Democrats defeat ‘southern strategy’
By Edward Luce in Chicago
Published: November 5 2008 18:11 | Last updated: November 5 2008 18:11
Every generation or so, the US throws up an epoch-making election. The last one took place in 1968 when Richard Nixon successfully exploited white resentment of Lyndon Johnson’s backing of the Civil Rights Act to end the Democratic party’s 150-year grip on the South.
Known as the “southern strategy”, the covert racial appeal to alienated working-class whites helped to deliver seven out of the last 10 presidential elections to Republicans.
On Tuesday night, Barack Obama’s emphatic victory brought the southern strategy to a close – and with it may also have ended his party’s torturous 40-year struggle to win back the loyalty of the US mainstream.
In 1968, the core electorate was the white working classes, which also included blue-collar voters, later dubbed the “Reagan Democrats”.
Today, the country has many core groups, virtually every one of which backed Mr Obama on Tuesday.
Of these, perhaps the most significant was Hispanics. The only exceptions were the white working classes and the older generations – both of which are shrinking as a share of the electorate.
“Barack Obama won each of America’s fastest-growing groups by margins of roughly two-to-one,” says Simon Rosenberg, head of the NDN (formerly the National Democratic Network), a liberal think-tank. “He has laid the foundations for a coalition of groups that could usher in a generation of Democratic dominance.”
At five percentage points, Mr Obama’s margin of victory significantly understates the importance of the shift.
A better way to grasp the implications is to compare his triumph with those of the two previous Democrats to take the White House – Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, both of whom were white, working-class governors of southern states.
Mr Obama achieved 53 per cent of the vote on a sharply higher turnout than any election in the past generation. Mr Clinton got 39 per cent and 47 per cent of the vote respectively in three-way elections. Mr Carter got 50.1 per cent of the vote.
With 44 per cent of the white vote, Mr Obama also won a larger share of the whites than any Democrat since President Johnson, whose 1964 election preceded his alleged “betrayal” of the southern cause. And, of course, Mr Obama is black.“Do not understate the significance of this,” adds Mr Rosenberg. “This is an epoch-making election.”
People will make much of the fact that African-Americans turned out in record numbers and voted overwhelmingly for Mr Obama. In 2004, blacks formed 11 per cent of the turnout and voted 85 per cent in favour of John Kerry. This week, they made up 13 per cent of the electorate and voted 96 per cent in favour of Mr Obama.
Even more significant was the surge in Hispanic support for the Democratic party in tandem with a strong growth in the Latino share of the registered electorate. Hispanics voted almost two-thirds Democratic. In New Mexico, their share of the electorate has increased from 31 to 41 per cent in the past few years. In Colorado, it has doubled to 17 per cent.
But the most significant Latino pattern was seen in Florida, the largest swing state, where Hispanic loyalties almost precisely re- versed from 2004. Mr Obama won 57 per cent of the Hispanic vote in Florida, including a majority of second- generation Cubans – once among the most loyal Republican ethnic groups.
In 2004, President George W. Bush won 55 per cent of the state’s Hispanic vote. The new shift, driven by the Republican party’s increasing resort to anti-immigrant sentiment in the past few years, has been compared by some with the party’s visceral opposition to further Roman Catholic immigration in the 1920s.
By shutting out what were then the country’s fastest-growing ethnic groups, the Republicans helped to pave the way for a generation of Democratic dominance. The party appears to have repeated that colossal mistake with Hispanic voters.Finally, and perhaps least noticed, Mr Obama won a clear majority of voters earning more than $200,000 (€154,000, £124,000) – the first time a Democrat has achieved this, and in spite of the fact that he promises to raise taxes on anyone earning more than $200,000 while cutting taxes for every other income group.
Analysts will pore over what was behind this puzzling statistic. But it might be guessed that the richest and most successful Americans are also the most likely to be familiar with the rest of the world’s point of view. They, more than any other income group, understand the damage the US brand image has suffered over the past eight years.
