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Regionalized GOP would be a disaster for both parties

November 13, 2008 — One of the elections most critical to the future of politics in the South actually took place hundreds of miles away last week, in Connecticut, where US Rep. Christopher Shays, the last Republican House member from New England, lost his seat to a Democrat.

Back in the glory days, Shays was a big supporter of former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who stumped for him this year to no avail. Back then, he opined to a group in Providence, the GOP was the party of ideas, but had slowly become locked in its own orthodoxy and insensititive to the changes going on around it.

“It took the Democrats 40 years to get arrogant before they lost the House. It took us only 10 years, and then we lost,” Shays said.

Shays’ defeat ended a line of Republicanism that can be traced all the way back to South Carolina Congressman Preston Brooks’ caning of Sen. Charles Sumner of Massachusetts in 1856, one of the incendiary events leading up to the Civil War.

The Republican Party had already begun to speak with a Southern accent by the time Gingrich helped engineer his party’s congressional takeover in 1994. But the party which is left after this election has a much more Southern tilt than the pre-’94 party.

 Looking at a map with more dirt than people in the other parts that were shaded red last week, some have begun to speculate that the GOP, the party of Lincoln, could become more of a regional, that is Southern, party.

Speaking to the Republican Governor’s Association in Miami Wednesday, Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty said the Republicans can’t be a viable national party, “when we essentially cannot compete in the Northeast, we are losing our ability to compete in Great Lakes states, we cannot compete on the West Coast, we are increasingly in danger of competing in the mid-Atlantic states, and the Democrats are now winning some of the western states.”

 The gathering of party leaders this weekend in Myrtle Beach, S.C., hosted by South Carolina Republican Party chairman Katon Dawson, is likely to lead to more musings along this line. Dawson, who’s interested in the Republican national chairman’s job, called the weekend meeting to talk about where the party goes next.

Southerners are likely to play key roles in leading the GOP through the lean times ahead – in addition to Dawson, the list of possible Southern chairs already includes Gingrich, Florida chair Jim Greer and Mike Huckabee strategist Chip Saltsman. But the kind of regionalized GOP some envision would be a disaster for both parties in the South..

Southern Republicans would be left in charge of their own small pond, shut out of influence at the national level and self-conscious about their regional identity in a party desperate to grow back old branches.

 For Southern Democrats, it might be even worse. A distinctively Southern Republican Party would be hard to run against, and Southern Democrats would lose influence within their own national party even more rapidly than they are already.

Fortunately for both parties, this notion of a regionalized GOP may have been somewhat exaggerated. Much of it seems to have been sparked by the election map which shows the Republicans only doing better than they were four years in a band of states starting in upper Appalachia, stretching west to Oklahoma and south to Louisiana. In terms of party identification, this particular map is very misleading, including some areas, like Arkansas, that remain very Democratic at the state level. Race -- and white educational attainment -- affected the shading of this map considerably.  It’s worth noticing also that that while most of the Republican growth areas were in the South, most of the Southern growth areas voted more Democratic.

In other words, it was a bad year for Republicans generally, and not too much should be made of the fact that the party’s few gains were in the South. If the Republicans bounce back, they’re likely to score gains all over the map. If they don’t they won’t even be able to continue to compete in the South for a lot longer, judging by the average age of their voters last week.

 A more accurate picture of where the Republican Party is now is probably the new Congressional map,  which depicts a Republican Party dramatically diminished from four years ago – but not yet confined to one part of the country.

(I didn't see what I think is the best representation  of the partisan divide, which comes from Stateline.org, until mid-day after this was filed. It's worth a look.)