The complicated politics of the poor

Vanishing breed: conservative Democrats
Katrina could not have targeted a more vulnerable population if it had tried: Louisiana is the 49th-poorest state. Mississippi is dead last. So why would voters in poor counties choose conservative lawmakers over liberals who presumably would crusade for anti-poverty programs and other government measures for the poor?

They don’t, said Charles S. Bullock, a specialist in Southern politics at the University of Georgia. The key to the conservative ascendancy in the poor rural South is that “the voters who elect the Republicans are not among the poor.”

Although there are fewer of them, “the more affluent vote at higher rates and therefore can offset the preferences of the poor Democrats,” Bullock said by e-mail from England, where he is a senior fellow at the Rothermere American Institute at Oxford University.

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Electorally, at least, poverty works to the benefit of conservative, pro-business candidates in the Deep South, where the Democratic Party carved out a disproportionately liberal identification with the civil rights movement.

The dichotomy can best be seen in Mississippi’s 4th District, which is represented by Democrat Gene Taylor. Taylor is among the last of a dying breed, Bullock said: the old-fashioned conservative Southern Democrat in the mold of former Sen. Zell Miller of Georgia.

The South used to send many Gene Taylors to Congress: hard-core conservatives on economic and defense policy who voted moderate to liberal on social issues like racial justice and poverty.

But “the conservative Southern Democrat in Congress has become extinct,” Bullock said. Nowadays, candidates like that must cast their lot with the Republicans if they hope to win.

“With the Democratic Party seen in some quarters as the ‘black’ party, it becomes harder for a Democratic candidate to weave together a biracial or multiracial coalition that would be essential to win, since most whites have been voting Republican for a number of years,” Bullock said.

Follow the money
That’s why it only seems to be a disconnect. By and large, the folks who were hit hardest by Katrina were poor and white and largely represented by Republicans. (Five of Louisiana’s seven congressmen are Republican. One of its senators is a Democrat and the other is a Republican. Mississippi is represented by two Republican senators. Its four congressmen are evenly split between both parties.)

It has been asserted that racial discrimination played a role in New Orleans, where two-thirds of the population is black but where the city’s wealth is concentrated among the minority of white families who largely live on higher ground. But New Orleans is not representative of the counties and parishes that were badly damaged. Almost uniformly, they are significantly whiter than the rest of Louisiana and Mississippi.

For example, Cameron Parish, in southwest Louisiana on the Gulf Coast, is only 4 percent black, compared with 32 percent of the state as a whole. In Mississippi, the population of Hancock County is 7 percent black, while in George County, it is 9 percent; overall, the state is 36 percent black.

These are voters who, even though they would likely benefit from anti-poverty initiatives, identify more strongly with conservatives on social questions of cultural, the role of religion in society and national defense, Bullock said.

Many of them “would be Democrats elsewhere,” he said — just not in the rural South.

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