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Black and White in Dixie: What Did and Didn’t Happen in the Election

November 12, 2008 — Barack Obama divided Dixie’s electoral votes, splitting the GOP’s Southern base much like Democrats Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton before him, an impressive feat by anyone’s measure, considering that Obama is both black and a Yankee, while Carter and Clinton were both white and Southern. Aside from carrying Virginia, North Carolina and Florida, Obama garnered a higher share of the vote than John Kerry did in 2004 in nine Southern states -- all but Arkansas, Louisiana and Tennessee, with Obama running even with Kerry in Oklahoma.

Behind the totals lie some interesting variants. In some Southern states, black voters turned out in record numbers, in others they did not. In parts of Dixie, whites voted for Obama in greater numbers than supported fellow Democrat Kerry in 2004; in other states, they did not.

In seven Southern states, according to exit polls, the black share of the total turnout was less than it was in 2004, when both parties -- per usual --nominated white males for president. In Arkansas, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia, the black turnout -- though it may have increased -- was a smaller share of the total vote than it had been in 2004. (Some were close; in Mississippi and Virginia, black turnout was only one percentage point less than in 2004.)

But in six other Southern states, the black share of the total vote increased, impressively so in some of them. In Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana and Texas, African Americans represented a greater share of the vote than four years ago. Two of the biggest increases were in Georgia, where the black vote jumped from 25% of the total in 2004 to 30% in 2008, and in Alabama, where it rose from 25% to 29%.

The other major phenomenon that did or didn’t materialize, depending on the state, was Obama’s appeal to Dixie’s whites. In five Southern states, Obama won more of the white vote than Kerry did four years ago: North Carolina, Virginia, South Carolina, Texas and Kentucky. His increase among whites was especially significant in North Carolina, where Obama received the votes of 35% of whites to Kerry’s 27; in Virginia where Obama got 39% of whites to Kerry’s 32%; and in South Carolina where Obama got 26% of whites to Kerry’s 22%.

But that’s only part of the picture. In Louisiana, Alabama, Arkansas and Mississippi, Obama ran substantially behind Kerry among whites. And in four other states -- Florida, Georgia, Oklahoma and Tennessee -- Obama’s share of the white vote remained the same as Kerry’s in 2004.

Some of the black-white differences are explained by the greater role that race has traditionally played in the Deep South, but not all of them. After all, Obama ran better than the 2004 Democratic nominee in four of the five Deep South states -- Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi and South Carolina. Obama’s relatively poor performance in Arkansas probably reflects lingering resentment over Hillary Clinton’s loss of the Democratic nomination. And Obama’s weak appeal in Appalachian areas, which showed up in the primaries as well, accounted for some of John McCain’s strength in Kentucky and Tennessee. The New York Times reported that Obama won only 44 of a stretch of 410 mountainous counties that begins in New York and ends in Mississippi. In the South, mountain voters owned few slaves and were hostile to the Confederacy. Since then, they have mostly voted Republican and have sometimes exhibited antipathy to blacks, relatively few of whom live in these counties.