Democrats aren’t holding their convention in North Carolina this week ‘cause they love themselves some NASCAR.
North Carolina was one of three southern states to give its Electoral College votes to Barack Obama in 2008, and the party wants to consolidate those gains — an ambitious goal, if current polls accurately reflect the state of the race.
Not that long ago, the South was cinder block-solid for the Republican Party. The president, George W. Bush of Texas, was a southerner. The majority leader of the U.S. Senate, Bill Frist of Tennessee, was a southerner, and important committee chairmen throughout Congress were, too.
Republican presidential candidates didn’t campaign hard in the South because its electoral votes were assured. But as officials in both parties try to map a road to electoral dominance in the 21st century, they face a new reality: Them days are going, if not already gone.
Demographic changes — namely, the rapidly expanding Hispanic population — and continued black antipathy toward the GOP could spell increasing trouble for a Republican Party that has not yet found a message that resonates with most minority voters.
Some Republicans are sounding an alarm.
“The demographics race, we’re losing badly,” U.S. Sen. Lindsay Graham, R-S.C., told The Washington Post. “We’re not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long term.”
The percentage of white residents in Virginia, Florida and North Carolina — all won by Obama in 2008 — dropped from 2000 to 2010, U.S. Census figures show, with a corresponding increase in the percentage of black and Hispanic residents.
The Hispanic population in those states, still small, is booming. It zoomed up by 36 percent in Florida, 74 percent in Virginia and 83 percent in North Carolina.
Hispanic voters, like black voters, tend to cast their ballots for Democrats in national elections. There are some groups — older Cuban-Americans in the critical state of Florida are one notable example — that favor Republicans. But overall, Democrats consistently win about two-thirds of Hispanic votes.
The overwhelming majority of black voters vote for Democrats in national elections. Obama, the nation’s first black president, seems poised to capture nearly all their votes, despite the economic pain inflicted by the Great Recession.
Last week, when GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney was shown in a BET commercial touting himself as the candidate who will be best at improving the lives of African Americans, the black men in Decatur’s Prime Time barbershop had a uniform reaction: loud, sustained laughter.
Despite pleas from GOP heavyweights such as U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., and former Florida Republican Gov. Jeb Bush, the party has resisted retooling its positions to appeal to a more diverse electorate.
One example: Hispanic voters are keenly attuned to the immigration issue. Romney has opposed policies that would grant illegal immigrants a path to U.S. citizenship, arguing, as some other Republicans do, that they should leave the country first and “get in line” for documents that would allow them to return legally.
Illegal immigrants are not allowed to vote in the U.S., but Hispanics who understand their efforts to live and work in this country can and do vote. Political observers say part of the problem those Hispanic voters have with the GOP is the tone of the party’s rhetoric on immigration.
“When you insult voters, they are unlikely to vote for you,” said Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics.
Sabato said he does not think Obama is likely to win the trio of southern states he picked up in 2008. He said his polling shows that North Carolina and Florida are likely to go to Romney. (Other polls tilt more toward Obama, particularly in Florida, which is shaping up as the tightest race in the nation.)
Virginia, with its upper income, Democratic-leaning D.C. suburbs holding great sway, is a better bet to stay in Obama’s column, according to many polls, including Sabato’s.
Whatever the outcome, the closeness of the contest in these southern swing states will give out-sized influence minority voters, Sabato suggested. Although they don’t make up huge chunks of each state’s population, they could well provide the margin of victory.
Not everyone buys that prognosis. The top Republican in Congress, House Speaker John Boehner, said black and Hispanic voters won’t come out in droves for Obama this fall.
“This election is about economics,” Boehner said last week during a luncheon hosted by the Christian Science Monitor. “These groups have been hit the hardest, and they may not show up and vote for our candidate, but I suggest to you that they won’t show up and vote for the president, either.”
Historically, opposition to civil rights, not economic issues, was the founding principle of the modern Republican Party in the South. Prior to the civil rights fights of the 1950s and 1960s, Democrats dominated the region. The tide began to turn when opponents of civil rights — Strom Thurmond of South Carolina is perhaps the best-known example — switched from the Democratic Party to the GOP.
From 1964 until Obama’s 2008 showing, the only time Democrats had success in the South was when they had a southerner on the ticket. And even that wasn’t a lock: In 1980, former Georgia Gov. Jimmy Carter won only one southern state, Georgia, when he was crushed by Ronald Reagan as he sought re-election to the presidency.
In beating John McCain in 2008, Obama became the first Democratic presidential nominee since Lyndon Johnson in 1964 to win Virginia.
As the GOP seeks to reverse that loss, its candidates are once more invoking racially tinged themes, said Dick Harpootlian, chairman of the South Carolina Democratic Party. Examples, he said, include the voter ID laws passed by GOP-dominated legislatures throughout the region and Romney’s attacks on Obama on the topic of welfare.
“Their security blanket, which they refuse to let go of, is race,” Harpootlian said of the GOP. “These voter ID bills, this is thinly-veiled, 21st century Jim Crow. There is an opportunity for them — if they could let go of this belief that they can’t convince African Americans to vote for them.”
Chris Kelleher, communications director for the Georgia Republican Party, said it is Democrats, not Republicans, who continue to harp on race, particularly as it relates to the welfare debate.
“It’s more so racist of them to assume that welfare is a black and white issue,” Kelleher said. “I think it’s insulting to African Americans to tie them to welfare.”
Kelleher said the GOP will do better in the South this fall because Obama is not able to run the same type of campaign he ran in 2008.
“You are seeing a much different campaign than four years ago,” Kelleher said. “Instead of a lofty campaign of hope and change, he’s having to run on — or against — his record.”
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