Tuesday, November 11, 2008

The Republican Southern Strategy Is Dead

Bury that motherfucker deep too.

The Republicans turned out their base all right, it just wasn't as big as they thought it was and it is getting smaller every year.


Racism is alive and well down South but it has become a very localized tradition.

Southern counties that voted more heavily Republican this year than in 2004 tended to be poorer, less educated and whiter, a statistical analysis by The New York Times shows. Mr. Obama won in only 44 counties in the Appalachian belt, a stretch of 410 counties that runs from New York to Mississippi. Many of those counties, rural and isolated, have been less exposed to the diversity, educational achievement and economic progress experienced by more prosperous areas.

snip

Less than a third of Southern whites voted for Mr. Obama, compared with 43 percent of whites nationally. By leaving the mainstream so decisively, the Deep South and Appalachia will no longer be able to dictate that winning Democrats have Southern accents or adhere to conservative policies on issues like welfare and tax policy, experts say.

That could spell the end of the so-called Southern strategy, the doctrine that took shape under President Richard M. Nixon in which national elections were won by co-opting Southern whites on racial issues. And the Southernization of American politics — which reached its apogee in the 1990s when many Congressional leaders and President Bill Clinton were from the South — appears to have ended.

“I think that’s absolutely over,”
said Thomas Schaller, a political scientist who argued prophetically that the Democrats could win national elections without the South.

snip
My bold
Read the rest of this NYT article here.

Y'all just go ahead and stay ignorant, ya hear?

3 comments:

  1. I was shocked that Indiana went for Obama. No way in hell I ever thought that would happen.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I was shocked that Indiana went for Obama. No way in hell I ever thought that would happen.

    ReplyDelete
  3. You've been tagged.

    ReplyDelete