The Deep South in the 2008 election

One of my favorite blogs for the few of years has been "Strange Maps", the other day they featured this map of cotton production in 1860 juxtaposed with a by-county map of the deep south in the 2008 election, originally from Professor Allan Gathman.


85 Million years ago, during the Late Cretaceous period, the Deep South was underwater. If you've read "Guns Germs and Steel" (I haven't... yet), you'll know that agriculture determines history. Geology and soil determines agriculture. In the 2008 election, history and geology determined election results in the deep south. (The Vigorous North)

In my previous history and politics-related post, I wrote about the Upland South and the 2008 election results. Since the Civil Rights movement, which has bipartisan support, excepting Southern Democrats, the national Democratic party has had a serious problem connecting with southern white voters and where they have lost the Republicans have gained substantially and due in part to what Nixon strategist Kevin Phillips called the "Southern Strategy".

Before FDR, the overwhelming majority of African-Americans, identified with the Republicans. While Eisenhower sent the army to enforce Brown vs. Board of Education and a higher percentage of Republicans in congress voted for the Civil Rights Act, in 1964 Barry Goldwater, who voted against the act, defeated liberal Republicans Nelson Rockefeller, George Romney, and Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. to win the presidential nomination of the party. Likewise, President Johnson's signing of the act along with the earlier Democratic policies of the New Deal gained the support of the community. When large numbers of African-Americans in the South started registering and reclaiming the political rights that their antecedents briefly had for the decade proceeding the Civil War, it created deep divisions within the Democratic Party. The party in Mississippi, for example, refused to desegregate and activists started the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party in 1964. The party worked hard to claim legitimacy and sought to be seated at the Democratic Convention that year in lieu of the official party, which would not support Johnson for reelection. The national party brokered a compromise giving the MFDP two delegate votes, which left both parties very angry and the official Mississippi Democratic Party walked out.

Goldwater carried Mississippi that year with 87% of the vote, the first Republican to win Mississippi and Alabama, excepting Reconstruction. 1964 was the first time Georgia EVER voted Republican and that Vermont EVER voted Republican(yes. It is the only time in the Electoral College that the Deep South voted differently than the entire Outer & Upper South. Johnson won the popular vote by over 22%, the 5th largest margin ever. 61.1% of Americans voted for Johnson, more than any other President since James Monroe ran virtually unopposed. Goldwater won the 5 states in the Deep South and his home state of Arizona. Downticket the Republican party also lost big. 1964 was also the last time a Democrat won a majority of the white voters.

By the time Nixon ran again in 1968, it was a completely different playing field than in 1960. Reaction to the Civil Rights movement had eroded the ensconced support of the "Solid South" for the Democratic Party. Kevin Phillips opportunistically identified the potential for winning Southern Voters, "The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans." And quit they did and for the past two decades Republicans have dominated the south with southern blacks largely supporting the Democratic party.

When Democrat Howard Dean, while running for President in 2004, stated, "I still want to be the candidate for guys with Confederate flags in their pickup trucks," he was soundly criticized by national Democratic leaders. When he became the leader of the Democratic Party itself and decided to fund staffers and campaigns in the south as party of his 50-State Strategy, he was soundly criticized by other party leaders again.

This year the Obama campaign had a massive Get Out The Vote (GOTV) and his candidacy obviously excited and increased turnout of African Americans through the country. It's no secret that most African Americans were brought to the American colonies and the early United States for slavery and with the invention of the cotton gin in 1794, large and very profitable plantations took off and previously wilderness areas Deep South were cleared, American Indians were forcibly removed, and they settled in the 1820s and 30s the mad rush of "Alabama Fever". Note the concentration of plantations along the Mississippi river and a "black belt" of fertile black "prairie topsoil" which extends across Alabama into Mississippi in the crescent visible in all of these maps.

This map illustrates the successful Get-Out-the-Vote efforts and enthusiasm for the Obama campaign among southern African-American voters:

Purple America: election results by hue:

You'll notice the patch in central Tennessee that does not correspond to Obama votes, this area farmed cotton largely without the use of slaves and divided its support in the Civil War and remained a violent place afterward with the founding of the KKK there with reprisals against Union supporters and blacks.

Recently, the New York Times declared an end ("For South, a Waning Hold on National Politics" Nov. 10, 2008) to the "Southernization" of American politics. The declining demographic and electoral dominance of the southern white voter is shrinking has broken as voting block-- with the "suburban south" states of Virginia, Florida, and North Carolina all went for Obama.

Merle Black, an expert on the region’s politics at Emory University in Atlanta, said the Republicans went too far in appealing to the South, alienating voters elsewhere.

“They’ve maxed out on the South,” he said, which has “limited their appeal in the rest of the country.”

...

David Bositis, senior political analyst at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, pointed out that the 18 percent share of whites that voted for [a God-damned Yankee!], Senator John Kerry in 2004 was almost cut in half for Mr. Obama.

“There’s no other explanation than race,” he said.

In the Deep South, the Democratic white vote His three lowest performing states were Alabama (10%), Mississippi (11%), and Louisiana (14%) followed by GA (23%), SC (26%), TX (26%), OK (29% --southeast OK is called Little Dixie), AR (30%). Whites voting Democratic nearly cut in half in Alabama and Louisiana while increasing in Indiana by 32% and nationally by 5% versus 2004.

2008 Democratic presidential white vote 10 pts or more below national white vote
2008 Democratic presidential white vote 10 pts or more above national white vote
(Science Blogs: The great white sort)

So there you have it, as they say, the Civil War is still being fought in the Deep South.