Democrats: Whistling into 2008

We've barely laid 2006 to rest, and already the field of Democratic presidential contenders feels more like a linen closet. The hopefuls, many of them incumbent legislators buoyed by a sweeping Democratic victory in November's midterm elections, are eagerly jockeying for position. But right now, all polls indicate that these candidates must settle for biting, scratching, and clawing their ways out of the shadows of Sens. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) and Barack Obama (D-IL), who have yet to even announce their candidacy.

Indeed, while the two Democratic frontrunners are generating the most pre-election buzz from the Beltway to the blogosphere, no one is even sure that Obama will toss his hat in the ring. But it is Obama, the handsome young Senator who has charisma by the truckload, who has captured the nation's imagination.

To take nothing away from his accomplishments and attributes, much of the buzz surrounding Barack Obama stems from his minority status. It's not just that a black man could win a major party's presidential nomination. I think that what generates so much excitement is that it's not so far-fetched to imagine that he could actually win. To do so, however, the Democratic Party would have to fundamentally alter its strategy for winning presidential elections. The Democrats haven't won a Southern state in a presidential election since Bill Clinton's second term. And let's face it - an African American has even less chance of winning a statewide election in the South. The last one to do it - Governor L. Douglas Wilder of Virginia - lives in one of the two Southern states with the greatest yearly in-migration of Yankees and was very conservative himself.

For Republicans, the "Southern Strategy" has paid off in spades, utilizing the South's poisoned political atmosphere in the wake of segregation's statutory demise for their own political gain, Republicans essentially wrote off the black vote altogether, instead of using it. Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman describes it this way: "By the '70s and into the '80s and '90s, the Democratic Party solidified its gains in the African American community, and we Republicans did not effectively reach out. Some Republicans gave up on winning the African American vote, looking the other way or trying to benefit politically from racial polarization." What it means is that the GOP has come to dominate southern politics at least in part by playing on fears of (black) welfare queens, Mexican immigrants overrunning your town, Willie Horton-esque criminals, and, of course, U.S. Senate hopefuls who just might want to bang YOUR white daughter. (In the same speech, Mehlman apologized for the use of the southern strategy - a somewhat disingenuous move, it seems, after his party has reaped the benefits for the last thirty years, but that's neither here nor there.)

Tom Schaller, in his recent book Whistling Past Dixie, proposes a sort of anti-Southern Strategy. After reporting on a massive array of data, he essentially concludes that Lyndon Johnson was right when he famously said after signing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, "We have lost the South for a generation." It is time that the Democrats focus on more fertile ground in the Midwest, the Mountain West, and the Southwest, all areas with great potential to swing Democratic. Shore up Democratic support in these states, win a presidential election, and then drag the South kicking and screaming into the present. This is not to say that the rest of the nation doesn't have its own racial demons to contend with. After all, only one other African American has been elected to governor of a state in recent times, and that only happened a couple of months ago. But we know that candidates of color have an especially hard time winning election in the South even when they have solid conservative bona fides. Sorry, Bobby Jindal.

Schaller's thesis is backed up in part by a very impressive study by Nicholas Valentino and David Sears entitled "Gone But Not Forgotten: Race and Partisan Realignment in the Contemporary South." After running multiple regressions on a huge set of data, Valentino and Sears find that when you correct for racial attitudes (like whether or not blacks "try hard enough" to succeed), Southerners who self-identify as conservatives are twice as likely to refuse to vote for the Democratic presidential candidate as self-identified conservatives in other regions of the country.

This fundamentally alters the frame of the electability debate in the upcoming presidential election. 93% of Americans say that they would be willing to vote for a black presidential candidate in 2008, but only 64% believe that America is ready for a candidate of color. People who might otherwise back an Obama presidential campaign could very easily be imagined to vote for a candidate seen as more "electable" in the primaries, thus creating a vicious self-fulfilling prophecy that artificially suppresses Obama's support. "Why didn't you vote for Obama in the primaries, Joe?" "Because I didn't think that he could win." But if that sentiment could be overcome by shifting the campaign focus to those states with a less negative comportment towards African-Americans, the idea of a black man running the country doesn't automatically seem like it belongs in a work of fiction.

I'm not sure yet that Barack Obama is the right man for the job of President of the United States of America. I don't know that John Edwards wouldn't make a better president. I am certain, however, that Schaller's book holds a great deal of promise for the Democratic Party in 2008 and that Barack Obama is in tremendous position to take advantage of its ideas.