Republicans rise in Dixie

0 Comments | Insight on the News, July 31, 1995

November's GOP win below the Mason-Dixon line has Southern Democrats running scared.

The national Democratic Party is becoming alien to the white South," political analyst Kevin Phillips wrote in his 1969 book, The Emerging Republican Majority. Now there's evidence to support his prediction: Sen. Sam Nunn is the only white Democrat in Georgia's congressional delegation, though House Speaker Newt Gingrich was the only Republican as of 1992.

The Republican Party won a congressional majority in the South last year for the first time since Reconstruction. Although Southern voters have supported the GOP in presidential politics since the 1950s, conservative Democrats traditionally have dominated congressional politics. The Democratic Party's apparent shift to the left and the creation of majority-minority districts by racial gerrymandering have changed the way Southerners cast their ballots, says Mary Ellen Guy, a political-science professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

"Southern Democrats could never [before] call themselves Republicans," she explains. "This trend is simply putting the label on top of the table rather than underneath the table."

Fueling this shift since 1990 has been the creation of majority-black districts, which resulted in part from an interesting alliance between blacks and Republicans, who also stood to gain from them. Blacks are the strongest supporters of the Democratic Party, but gerrymandering carved them out of districts that also had been filled with the kind of moderate-to-conservative white voters who turned to the GOP last year. Since the majority-minority districts were created by state legislatures after the 1990 census, Southern black representation in the House has increased from five to 17. In Alabama, the executive director of the Democratic Party says racial gerrymandering cost him two seats in last year's congressional elections. "You would think, after all these years, the race issue could be put behind us," says Al LaPierre. "But it hasn't."

Emory University political science professor Merle Black points out that 65 percent of Southern white voters chose Republicans in 1994, compared with the normal 52 percent. Democrats have always run by putting together a biracial coalition that would yield a majority. "The problem for the Democratic politicians right now is that they need a fairly large share of the white votes," Black says. "That tempts them to move in a conservative direction."

A recent Supreme Court decision, however, could reverse this trend. In a 5-4 ruling, the court said that race could not be the predominant factor in drawing legislative districts. Black and Hispanic congressmen denounced the decision, saying it would resegregate parts of the electorate and hamper minority representation on Capitol Hill.

Now a new political game will begin with redistricting, a factor Democrats hope will help them. The black-GOP alliance in the legislatures probably will fight new districts every step of the way. "The politics of drawing new lines is going to be very highly charged, very divisive," Black says. "On paper, Republicans could stand to lose if blacks are spread across a number of districts. It depends on how the lines are drawn." But Republican National Committee Chairman Haley Barbour says he isn't fretting. "The demography of the districts is much less a factor than the power of our ideas," he say. "It's impossible to predict the effect of this case until the new districts are drawn."

Either way, most analysts see no immediate improvement in the Democratic Party's base below the Mason-Dixon line. A recent report by the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate, a nonpartisan Washington research group, shows how the South largely was responsible for the new Republican majority in Congress. Of the 1 million votes the Democrats lost nationwide, 80 percent were in the South, where the GOP gained more than 40 percent of its nationwide net of 8.7 million votes. Further erosion of the Democratic base in the South makes it even more unlikely that the party can recapture control of the House in 1996, says Curtis Gans, director of the committee. "The Democrats...are unlikely to win any state in the South, save perhaps Arkansas," he says. "That trend is likely to continue for at least a generation."

Black agrees. "Republicans will continue to hold these seats," he says. "The Democratic Party is in the biggest trouble I've seen in 30 years because they don't have a winning formula. They can't move in a liberal direction because their hearts are not in it."

Party label has meant little to Southern politicians - and voters - over the years since they vote with Republicans much of time. But the new majority meant that control of congressional committees shifted to Republicans, leaving several Southern Democrats with little or no clout where it counts. Many say a coveted seat on the House Ways and Means Committee offered to Texas Rep. Greg Laughlin prompted his recent jump to the GOP. He joins fellow Southern defectors Sen. Richard Shelby of Alabama and Rep. Nathan Deal of Georgia. While incumbent politicians, such as Rep. W.J. "Billy" Tauzin of Louisiana, probably can survive either as Democrats or Republicans, the party label means much more for new candidates, says the University of Alabama's Guy.