A New South Rising

At first glance, Gwinnett County looks like any other suburb in Atlanta’s ever-growing metro orbit. Nestled between the working-class “in-burbs” of DeKalb County and wealthier enclaves to the north, the county has captured 26 percent of the Atlanta region’s growth since 2000.

Until recently, Gwinnett County also symbolized a white conservative political culture taking hold in the suburbs and exurbs of the South. Gwinnett was a lot like nearby Cobb County, which gave rise to Rep. Newt Gingrich (R), one of the leading figures of the New Right. Republicans saw such places as a safe base for consolidating their political hold on the region.

“Just 18 years ago, in the 1990 Census,” George Campbell recently wrote in USA Today, “Gwinnett was 90% white, rock-ribbed Republican and Exhibit A in the pantheon of suburban Sun Belt counties that supposedly would mold and sustain realignment to a permanent Republican majority.”

But like much of the South, Gwinnett County has changed. According to the Census Bureau, Gwinnett County will soon be “majority-minority,” with roughly equal numbers of African-American, Asian-American and Latino residents outnumbering whites. Over 100 languages are spoken in the county’s schools, which are the fastest growing in the entire Southeast.

And as the 2008 elections showed, the changing face of Gwinnett County is creating an entirely new political landscape. As Campbell notes, the first President Bush got 75 percent of the presidential vote in 1992. Four years ago, George W. Bush got 66 percent. In 2008, Republican nominee John McCain managed only 55 percent.

 

A Changing Political Landscape

Gwinnett County is at the leading edge of social, demographic and economic changes sweeping through the South — changes that will profoundly impact the region’s political future. The South’s evolution is uneven and fitful, but the overall broad trends and their political significance are unmistakable:

Rise of Southern Cities: The South’s voters are increasingly based in rapidly expanding urban regions that include places like Gwinnett County. Eight of the 10 metro areas in the country with the fastest rate of growth are in the South, including Raleigh-Cary in North Carolina, the Palm Coast of Florida, and Austin, Texas. Similarly, out of the 10 metro areas that grew the most in sheer numbers, six are in the South, including the Atlanta area.

These metro areas are also becoming centers of political power. The infamous maps which divide states by red and blue — and thereby show entire stretches of the country dominated by a single color — conceal an important political truth: In 2008, 50 percent of the nation’s voters came from just 237 counties with a density of 500 people per square mile or more. Over 35 percent of those counties are in the South — and in 2008, 58 percent of them voted for Democrat Barack Obama.

Across the South, rising metro centers are challenging Republican control. In eight Southern states, Obama won over 50 percent of voters who identified as “urban” in exit polls; in Georgia, Kentucky, North Carolina and Virginia, he garnered over 60 percent.

Even more striking, out of the 111 urban areas nationally that flipped from Republican to Democrat in their votes for president between 2004 and 2008, 32 were in the South.

A New Generation of White Voters: Another piece of the Southern realignment underway is a new generation of young whites that appears to be departing from the political allegiances of their elders.

After the 2008 elections, a steady stream of punditry set out to prove that Southern white voters were out of touch with the rest of the country. One frequently-circulated map from The New York Times showed the 22 percent of counties nationally where the Republican vote actually grew between 2004 and 2008; the “McCain Belt,” as it was called, stretched across many mostly white counties in Appalachia and the lower Great Plains.

The lack of support for Barack Obama in mostly-white counties was hardly a surprise: Democratic presidential candidates haven’t won a majority among white voters once in the last 40 years. (Jimmy Carter came closest, getting 48 percent of the white vote nationally in 1976.)

It is true that the percent of Southern whites who supported Obama was a bit lower than the national average: about one-third in the South compared to 43 percent nationally. But perhaps a more interesting story is that in three Southern states — North Carolina, South Carolina and Virginia — Obama actually gained with white voters over John Kerry’s 2004 performance at a rate higher than the national average.

The shift in the Southern white vote came from many sources — two being newcomers to the region and independents and white Democrats frustrated about the economy.

But another source was a new generation of Southern white voters. Barack Obama invested heavily in reaching out to young voters, and in many places young white voters responded. In six Southern states, 40 percent of whites under the age of 30 voted for Barack Obama. In North Carolina, Obama’s level of young white support was 56 percent — one of the highest in the nation.

Black Belt Power: But the media’s focus on white voters is, of course, deceptive — and has more than a tint of racism, given the long history of “Southern” being equated with “white.”

The 2008 elections also showed the growing political power of African-Americans, Latinos and other voters of color. Barack Obama was uniquely positioned to prove that mobilizing this multiracial base could tip the scales toward victory. An Associated Press analysis found that a 20 percent rise nationally among minority voters — 5.8 million total — was critical to Obama’s victories in several key states.

The voting surge was especially clear among African-American voters in the South, for whom the 2008 elections held a special importance. With over 42 percent of the nation’s black population living in 13 Southern states, African-Americans flexed their political muscle like never before.

Many pundits dismissed the value of Obama’s central strategy of boosting the African-American vote in the South, saying it wouldn’t be enough for victory. But it was certainly key to Obama’s win in North Carolina, where over 300,000 black voters registered in 2008, and turnout among African-Americans soared from 59 percent in 2004 to 74 percent in 2008.

The surging black vote proved critical in dozens of down-ticket races as well. North Carolina Democrats picked up a U.S. Senate seat and won the governorship on the strength of the boost in African-American voters.

The 2008 U.S. Senate contest in Georgia also offers a cautionary tale for candidates who think they can take the Southern black vote for granted. Democrat Jim Martin was able to force a run-off against incumbent Sen. Saxby Chambliss on Nov. 4, despite winning only 30 percent of the white vote. When African-American turnout dropped in the runoff race, Martin was trounced by a 14-point margin.

The Multi-Racial South: The color of Southern politics in 2008 wasn’t just black and white. Gwinnett County and other key areas of the South also offered a glimpse of the South’s multi-racial political future, including a rapidly growing number of “majority-minority” counties.

Southern states have the fastest-growing Latino population in the country. Combined with an already-large African-American electorate and other voters of color, hundreds of Southern counties are, or are poised to be, “majority-minority. “

The electoral clout of this demographic transformation will be increasingly felt over the next generation. According to Census figures, the number of Southern majority-minority counties is projected to double in the next 20 years, moving entire states like Georgia and Mississippi into the majority-people of color column.

The political power of this new multi-racial majority is already being felt in places like Gwinnett County, Ga. But it’s also a harbinger of a broader trend underway in states from Louisiana to North Carolina and even Arkansas, which has the fastest-growing Latino population in the nation.

 

Time to Write Off the South?

Despite the South’s hotly contested races and signs of change across the region, many of the nation’s political observers ironically saw instead in 2008 evidence of the South’s marginalization.

“What may have ended on Election Day,” intoned Adam Nossiter of The New York Times in a widely-circulated piece, “is the centrality of the South to national politics.” Dozens of commentators argued that Republicans are becoming a “regional party” based in the South, implying that the region was a bastion of red-state conservatism.

The popular New York website Gawker put it more bluntly: “North finally wins Civil War.”

Leading the pack of pundits eager to write off the South was Tom Schaller, a political scientist and author of the 2006 book Whistling Past Dixie, which argued that the South was no longer a politically important region, especially for the Democrats.

Schaller’s passion for downplaying the South’s significance has occasionally put him on the wrong side of history. In July 2008, Schaller declared in a New York Times column that “Mr. Obama can write off Georgia and North Carolina” — advice that Obama wisely ignored, winning N.C. and making the Republicans fight for the Peach State.

It wasn’t the first time Schaller was wrong. In 2006, he famously declared he was “certain” now-Sen. Jim Webb (D) would lose in Virginia. But the string of bad calls and Obama’s success in the South hasn’t silenced Schaller and others who see the South as unchanging and irrelevant — it seems to have only emboldened them.

The zeal of pundits to write off the South now is odd not only because it comes at a time when the South is rapidly changing — it’s also being said at a moment when the South’s political clout is clearly on the rise.

The fuel behind the South’s rising political stature is its skyrocketing size. Two-thirds of the nation’s fastest-growing counties are in the South, and half of the 10 states with the biggest population gains are in the region.

The South’s growth is expected to translate into a big jump in electoral influence after the 2010 Census. Every 10 years, Congressional seats and Electoral College votes are reapportioned among the 50 states based on the latest Census counts. If the South’s population boom holds steady, this will mean Southern states will play an even bigger role in Congress and choosing future presidents. As the Associated Press reported in 2008:

Fast-growing Southern states could gain nine new congressional seats after the 2010 census, largely at the expense of their neighbors to the north, judging from the latest government data.

Georgia and North Carolina’s delegations in the U.S. House would overtake New Jersey’s, for example, while Florida would catch up with New York, according to projections based on a July 2007 population snapshot released by the Census Bureau last month. Texas would be the biggest gainer.

This hardly sounds like a region in political decline. But that’s exactly what pundits have argued after the 2008 elections. Adam Nossiter’s Nov. 11 story in the Times, entitled “For the South, a Waning Hold on National Politics,” argued that this year “voters from Texas to South Carolina and Kentucky may have marginalized their region for some time to come.”

This reveals Nossiter’s first mistake: He changes the definition of “the South” to suit his purposes. Leaving out Florida, North Carolina and Virginia — the Southern states that make up one-third of the South’s Electoral College votes — certainly makes it easier to downplay the South’s importance. But is it right?

How soon the pundits forget: Just years ago, these states were electing Senators like Jesse Helms in North Carolina and George Allen in Virginia. Virginia was the capitol of the Confederate States of America from 1861 and 1865, and Richmond is still home to the only Museum of the Confederacy. And the same demographic and economic changes underway in a state like North Carolina can also be found in Georgia, South Carolina and Tennessee. Are they also at risk of being defined out of the South?

But The New York Times analysis also reflects a larger failure to understand the extent and impact of such changes in the South. For example, Nossiter’s dispatch from a small town in Alabama fails to quote a single non-white expert or person-on-the street. This racial blind-spot, typical of much Southern political coverage, leads to passages like this:

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, [emphasis added]

Note the casual conflation of “the Deep South and Appalachia” with “Southern whites,” especially bizarre given that the Deep South is home to the Black Belt. Apparently, Nossiter couldn’t find any African-American voters in Alabama, a state with the seventh-highest black population in the country (26 percent) and scene of the iconic Selma to Montgomery civil rights marches in the 1960s. Or any other non-white voters, for that matter, in a state where 22 counties are “majority minority.”

Even white Alabama Democrats, 47 percent of whom pulled the lever for Obama, seem to escape the New York reporter.

But to acknowledge these realities — as well as the more than 19 million voters in 13 Southern states who voted for the first African-American president in history — would be to also admit that the South remains a vibrant, changing and critical political region, something many pundits appear loathe to do.

 

A New Southern Strategy

Aside from affirming the South’s competitiveness and clout, the 2008 elections also pointed to the outlines of a new progressive Southern Strategy for political change. A few of the lessons and elements for success revealed this election year:

Mobilize the New Majority: Barack Obama’s campaign was successful in key Southern states because of its unique ability to mobilize the core elements of the New Majority in the South: a growing coalition of African-American, Latino, urban and young white voters. Other demographic groupings, like single women and Asian- American voters, are also part of a changing electorate that is realigning Southern politics.

Build at the Base: Nationally, political parties have gradually moved from neighborhood-based institutions to high-tech operations focused on TV ads and direct mail. The Obama campaign revived a “bottom-up” style of organizing reminiscent of the civil rights movement — and, more recently, the Christian Coalition — that greatly expanded its vitality, reach and impact. In North Carolina, Obama had 50 field offices and some 21,000 volunteers and staff fanned out across the state, knocking on doors, engaging voters and making sure they got to the polls.

The Power of the Pocketbook: The economy was the big issue in 2008, and showed how economic populism can resonate with a diverse range of Southern voters. In a state like North Carolina, with everything from banks to manufacturing in crisis and the unemployment rate edging above 8 percent, the ability of Obama to speak to “Main Street” pocketbook issues was critical to victory. It also helped win over a share of working-class and poor whites: While only 35 percent of N.C. white voters overall picked Obama, the number jumped to 42 percent for whites making under $50,000 a year.

Defend Voting Rights and Promote Electoral Reform: Voting reforms played an important and under-reported role in helping progressive candidates in 2008. Millions of voters used no-excuse early voting in eight Southern states, and activists successfully used early voting to ensure voters got to the polls. In Florida and Virginia, bi-partisan reforms of draconian felon disenfranchisement laws restored the voting rights of tens of thousands of voters — especially African-Americans. North Carolina’s new law allowing same-day registration and voting during the early voting period was especially critical, being used by 92,000 new voters.

You Win When You Try: On the Monday before Nov. 4, Barack Obama visited three states to make his all-important final case for the presidency: Florida, North Carolina and Virginia. Obama’s last-minute stumping capped dozens of visits to these states by campaign surrogates. He targeted the South with tens of millions of dollars in TV ads, set up hundreds of campaign offices and mobilized hundreds of thousands of volunteers. The pay-off of 55 Electoral College votes showed what happens when candidates ignore the conventional wisdom and have the will and resources to fight for Southern states.

One can only hope that progressives absorb these lessons — and when looking at the South, they continue to ignore the pundits and instead say, “Yes, We Can.”