Mississippi’s political dilemma holds lessons for Georgia

It was a fitting position for Mississippi Democrats. They need all the help they can get.

There is no state in the U.S. with more black officeholders and a higher proportion of the black vote than Mississippi. There is also no state where voters are more polarized.

The plight of Democrats here is no mystery to counterparts across a region now dominated by Republicans. While Democrats in Georgia and elsewhere pin their hopes on a growing minority population and all-out registration efforts, some party luminaries are urging not to forget their once-fervent white base.

“They can’t write off the South,” U.S. Rep. David Scott, a black Atlanta Democrat, said of his party’s leaders.

“We have to appeal to people who are interested in lifting themselves up and being able to address ourselves to those middle-class needs, bringing jobs back.”

But with consecutive presidential wins under the party’s belt, President Barack Obama, Democratic leaders in Congress and 2016 front-runner Hillary Clinton have shown little indication of changing course on policy or politics.

Republicans face the inverse problem of trying to expand their appeal to minority voters who have been largely allied with Democrats since the civil rights era — and whose numbers are growing as a portion of the electorate.

The math has helped Republicans dominate the South.

In Mississippi, blacks make up a higher percentage of voters than any other state, with 36 percent in 2012, and they reliably shower Democrats with their support. But Mississippi’s remaining voters, overwhelmingly white, are tremendously loyal Republicans. Nearly nine in 10 white voters, for instance, voted for Mitt Romney in the 2012 presidential contest.

Georgia Democrats are wary of sliding down the same path, though metro Atlanta’s sizable white Democratic contingent gives them more breathing room. Last year’s elections served as a reminder of how far the party must go to get white voters back in the fold.

Michelle Nunn and Jason Carter, both white Democrats with name-brand legacies, aimed to capture 30 percent of Georgia’s white vote. Exit polls showed them falling well short of their goal as Republicans retained control of every statewide office.

A review of exit poll data by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution shows that the Southern states captured by Democrats in recent elections more resembled the national trends: solid but not overwhelming white majorities for Republicans and near-universal support from black voters.

In the bulk of the South captured by Republicans, the black vote held but Democrats typically pulled in far fewer than 30 percent of white voters. (The one exception was overwhelmingly white Arkansas, where Democrats inched into the low 30s.)

In Mississippi, analysts speak of the deeply entrenched polarization in stark terms.

“Mississippi Democrats have tried reaching out. They’re in this corner because the Republicans have been so effective in saying that Democrats are who you vote for if you’re black,” said John Bruce, the chairman of the University of Mississippi’s political science department. “And that’s possible because the role of race isn’t what it was 50 years ago, but it’s still present.”

Stagnation in Mississippi

Democrats have had a long and turbulent history in Mississippi. Like other Deep South states, Democrats dominated statewide politics after Reconstruction and through World War II. But a 1948 rift over civil rights prompted the state’s delegates to back the segregationist Dixiecrats, whose supporters thrived over the next two decades.

Disenfranchised blacks formed their own splinter party, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, in 1964, and warring between factions known as the “regulars” and “loyalists” divided the party. Republicans began siphoning significant white support from Democrats in the early 1990s, and they steadily consolidated power over the next two decades.

The black electorate, meanwhile, has remained solidly behind the Democrats. Mississippi counts more elected black officials than any other state (Georgia is consistently in the top five), and in 2011, the Democrats made Hattiesburg Mayor Johnny DuPree the first black candidate to win a major party's gubernatorial nomination in Mississippi since Reconstruction. He was trounced at the polls by Republican Phil Bryant, earning roughly 40 percent of the vote.

The voting bloc is so strong that nervous Republicans called on black voters to rescue U.S. Sen. Thad Cochran in 2014 as he faced a divisive runoff against a tea party candidate. He narrowly survived with the support of many of the state’s leading black figures.

The status quo in Mississippi, though, is unlikely to change any time soon. The demographic waves that Democrats hope will upend politics in Georgia and Texas barely make a ripple here, where population growth is stagnant. Census data show the state’s population grew less than 1 percent between 2010 and 2014.

The party is putting forward a diverse slate. U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson, who is black, represents a Democratic-leaning district spanning much of the western part of the state. And white Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood, whose tough-on-crime stances have helped him survive as the sole Democrat in statewide office, is running for a fourth term.

But analysts have slim hopes for some of the other contenders. Among them is newcomer Joce Pritchett, a white Democrat who is also openly gay. Pritchett, who is running for state auditor, said her fellow partisans are no longer afraid to stand up and support the Democratic ticket. She calls it a “coming out of the closet, so to speak.”

“We’ve been afraid of offending each other and uneasy with the racial divide among us,” said Pritchett, a Georgia Tech-trained civil engineer who works near Jackson. “But we are seeing a coming together that we haven’t seen in Mississippi in a long time.”

Endangered moderates

There is little coming together in Washington.

Conservative white Southern Democrats who often crossed party lines are all but extinct, through party-switching, attrition and defeat. Last year saw the last white Democrats in the Deep South fall when U.S. Rep. John Barrow of Augusta and U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu of Louisiana were swept away in a GOP tide.

U.S. Rep. Jim Cooper, D-Tenn., who is white, is one of the last remaining fiscally conservative Blue Dog Democrats, a group once fattened with Southern moderates.

While House Republicans have drifted far to the right, Democrats have gone under a similar — though less pronounced — shift to the left in their voting patterns. Research by University of Georgia professor Keith Poole shows congressional Democrats and Republicans further apart ideologically than at any point in history.

“Sometimes the Blue Dogs get attacked by your Daily Kos people and folks like that,” Cooper said of the well-read liberal blog. “And those are fine folks, but they don’t come from our region and they don’t realize the struggle we face every day just continuing to be a Democrat.

“Because I go lots of places and some young people have never met a Democrat in their lives, where they think we have horns and a tail.”

Cooper said there is a cultural disconnect between national Democrats and his constituents around Nashville.

“In the South, we’re people who like guns,” he said. “We like churches. We like a lot of things that the national party has sometimes not related to very well. But the key issue is always economics.”

Scott, one of precious few members of the Blue Dogs and Congressional Black Caucus, agreed that a better economic plan is the way to win back rural Southern whites, but he said the party also should preach a more robust national defense and agriculture policy.

Do party leaders get that?

“That question has yet to be answered,” Scott replied.

The story for Democrats in the U.S. House, at a low-water mark with little chance of winning the majority at least until another round of redistricting, is far different from the presidential picture.

Many Democrats see the "Rising American Electorate" — left-leaning minorities, unmarried people and the young — as a path to success. Population trends, goosed by effective registration and turnout regimes, can keep blue states blue while moving states like such as Georgia, Arizona, North Carolina and Texas in that direction.

Stacey Abrams, the top Democrat in Georgia’s House, is an advocate of this strategy. She leads an outreach program that aims to register 800,000 new minority voters over the next five years.

“They need to be brought into the fold,” Abrams said. “And reaching out to them and embracing their franchise is a fundamental mission. Everyone should be engaged in engaging these voters.”

‘We can’t get there’

The Democratic heartbeat in North Mississippi pulses in a ramshackle office in the town of West Point where hand-drawn signs of two braying donkeys welcome visitors. Inside, a group of two dozen veteran activists, all of whom are black, complained at a recent meeting of hopelessly hardened attitudes and no support from the statewide party.

“The white switch still really bothers me. We have elected people to office who have switched to become Republicans before the engine even gets cold,” said Sylvester Harris, who has been involved in local politics since 1965. “Blacks and whites both used to support Democrats. The whites fled, and those who didn’t were ousted through intimidation.”

“All we need is about 10 or 15 percent of white support,” he lamented. “And we can’t get there.”

Rickey Cole, the Mississippi Democratic Party’s chairman, said roughly 17 percent of Mississippi’s whites identify as Democratic. It’s getting them to actually vote for the party’s slate that can be a challenge. And he said the party, mired in a rebuilding phase, can’t solve all the problems.

“The mythical expectations of bountiful manna flowing down from above have been hard to banish,” said Cole, who is white.

Walter Zinn, the choirmaster’s son, gave Democrats their most recent chance to test their appeal in solidly conservative northwest Mississippi. He was the only Democrat and only black candidate among 13 contenders who sought to represent a U.S. House district left open when Republican Rep. Alan Nunnelee died of brain cancer in February.

Zinn, a 34-year-old attorney and political consultant, won a surprising 17 percent of the votes in the first round, making him the leading vote-getter. That put him in a June 2 runoff against Republican Trey Kelly, who got 16 percent of the tally.

As Kelly focused on the word “conservative” and his track record as a district attorney, Zinn doubled-down on the black electorate, heading to churches and family reunions with a message that he wanted to drag Mississippi out of the bottom ranks that make it the butt of so many jokes.

“We’re tired of being last. It’s not a black or white issue, and it’s definitely not Democratic or Republican,” Zinn said to a crowd of about 50 family and friends at his stepdad’s church in Potontoc. “We don’t need to keep losing our brothers and sisters to Atlanta and Dallas.”

For Zinn, it wasn’t to be. He was crushed the next day, getting just 30 percent of the vote.

There was a bright spot to his defeat. Just ask Devian Harris, a recent Georgia State University graduate who returned to Mississippi to seek work as a policy analyst.

“The good thing about this state having such a small Democratic Party,” she said, “is that we can only go up from here.”