You should be reading Orcinus. No, no: in addition to of Nobody Knows Anything, not instead of. Just get up 5 minutes earlier every day.
Orcinus has an interesting entry about the Republican party’s Southern Strategy and another entry about how the Republican party no longer has the Big Tent—frankly, it’s hard for me to imagine they ever did, but all I know of the Republicans is Reagan-Bush-Gingrich, so there you go. Anyhow, the “Southern Strategy,” for those of you’ve been dead recently:
The Southern Strategy was developed to take advantage of the upheavals of the southern structure (Bass and De Vries, 1976, 22-33). The major goal of the Southern Strategy was to transform the Republicans’ reputation as the party of Lincoln, Yankees, and carpetbaggers into the party that protects white interests (Klinkner 1992; Bass and DeVries 1976; 22-23). Thus, subtle segregationist threads are sewn in to the tapestry of the Southern Strategy.
The upshot of this move to the right and assumption of the right-wing, segregationist elements of the South is the Republican Party we have today:
What I didn’t realize, of course, was just how much havoc the devil’s pact by Nixon, in signing on to the Southern Strategy, would wreak on the party itself. But it became immediately manifest by the late 1970s that the conservative movement — which was more of a Trotskyite ideological movement than genuine conservatism, in my estimation — had taken over the party’s larger machinery.
I don’t think there’s much debate that the Southern Strategy has completely altered our political landscape (and, as it probably goes without saying, has done so for the worse).
So here’s my question:
Why is the conservative/reactionary Southern white male vote so goshdarned important?
I’m sorry if that’s a completely naive question, but for the life of me I cannot understand why this regional group has had such a large effect on the rest of the nation. Why did the Democrats (until the Civil Rights movement) and then the Republicans pander so hard to them? Are they a much larger voting bloc than I imagine it would be? Is it the money of reactionaries like Richard Mellon Scaife?
Any pointers to discussions of this subject would be most welcome.
My guess is that it has to do with electoral votes. Remember that states get a number of electoral votes equal to the number of congressmen (senators + representatives) they have. So small-population states have extra leverage in a Presidential election.
I looked at a page on electoral votes, 1991-2000 and computed the following totals by region:
Northeast (Connecticut, DC, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont): 122
South (Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, West Virginia):168
Midwest (Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Ohio, Wisconsin): 112
Plains/Rockies (Colorado, Kansas, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Utah, Wyoming):36
Southwest (Arizona, California, Nevada, New Mexico):71
Northwest (Idaho, Oregon, Washington):22
Alaska, Hawaii: 7
You can quibble about my distributions somewhat, but it seems clear that the South easily has the most electoral votes of any region of the country. (My own quibbles would make things even better for the South; I think what I’ve called the Northeast is at least two different regions. I don’t realy think DC, Delaware, Maryland, or big parts of Pennsylvania or New Jersey are really the “northeast”, geographically or politically.)
Since conservatives tend to be more faithful voters then other voting groups (whites, blacks, women), appealing to conservatives seems like a safe strategy. Since the South is, by-and-large, conservative, appealing to southern conservatives seems both safe and high reward. If you can take most of the south, then you’re at least 1/3 of the way to being elected President; over 1/2 if you get the whole south.
So that’s my two cents.
The white male vote is largely important because of turnout. White males vote more regularly than women and minorities. Perhaps it is because candidates that they back have been elected so often. Women and minorities get caught up in the problem of their votes being meaningless. In Florida, their votes were never even counted.
It’s also easier to get the white males to vote as a bloc. Typically, they have single trigger issues that determine how they vote. They might not be racists but they might love their guns. Therefore, they vote for the party of the NRA.
The components of the Southern Strategy could be said to include:
– easy access to firearms
– no affirmative action
– right wing extreme Christian beliefs
– nationalism in foreign policy
– tough talk about the death penalty
At least one of these is a trigger issue for most Southern white male voters. Winning the vast majority of that bloc will win you the South. As Michael said, winning the southern states as a bloc almost gets you elected. Other regions can be divided over taxation and other issues enough to prevent them from voting as a bloc.
As a political scientist who studies elections, I would point out that the identification of the southern strategy with racist politics is rather simplistic. Further, I would note that the reason so much attention has been paid to the South in recent decades is because it represented an untapped market, if you will, for the Republicans. Consider the following: from roughly 1870 until fairly recently the South has been solidly Democratic (granted, mostly conservative Dems, but Dems nonetheless). Really, it isn’t until the mid-1990s that one could call the South truly two-party competitive, and even now many local-level elections are limited to the Democrats. A recent illustration would be Georgia-which in 2002 elected its first Republican Governor since Reconstruction (i.e., the 1860s/70s).
At any rate, the point being that the fundamental issue at hand in regards to Southern voters was that the Republicans saw the potential to tap into the conservative Democrats in the South.
Really, the transformation of the Dems and Reps in the South doesn稚 come into full swing until the 1980s, when Reagan made it safe to be a Republican in the South, and really full maturation isn稚 until after 1994 when the Reps captured the Congress. Then many Southern Dems (like Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama) switched parties, as the ability to be both in the majority AND in the party of one痴 ideological preference became possible. Being in the minority sucks (to use the technical term) and prior to the 1990s it looked as if the Reps were the permanent minority in the House, and to some degree in the Senate as well. As a result, many Southern conservative Dems stayed in the Democratic Party, even though they had more in common with the Republicans. The fact the for most of the 20th century to run as a Republican in the deep South was to run as a loser was also a strong incentive.
This is a brief reply to a fairly detailed subject, but it seemed worthy of comment.
> Why is the conservative/reactionary Southern white male
> vote so goshdarned important?
– They probably assume that conservative/reactionary is the vast majority, and thus not a restriction;
– Is their appeal really restricted to males? Perhaps even sexist views put forth by men are bought into by both sexes.
– “Southern” may mean more than half the country, including the rural North. The KKK was big in Indiana.
So this is not a small group to appeal to.