Not so long ago, the South looked like one of the great comeback stories for Democrats. After Republicans swept the region in 1984 and 1988, Bill Clinton and Al Gore carried five southern states in 1992 and 1996. And even though Bush ran the table in the South in 2000, Democrats until recently were within striking distance of holding every southern governorship from Richmond to Baton Rouge.
Democrats can still find some bright spots -- in Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Oklahoma, and with luck later this month in Louisiana. But this week's losses in Kentucky and Mississippi, coming on the heels of last year's losses in South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, leave the Democrats' southern comeback in limbo. Next year, Southern Democrats will also have to defend at least four open Senate seats in the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida. The Democratic presidential nominee will need to be competitive in the South to win, and must do so against a Republican ticket headed by a southerner and guided by a White House that showed in 2002 it would stop at nothing to drive any wedge through the southern electorate.
Howard Dean has shown exactly the wrong way to restore a Southern Democratic majority, with statements about "guys with Confederate flags in their pickup trucks" that managed to offend everybody, from millions of Americans of every race and region who view the Confederate flag as a symbol of racial oppression to southerners who resent being inaccurately and condescendingly stereotyped. The modern South is not The Dukes of Hazzard.
As dozens of DLC elected officials have shown, the right way for Democrats to win a majority in the South is build a durable biracial majority. No doubt the GOP is still willing to play the race card whenever it can get away with it. But most Southern voters are repulsed by those tactics.
Many are suburban families with children; business people; union members -- indeed, a broad cross-section of the population. And they have repeatedly shown they are willing to support Democrats who can succeed in connecting with them on matters of values as well as bread-and-butter economic concerns. Indeed, in Georgia, supposedly ground zero for the Republican drive to dominate the South, two centrist African-American politicians, Labor Commissioner Mike Thurmond and Attorney General Thurbert Baker, have twice won statewide elections, running far ahead of the national ticket among white voters. They show southern Democrats it's possible to create a two-way biracial coalition (white voters supporting black candidates, not just the other way around) based on a broad centrist message.
We've been arguing for years now that a big part of the problem Democrats have in the South and in other regions and sub-regions with "red state" characteristics is the difficulty they so often have in talking about cultural issues, ranging from guns and abortion, to religion and the struggles of families to raise kids, to the responsibilities of individuals and civil society, not just government.
The recent conference in Atlanta we cosponsored with Americans for Gun Safety concentrated on that problem, and offered a variety of ways that Democrats can reach out to gun owners, people of faith, parents, and white males, without in any way compromising their progressive principles. Sen. Mark Pryor of Arkansas, the only Democratic challenger to unseat a Senate incumbent in 2002, spoke eloquently about the need for Democrats to capture the political center on cultural issues instead of falling silent and letting the opposition promote inaccurate and negative stereotypes. And as speaker after speaker at the conference made clear, "values centrism" appeals just as strongly to African-Americans, in the South and elsewhere, as it does to any other element of the population.
So far there's not a lot about the Dean campaign that shows any understanding of the need for values centrism as a way to make sure people are willing to listen to Democrats' arguments about everything else. That's unfortunate, because no candidate for president is likely to win the nomination, much less beat George W. Bush, if his support is limited to a golden ghetto of white, upscale, culturally liberal, antiwar voters.
There's a right way to "go South" and build the kind of biracial coalitions that have long been the key to Democratic success in the region, while broadening the base of the Democratic Party in other parts of the country as well. We urge all Democrats to remember that lesson if they hope for better luck next year.
