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Election 2008: Rise of the fluid South

November 10, 2008 — In retrospect, the so-called Solid South never really was all that solid. Over the past 15 presidential elections the region from Florida to Oklahoma has voted as a bloc five times – not much more stable than other sections of the country, the Midwest excepted – and it is unique during this period for having twice split three ways: in 1960, for Nixon, Kennedy and Byrd, and in 1968, for Nixon, Wallace and Humphrey.

Since so much presidential political strategy has been devoted over the past few decades to holding the Solid South or cracking it, however, the concept has lingered for a while into the new century. As a term of convenience for the Republican effort to hold on to a broad spectrum of social conservatives from Florida all the way to Alaska, it may last even longer, but as a reliable frame for viewing this region’s politics, the Solid South was put to rest last Tuesday.

What we have instead is a very fluid South.

This isn’t so much because Barack Obama won Florida, North Carolina and Virginia while the rest of the South stayed in the red column. Unlike Bill Clinton in 1992 or Jimmy Carter in 1976, Obama would have won the election had he not carried any of these Southern states. It mattered that Obama forced the already strapped McCain campaign to spend money defending the South, but its combined electoral votes would not have made the difference in this election.

What makes the South so fluid is the increasing unlikeliness that the diverse regions which stretch from the Chesapeake Bay to the West Texas plains are going to coalesce again as a reliable bloc of electoral votes, except on the occasion of real landslides. This election was a snapshot of a South moving in different directions demographically, economically and politically.

You'd be hard put to find two adjoining and similar states which went in different directions last week than Tennessee and North Carolina. The Volunteer State went heavily for McCain, elected Republican majorities  in both houses of its legislature for the first time, and gave Lamar Alexander a cakewalk in his US Senate race. The Tarheel State gave Obama one of his signature victories, threw Elizabeth Dole out of the Senate and Robin Hayes out of the House, and elected Bev Perdue governor.

There’s no starker evidence of how fluid the South could become than the exit poll profile of South Carolina, a state which is the foundation stone of Republicanism in the Deep South and which John McCain won by 54-45 percent. If the election had been held only for voters younger than the age of 45, the exit data suggests, Obama would have carried the state, by a slightly larger margin than McCain carried it last week.

Obama carried the 18-29 vote in every Southern state except Georgia, Louisiana and Oklahoma. McCain won the 65-and-old in every Southern state, including Alabama, where he won the oldest quadrant with an amazing 78 percent.

Nearly all the counties where John McCain did better than George Bush are in a band westward from the Appalachians to the Ozarks, and curling down into Louisiana. Eastern Tennessee and Kentucky are among the few places where Kerry counties actually became McCain counties.

As one Tennessee analyst has noted,  some of the same traditionally Democratic counties which rejected Obama last week voted solidly for Harold Ford Jr. in his 2006 US Senate race. This suggests that race is still a factor, but again, in a more fluid fashion than before.

Since the 1960s, Republicans have won in the South with big sweeps in the rapidly growing suburbs and a steadily increasing share of the traditionally Democratic rural counties. This year, John McCain won the battle of the ‘burbs by a significantly narrower margin across much of the South – compare George Bush’s 66-33 victory in Gwinnett County, Georgia, with McCain’s 55-44 win last week – combined with overwhelming majorities in those more sparsely populated, rural counties which were the last to hop on the Republican bandwagon.

Adding further complexity to the picture is the ribbon of blue counties which begin in Charleston,  S.C., and thread through the heart of last week’s red states all the way to Chickasaw County, Miss. These counties, which encompass most of the Black Belt, gave Obama some of his biggest majorities anywhere: He garnered 87 percent, the highest county total I could find for either candidate, in Macon County, Ala., and Jefferson County, Miss. They've voted solidly Democratic in the past, but never simultaneously with Democratic majorities the size of those in Atlanta, Miami, Dallas, Charlotte and other big cities across the South.

All this suggests a South with some familiar landmarks, but also one primed to change very dramatically over the coming decade. It's easy to imagine, given the herculean challenges facing him, Obama losing the states he won last week in 2012. Given the age of McCain's core supporters, it's not inconceivable either that Obama could win states he lost this year.

But the South has shown that in one of the cricitical elections of our history, it was not all of one mind. And it's unlikely ever to be again.