Democrats' Deep South Debacle

L’affaire Alvin Greene is already a treasured part of this year’s political lore. The story in brief: A young, unemployed military veteran without any visible means of support, running a virtually invisible campaign, easily wins the June 8 Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate. And the winner faces a felony obscenity charge to boot.

The outcome stupefied South Carolina Democratic leaders, who speculated that Greene was a Republican plant, the voting machines malfunctioned, or there was a huge GOP crossover vote to produce as weak a candidate for the heavily favored Republican Sen. Jim DeMint as possible.

But if South Carolina Democrats want a better reason for why a political unknown such as Greene was nominated, they should look in a mirror. For the Democratic Party in South Carolina and across the Deep South in general is a shadow of its former self. It is now essentially in the position that Republicans were a generation or two ago, when the GOP was struggling to fill their ballot slots while the Democrats were producing congressional leaders such as Russell Long, John Stennis and Sam Nunn.

Those days, however, are long gone. In the Deep South states of Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi and South Carolina, Republicans currently hold all five governorships, nine of 10 Senate seats (all except that of Louisiana’s Mary Landrieu), and more than 60% of the House seats (23 of 37).

If there was a major turning point in the political history of the region, it came in 1964. The Democratic Congress passed a major civil rights bill. Barry Goldwater became the first Republican presidential candidate to sweep all five states of the Deep South. And South Carolina Sen. Strom Thurmond – the presidential candidate of the segregationist States’ Rights Party in 1948 – bolted from the Democrats to the Republicans.

A wholesale exodus of white Democrats followed, leaving their former party with a core base of African Americans. The latter comprise a significant share of the population throughout the Deep South, but are a distinct minority of the electorate in all five states.

Barack Obama used the racial dynamic to his advantage in his 2008 campaign for the Democratic nomination against Hillary Clinton. Marshalling the African-American vote, he defeated her handily across the region by an aggregate margin of nearly 800,000 votes.

And in the general election, Obama showed signs of building a potent new  coalition for the Democrats that would join African Americans with liberal white voters and the young. Obama failed to carry any Deep South states against Republican John McCain, but he finished only 5 percentage points behind in Georgia, 9 points down in South Carolina, and 13 points back in Mississippi.

But the prospect of this coalition gaining any permanence was quickly dashed. With Obama on the ballot, the Democratic Senate candidate in Georgia ran just 3 points behind Republican incumbent Saxby Chambliss. But in a runoff a month later without Obama on the ballot, the Democrat lost by 15 points.

And an effort this spring by Rep. Artur Davis to run an Obama-like biracial gubernatorial campaign in Alabama fell flat. Seeking to show his independence of the state’s African-American leaders, Davis ended up with a base in neither the black or white community. He lost June 1 to the state’s agriculture commissioner, a white, by a margin of nearly 25 points.

While Davis was mounting an historic candidacy to become the first African-American governor in Alabama history, the state’s Democratic Senate primary was an afterthought, just as it was in South Carolina. No one of note filed for the right to challenge veteran Republican Sen. Richard Shelby, and the Democratic primary came down to a choice between a lawyer and a school teacher. Make of it what you will, the lawyer won.

In both Alabama and South Carolina, Democratic primary turnouts were a fraction of what the Republicans attracted. In Alabama, it was only 65% as large; in South Carolina, the Democratic turnout was just 45% the size of its Republican counterpart (in both cases comparing the ballots cast for governor).

It is easy to see why there was such a wide disparity. The Republican ballot in South Carolina offered a colorful, high-profile gubernatorial race, a nationally known incumbent senator, and a pair of compelling congressional primaries. In one district, an incumbent House member (Bob Inglis) was trounced in a runoff. In another, an African American (Tim Scott) was nominated over two “legacy” candidates – sons of Strom Thurmond and Carroll Campbell (a former GOP governor). 

As for the South Carolina Democrats, their bench of potential candidates is much shorter and their ability to attract voter interest is much smaller. The result: the nomination for governor of a young state legislator, and for the U.S. Senate … Alvin Greene.

(As published in the Wall Street Journal online edition on June 24, 2010.)