AJC on the trail
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution will be closely tracking the presidential campaign through November 2016 all across the country, with a special emphasis on the South.
Southern Democrats snapped up tickets for last week’s “First in the South” presidential forum within five minutes. But that pent-up demand to hear the party’s top White House contenders is a sharp contrast compared with the party’s flailing electoral fortunes across the region.
Last week’s elections underscored the near-total realignment of the South, once a bastion of Democratic support. Despite the party’s hopes that shifting demographics and an influx of newcomers would help Democrats win back the region, the South remains firmly in GOP control.
Republican Matt Bevin's victory in Kentucky means the GOP controls all but one governor's mansion in the South — everywhere but Virginia — and all but one state legislative chamber. The holdout, Kentucky's House, is already in the cross hairs.
Southern Democrats hold out hope that Jon Bel Edwards, the party’s nominee in Louisiana’s governor’s race, can pull out a win later this month against a damaged Republican candidate. But the party has otherwise failed to exploit Republican divides in Washington and distance itself from President Barack Obama’s struggles in the region.
It’s triggered a new version of a familiar debate for Southern Democrats over how to win back the region. Party leaders and strategists who gathered here explored ways to maximize outreach to minorities, tap into the environmental concerns of the millennial generation, consolidate support from gays and engage more religious voters.
Above all, they pleaded to the strategists behind the campaigns of Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton and her rivals to make a play for the region.
“What we want is for folks in Washington to simply say: Don’t write off the South,” said Gilda-Cobb Hunter, a South Carolina state legislator. “We’re here today to say this is how we think it ought to be done. The South matters.”
Republicans are quick to scoff at the high hopes.
“Democrats’ inability to win in states like Kentucky, Virginia and Mississippi is an ominous sign for their party heading into the presidential election,” Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus said. “Our party heads into the 2016 election with positive momentum and with the right vision to put our country back on track.”
Democratic setbacks
The tide of elections across the region last week did little to buoy their spirits.
Mississippi's Republican governor sailed to re-election over a long-haul trucker who could hardly qualify as token opposition. (He said he didn't even vote for himself in the Democratic primary, revealing that he forgot he had qualified for the race.)
A costly effort to wrest control of the Virginia Senate flamed out. And Bevin's victory made him Kentucky's second Republican governor in four decades.
In Georgia, meanwhile, Democrats who poured so much time and treasure into last year's gubernatorial and Senate contests still haven't fielded a candidate to challenge Republican U.S. Sen. Johnny Isakson next year.
The setbacks have forced Democratic operatives on the defensive as they make a case for campaigns to invest beyond the primaries in flipping Southern states from red to blue.
The Old South, stretching from Virginia to Texas, holds a trove of 160 electoral votes — about 60 percent of the tally needed to win the White House. And Democrats ignore the region at their own peril, said Scott Huffmon, a Winthrop University political scientist.
“In modern times, if Republicans can field a candidate that can sweep the South, they have become president. Period,” he said. “And if the Democrats can field a candidate that can crack the South, they have become president. Period. That’s why the South is the crown jewel in the presidential elections.”
Obama successfully splintered the South in 2008, winning Florida, North Carolina and Virginia. He also made a late spending push in Georgia to reach 47 percent that year, the high-water mark for Democratic presidential candidates in the state since Jimmy Carter’s run.
Obama couldn’t retain his grip on North Carolina in 2012, though he managed to hold on to the other states in his re-election over Republican Mitt Romney.
A ‘tier two’ state?
Clinton is relying on her deep well of support in the black community to turn South Carolina, as well as Georgia and the other "SEC primary" states voting on March 1, into a Southern firewall to fend off Vermont U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders and other rivals.
But Clinton's general election strategy, should she win the party's nomination, remains a mystery. She's likely to target the same trio of states that Obama won in 2008, but her strategists have described Georgia as a "tier two" target — as in, it's not yet a swing state, but it could be.
Much of the Democratic soul-searching focused on the promise of the party’s ascendancy in the not-so-distance future.
“The South is going to flip, and the Republicans know it,” said Louis Elrod, a Georgia native who is vice president of the Young Democrats of America. “They’re doing everything they can to stop us.”
Others, though, offered a more tempered view. Tennessee’s Democratic Party chairwoman, Mary Mancini, said she’s learned to relish incremental victories — such as flipping a state legislative seat or winning a county election — as the party slowly rebuilds.
“We’re not even getting people who agree with us to vote,” Mancini said. “Turnout is the key. And those are the folks we’ve got to reach out to first.”
Ever the optimist, Democratic Party of Georgia head DuBose Porter suggested the party is “closer than people think” to reclaiming the region. But he said it will take an extra dash of outrage to get there.
“We’ve got to create ‘hell, you say’ moments,” Porter said. “We’ve got to create moments that get their attention on policy issues. We’ve got to create those moments where the light bulbs come on to illuminate the issues.”
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