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11/27/02

The South has risen — in politics

By John Estes
Last week as part of WCU’s Visiting Scholars Program, Merle Black of Emory University visited campus to speak on the recent election and its implications on Southern politics. His focus was on the new competitive South, which makes for a competitive America.

Black holds the Asa G. Candler Professorship of Politics and Government at Emory, and has coauthored several books on Southern politics, including recently The Rise of Southern Republicans.

According to Black, the South is currently the most important region in national politics. Despite having a Republican-controlled House and Senate, the nation’s other regions have representation in Congress that carry a slim Democratic majority. Not so from the South — the sheer number of Southern Republicans are what give their party its majority on the national level.

Which is why President Bush blanketed Southern states, said Black, commenting on Bush’s campaign assistance to Congressman Saxby Chamblis (R-Georgia). Bush holds an unusually high and long-standing rating among the American people — it is rare in the history of the United States for a president to have such a good approval rating two years into his term — and throwing his support in close elections like Chamblis’ in many cases helped tip the scale in the Republican Party’s favor.

The South is the biggest region in the country, carrying 131 seats in the House. It is also currently the biggest supporter of Republicans in Congress, a trend that began in the early 80s with Ronald Reagan’s terms in office, according to Dr. Gibbs Knotts of Western Carolina University’s Political Science department. “Reagan was a president that Democrats could vote for and be comfortable with in the South,” said Knotts.

Since that time Republican sway in the region has gradually increased. From the New Deal until 1994 the standard fare in Congress was a Democratic House and a usually Democratic Senate. The Democratic Party now, though, is finding out that they now have to fight to get their votes. Both parties, according to Black, are competitive minorities now, meaning they each carry about 40-45 percent of voters, not enough alone to win in a two-party system.

“Democrats can’t just put their names on the ballot anymore,” said Black. “They’re not the majority. They have to reach out to independents and swing voters to win. Both parties have to appeal to voters who are not members of their party,” he said.

The classification is a step up for the Republicans, who were once considered a noncompetitive minority in the South, and a step down for Democrats, who used to carry the majority.

Dr. Black has coauthored two other books with his twin brother Earl, a political science professor at Rice University. They are The Vital South (1992), which dealt with presidential politics; and Politics and Society in the South (1987), which focused on the social undercurrents that have affected the South’s political climate.


(Estes is a student at WCU and an intern for The Smoky Mountain News.)