn’t vote for any Democrat.”

Mr. Obama’s race aside, his ideology is a significant hurdle in the South, if history is any guide. Mr. Clinton broke the Republicans’ hold in 1992 in part by running as a decidedly centrist Democrat — pro-death penalty, pro-welfare reform, for the “forgotten middle class.” He was also helped by Ross Perot’s third-party candidacy, which drained votes from the Republicans.

In the Republican camp, strategists say that for all the difficulties the party is facing, the South remains deeply conservative.

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“It would take an awful big shift in the electorate this year,” said Mike DuHaime, a senior adviser to the McCain campaign. “It’s not like we’re talking about states that were won by one or two points last time. These Southern states, with the exception of Virginia and Florida, were double-digit wins.”

Mr. DuHaime acknowledged that Virginia, whose northern suburbs have become more Democratic in recent years, would be competitive this year. But he maintained that Mr. McCain, more than many Republicans, should have substantial appeal to moderate and independent voters.

Gordon Giffin, a Democratic activist in the South and an ambassador to Canada in the Clinton administration, said the economy and the Iraq war had created “more available white voters in the South this time than we’ve had in recent memory.” Southern Democrats always argue for more attention from the national party, and Mr. Giffin acknowledged, “Sometimes we know we’re full of hot air.”

He added, “This time it’s different.”

This story, Obama Camp Thinks Democrats Can Rise in South, originally appeared in The New York Times.

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