Why does the South have to dominate America?

Great Debates
21

Don’t overstate your case. There was a strong abolitionist strain in the North around 1860, but there was still not a popular interest in equal rights. Slavery still ended as much for economic reasons as moral ones. Moreover, there is a certain truth to the idea that American conceptions of freedom started in the South.

Anyway, I also point out that as a region, there ain’t much the rets of the country has on the wealth, population, and resources of the South. Virginia, Florida, and Texas alone would comprise a very powerful political force. Granted, they don’t always work together, but they are more unified than, say, New York and California.

22

Maybe a better question would be how has the South been able to do this?

The South has long been the cultural center for the US. Maybe that has something to do with it.

23

You’re seeing a demographic shift. If you look at the census data, you’ll see that Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Tennessee, Arkansas, and Texas all experienced a higher percentage of population growth between 1990-2000 than the nation as a whole.

24

Well, Jomo, it’s not as if the South WANTED to dominate the United States. They wanted to LEAVE the United States, if you’ll recall. It was the dang Yankees that wouldn’t let that happen!

See what you get for forcing the Rebs back into the fold?
Sincerely,

                 A (Mostly) Facetious Transplanted New Yorker
25

Yep, those well known Southerners- Samuel Adams, Franklin, John Hancock, etc. The birthplace of American democracy is more Mass. than Georgia. True, Virginia had a large amount of influence, but they aren’t “deep South”. About the only thing the deep south did during the events leading up to the Declaration of Independce is almost blow the whole thing over slavery.

The reason is “dixiecrats”- those politicos who are in sympathy actually Republican, but come from states where they still carry a grudge against Lincoln. The rest of the nation is pretty well evenly divided- so the dixiecrats hold the "swing vote’.

The Midwest will vote GoP just about 100%. CA and the NE will vote Dem. Thus, the South is just about the only region where the vote is in doubt. And note that Fla is getting out of the “deep South” bit by bit. It may be that Fla will be THE state to win in the next couple of presidential elections.

26

You are taking noptes from an old book, friend. This is not very true now, and getting less so every year.

27

SB- true, but the OP goes back to 1964, where it was a trueism. The “Dixiecrat” party has been getting smaller & smaller, i will admit, but the influence was large in the past.

28

I did a little digging on electoral trends, taking 1960 as the arbitrary starting point of the modern era. Looking at these past 11 elections, I count as a safe party state those that have voted for the same party at least 8 of the 11 times.

5 states plus DC are safe Democratic states (having voted for the Democrats 8+ of 11 times):
DC, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New York, and Weat Virginia. In the 2004 election they will give 71 electoral votes to the Democrats.

20 states are safe Republican states (having voted Republican 8+ of 11 times)
Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Utah, Virginia, and Wyoming. In the 2004 election, these states will give 154 electoral votes to the Republicans.

Not a single state of the old Confederacy is a Democratic stronghold, while 6 of 11 former Confederate states are safe for Republicans. Clearly the south is the weakest region for presidential Democrats, and therefore the hardest for non-southern Democrats to win. Being that Republicans need only pick up 116 tossup electors while Democrats need 199, it is clearly much harder for Democrats to pick up the White House without southern support than it is for the Republicans.

I’m not sure there is a southern monopoly on power, for years Tip O’Neill of Massachusetts was the Speaker. Indeed, from the start of McCormack’s reign in 1961, only Jim Wright and Newt Gingrich were southern, so 8 years of the past 42 does not a dynasty make.

In this time, only Howard Baker, Trent Lott, and now Frist have been Southern majority leaders, so again 8+ years of 42 is hardly domination.

29

“Not a single state of the old Confederacy is a Democratic stronghold, while 6 of 11 former Confederate states are safe for Republicans.”

For years (hell, decades) there was absolutely no Republican Party in Virginia. The Byrd Machine ran this State from the earliest parts of the 20th Century up to the 1970s. The Byrd Machine was centered on a “pay as you go” fiscal conservatism and a segragationist public policy (James J. Kilpatrick, as Editorial Page editor for the Richmond Times-Dispatch supported “massive resistence”). Republicans were in the wilderness only until fairly recently, even though the Dems are nearly as conservative. There simply isn’t much difference here.

30

The Ku Klux Klan. Jim Crow. “Segregation now. Segregation Forevah!”

31

You may as well ask why almost every Prime Minister elected in Canada in the past 35 years is from Quebec.

My WAG is that the chief political honchos are in the South, and political people from other regions get kept on the outside. If you’re from, say, Washington state, and you want to hook up, you’ll be ostracized and pushed out unless you show Southern spirit.

32

I’d say there are three major factors contributing to the phenomenon of the Southern Democratic President: identity, the South, and the electoral college. I have no guess about Congressional leaders.

We, most Americans that is, still have part of our identity invested in which state we live in. Not as much as white Americans had 200 years ago but we still feel a part of these groups, even those of us who have changed states. People are likely to vote for the candidate they can identify with so being a local is an advantage any election. The South shares its confederate heritage so the presidential candidate from Georgia is somewhat of a local boy in Louisiana when facing an outsider.

Then our mischevious system for picking a president comes into play. All of a states electoral votes go to the most popular candidate in that state so a small home team advantage can turn a few thousand votes into ALL of a state’s electoral votes. Lets take MSU 1978’s six safe Republican southern states as an example: Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia. In the last election they delivered 8,248,815 of 105,326,325 or 7.8% of the total popular vote to the Republican Party. But the electoral college turned that into 76 of 538 or 14.1% of the electoral vote. Just over seven million voters in those states chose Al Gore and received nothing for it in the electoral college.

Given how our election system can turn a small advantage in the right place into a lot of electoral power and the conservatism of the South it is small wonder that recent Democratic presidents tend to be sons of Dixie. The Republicans don’t need to court the South so hard because it is now their base as the more conservative party. Instead they look for promising Californians and such as they try to pry electoral votes from the clutches of the Democrats.

33

Good point, or it would be a good point if it’s true. Is it true? How do you know? Who says the South has to be the cultural center? As if the South determines America’s national character? Is this right? Why should it be? It does seem to be the presumption of the arrogant strain of Southerners who are busy dominating the government that they are the only real Americans and the rest f the country can go to Hell for all they care.

True. Things were more balanced in Congress in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. Although there may have been a presidential election trend that Dems can gain the White House only if they’re Southern, it’s only in the past decade that Southern domination of Congress has been so heavy. Which is exactly my point. Why is this happening now? Do the majority of Americans really want this? Or are they just too intimidated to resist the trend?

I get the feeling lately that we’re all supposed to believe that if you’re not Southern, you’re nobody.

2sense, I agree the present electoral college system is wrong for America. It isn’t carved in Constitutional stone that the winner has to take all, is it? Maine, IIRC, uses proportional allotment of electors. I guess the other 50 states could choose to go proportional without a Constitutional amendment, just by changing their rules. Or is that determined by the state constitutions?

34

You assume too much.

  1. You did not, in fact, actually refute his point.

  2. He did not make a value judgement on the goodnes of badness of the fact, only observing that the SOuth was a major cultural center of the US (granted, he said “the”, which is not technically true).

  3. Your rant against Southerners does not appreciate the facts of the case. Southerners are as varied as any other group and do not seem to exert and undue influence on the government.

35

I think the perceived power shift to the south might be explained by anomalies in seniority. Committee chairs and leadership positions in the Congress are largely a function of seniority. It may be that the most senior members of Congress just happen to be from the south and thus are in line for these posts. If someone has the time and energy to research this I’d be interested.

The electoral college is a dinosaur that we’re stuck with. I do like the way that Maine does it, where each congressional district has its own election for an elector and the other two electors are selected by the at large vote. If all states adopted it, then if you’re a Republican in New York or a Democrat in Indiana, you’d at least have a prayer of having an elector represent your wishes.

I don’t know about this cultural center debate. In modern America, a lot of the culture is represented in movies and telvision, and these are dominated by NY and LA. Certainly rock music has southern roots but I think it would be a stretch to say that the concepts of freedom were entirely of southern origin. Ben Franklin and John Adams had a little to do with it too.

36

If you can’t beat’em, join’em. That about sums it up I think :wink:

37

Jomo Mojo,

You are right, each state decides for itself how to select its alloted electors. Those electors then meet in each state and cast their ballots for president and vice president. There is no requirement that a state even hold an election. A state law allowing the legislature to choose the electors directly or have them appointed by the governor or in some other way would be constitutional.

The district system as described by MSU 1978 is used by 2 states. I regard it as a harmless variation, at least when used by “small” states like Maine and Nebraska. They have 2 and three congressional districts respectively and a relatively homogenous population so gerrymandering isn’t a problem. In larger states like here in Pennslyvania the district system would be a nightmare. Look at what the fight over redistricting has come to in Tejas. Fifty Three Dems have fled the legislature preventing a quorum. Image how much more common that would be if the stakes included the the House and the White House too.

I have long thought an actual proportional system with each candidate gaining a certain percentage of a state’s vote would win the right to name one of its electors was the best we could do under the Constitution. But I’ve just had an epiphany which I believe deserves it’s own thread. As for the district system in Maine and Nebraska I think the simplest way to demonsrate it is an ineffective reform is the fact it has done nothing. Neither state has ever split their electoral votes since they changed to the system.

38

Damn fellows, do you think that at one time all the people in the south got together and decided to talk slow. Of course not. Slow talking and slow walking are obviously adaptations to the hot humid southern clime. And a beneficial offshoot of this adaptation is that by talking slow and moving slow we have more time to reflect upon what we are going to say and so say it right.
This is optimum human communication, and as a result we have become an envied region of philosophers, poets, and presidents.

Just review this thread for an example…

See? The contributors from other regions speak without thinking and then they ramble and rave, long and about, and so forget the very point that moved them to write in the first place. My.

Now. Read the posts above that were written by the good people of the south…careful…measured…kind…intelligent and to the point. Wow!

Note: I’ve even seen transplanted yankees become better, brighter, people after living a while in Alabama, but not often. Its much better if you can get 'em before their heads are filled with a carpetbag of trite notions.
__________________________________ :slight_smile:

39

I’m not sure that The South is the ‘cultural center’ of the US, but perhaps it is the center of what Russel Mead called the ‘Jacksonian Tradition’.

This could benefit Southern presidential candidates two ways: Not only does this ideology play very well in a national election against ‘Wilsonian’ and ‘Hamiltonian’ candidates in a lessor-of-two-evils-Condorcet sense, but by allowing this type of candidate to become a governor and get the vital campaign fund-raising base necessary for a successful presidential campaign. (Reagan, Carter, Bush2, Clinton were all governors - and the Kennedy’s had/have such a lock on Mass that they might as well have been.)