Could Someone Explain Our "Southern Strategy"..............again??

Some may call it a strategy---I call it "the handwriting on the wall". Come on, did you really think we were going to pull out Kentucy and Mississippi? Do you think we will magically claim Lousianna in a few days?? Did Bob Graham drop out of his senate race because this time he was concerned about being re-elected and/or knows how in the minority the Dems will be after '04?? Are reports true that Edwards "put it all on the line" basically because his seat was by no means a 'certain' re-elect?? We have empty seats coming up throuhout the south---do you honestly think that we can "pull it out" and "retain those seats" and "have some great possibilities", blah, blah, blah???

The US Senate is going to be gutted of Dems come '04 because of the South. The House is hopeless....Texas took care of that. Let us not be a stupid Bush who keeps throwing soldiers to their deaths following a game plan that cannot be won. The DNC needs to regroup and rethink. These defeats (like 2002 and like CA's love fest with Arnold)come after we know Bush lied about a war, after we see Bush cronies sucking down unbid contracts in Iraq, after the outing of the CIA agent, after sitting on 9/11 reports, after,after,after.....and after our 9 member baseball team has been hitting balls at Bush left and right (but apparently not scoring any runs). Are we expecting Christ to deliver us in '04 in the South??? He'd be stoned to death because he's too liberal!! And then we have good Dems like Zel Miller who make you just want to go out and vote Dem!!!

I'm not saying this to be nasty and get people's knickers in a knot. I know we've been down this road before here---but now I know for sure that the road goes nowhere and keeps looping in circles. We need to put every dime and every ounce of energy in every state that is not "southern" because we simply cannot afford to waste what little we have there. It will be those other states that will supply us a Dem president and a Dem Congress if there ever is going to be one...it is not going to come from the south. They have just spoken loud and clear: BUSH ALL THE WAY--WE DON'T CARE WHAT HE HAS DONE OR WILL DO. There are not going to be any "blue-light" specials glowing on the election map in the south in '04. At best races will be razor close but Bush's personal appearances and loot will help the GOP over the top. We may select a couple races that maybe could be saved; but we cannot go throwing money we don't have after hopelessness.

is to spend out time and money elsewhere

Since I'm irrelevant politically and all, I might as well make myself useful.

That's the way it looks after yesterday.

I suspect in a room somewhere (several actually), they are deciding what to do on this issue. Where to put the money, where to send the candidate(s). But writing off one section of the country isn't, in my mind, a good idea.

A couple of months ago there was a study that would suggest you are correct--this election, unlike many, will be won by the bases rather than by the undecided voters. I don't know if the landscape has changed since then, but if that study still holds, well, you'd be right. We need to focus on getting our base motivated, and that means focusing in the north east and the pacific, along with some bits of the great lakes states.

But if that theory is wrong, well, personally I'd pick a few states where our candidate has a fighting chance and sink some effort there. Florida for example. At any rate as an individual living in the south, (Florida, actually) I will probably spend next year trying to get my state to swing the democratic way.

Bryant
Check it out --> http://politicalcomment.blogspot.com

and sometimes it has been said it is not really "southern" BUT there is this one itty, bitty piece of scum down there that could work miracles for the GOP (wink, wink...you know what I mean, brother??). Jeb boy will never allow anything but a GOP win for his brother and for his '08 ambitions---if he has to personally have all Dems arrested, hung or not allowed to vote!!! He's the one that stands big in the way of any Dem victories in the big races in Florida. Mafia vs. Old People usually doesn't end up nice.

Class Warfare.

The GOP gains in the South have been almost entirely accomplished through the skillful use of wedge issues, in particular race.

We need to turn the firehouse back on the GOP, on the issue of economics.

The lingering divisions of race need to be replace with the common issue of working class economics. Period.

It's the only way to get around the lingering racial divisions.

Also, we need to have a gun policy that doesn't frighten southerners. I liked Dean's position statement after Kerry took off on him over the NRA on Rock The Vote. I couldn't have written a better response myself.

We also need to figure out what to do about religious issues. I am passionately opposed to the concept of A Christian Nation, wish to see 10 Commmandment monuments and the religious references in the Pedge done away with.

This is, however, a monumentally unpopular idea in the South. Democratic Candidates should stay away from it, and we should only pursue it through the courts. Don't expect any (electable) candidate to stick up for these issues.

I highly doubt that anyone was counting on Miss and KY to win 04.

However, PA and VA were in play, and they are trending in the right direction even when the Republicans are doing OK in KY and Miss.

lying right in front of these people...and they didn't care. Candidates pointed this out to them...they didn't care. And so on regarding all the issues--all the issues we thought would start brining people to us. They love da' Bush boy and they are gonna' stand by their good, moral president. We need to revisit his past and the past of his family and show them how 'moral' this goon really is. They just don't get it.

you make it a personal issue instead of a government issue.

You get local dems to get more involved with their churchs and have them elbow out some of the big mouth republicans who have been controlling their ministers...In fact wouldn't it be great to have more Democratic ministers...seems like a more appropriate field for Dems than for Republicans who talk the bible but don't walk it.

I agree though...Class Warfare is the weapon. Personally I think the South has suffered greatly under conservative ideals. Right-to-work for less... Poor healthcare for the poor and their children, Walmarts knocking out downtown america, poor public schools..etc

Now I am not knocking the South but I will have to honestly tell you that my husband and I have been fighting a move to the South because of the lack of services, the poor treatment of even white collar employees and mis-managed schools in the area where my husband's company is located.

Ignore it.

is a mathematically feasible option. It has 147 of the 270 electoral college voted needed to win.

Ignore it, and we'd have to get all the states that went for Gore (West Coast, Upper Midwest, and North East, largely) then pick off one of these from the Bush column:

IN, OH, WV, VA, MO, or NH.

Seems doeable, but there is little margin for error. Fail to hold all the Gore states, and the whole strategy is jeopardized.

so I don't know why you list VA as a choice.

If the next election comes down to the same states as the last, Bush will be ahead by 18 electoral votes, not 4.

border states....


With the 2000 reapportionment Bush would have won by eighteen electoral votes not four....

I'd like to see a winning congressional scenario without the south and border states....


The laws of political mathematics are immutable...

Gore states + NV + CO + OH - (border states)MD,WV = 284 Electoral votes.


Also NH,NV and CO could be tweaked at still result in a win. Ohio is the lynchpin in a northern strategy

(On Edit)

Victory is possible without OH in case of Gore states + NH,CO and NV going blue(278) unless you still maintain that MD is a border state of the South.

and it allows * and the R's to focus all their energy on a handful of states....

It is possible but it's the Electoral College equivalent of the inside straight flush in cards or the Hail Mary in football....


Same thing with controlling the House and Senate......

IA,MI,OR or NM?

Obviously electoral victory assumes certain optimistic conditions.

automatically holds onto to Gore's base....

I'd have to look again at 00 and 02 election results to make further predictions...

I just think it's imposssible to be a majority party without being competitive in the fastest growing and most populous area of the nation....

I sure hope the DNC is not going to pursue the inside straight flush strategy... NC, SC, GA, and FL have open Senate seats... If someone put a gun in my ear and said my life depended on being right I'd say the R's have a better chance of a sweep in those states than the Dems...


I can very easily see the Dems down to forty four or forty five seats in the Senate not even able to mount successful filibusters.....

That's when the R's swamp the nation with reactionary legislation and judges.... We'll go back to the 90's , the 1890's...

God save the USA

The reason we had such a razor thin margin in the election (leading to the supreme court selection) in the last presidential election was that the Democratic party concentrated their efforts in a few stronghold areas. To avoid a repeat we need to have as strong a showing as possible everywhere.

I don't believe we can afford to focus on certain areas of the nationunless we can be assured that we will get enough of the vote (both popular and electoral college) to ensure that the issue will not end up in the hands of some other organization to be decided. Some people were hiring lawyers and getting ready to go to court and challenge the California governors race outcome before the election was held. After it was over, they saw the margin and realized they could not do so. We need to fight for a margin large enough that it frightens off those who might otherwise try to steal the election. This means fighting for every vote, everywhere.

Which is more than we can say for New York and some other places in the NE...

want the Dems to be, and that's not the party most of the rest of the country wants. Time to put the South on ignore, and slap them with a win to prove the point. When we do win, it'll be time for paybacks for all of the abuse they've given the nation, and our party, in recent years, particularly focusing on the rampant corruption among Southern Republicans.

How do you forge a winning electoral college scenario without the south?


And how do you regain the Senate and House without the South?

reflect the Southerners in general--He represents the Elite unfortunatley. They are happjy to maintaine their caste system.
The majority of southerners would not agree with him.

Let's look at the south and what's happening there. They are under republican control and thus republicans are responsible for what is happening in those states. Unemployment is sky high and manufacturing jobs are going overseas. North Carolina used to have a huge furniture empire that is being destroyed because of global trade along with other key manufacturing sectors. HealthSouth, which is the largest employers in Bham, Al is teering on the brink of destruction due to Corp. fraud. I believe that Rethuglicans will destroy themselves in the south just give them time. In the meanwhile we need to spend our money where people are open to our values. I just hope the poor in the southern states get fed up and act as a galvanizing force for change.

If you have a show of hands of the group here that says to dump the southern states, do you think you have the power to decide where campaign money is going to be spent? Once you take your straw poll, are you the person in charge of all the candidates' money and reallocate it? Unless somebody here is a campaign manager it is just a lot of whistling in the wind in an effort to offend southerners and try to do a little "ethnic cleansing".

We ought to:

• Publicly, loudly eject all of the Dixiecrats.
  Tell 'em all to go to Zell!
  
  
• Repudiate all racism, Confederate treason, and the SYMBOLS
  THEREOF!
  
  
• Come out firmly for National Health Care for all.
  
  
• Declare that yes, Virginia, there is CLASS WARFARE and the
  elephant in the room that no one will speak of is that the Republicans
  are using it against all the rest of us, Northern, Southern, East and
  West.
  
  
• Repudiate religious fundamentalism and all the anti-abortion,
  anti-gay violence it breeds.
  
  
• Promote equal rights for all, no matter the race, gender, religion,
  sexual orientation, rich/poor, or any other way the Republicans have
  figured out to divide in the past.
  
  
• Repudiate PermaWar as simply a tactic to move massive amounts of
  your tax dollars to private industries and their shareholders while
  ensuring that people worldwide hate us and wish us dead.
  
  
• Embrace the peace process everywhere in the world, even if it
  means telling a few of our "allies" to "Knock it off!".
  
  
• Firmly embrace the need to support our cities.
  
  
• Firmly embrace the need to reduce our oil dependence.
  
  

Maybe the Democrats could win by being real Democrats again?
And shedding this "appease the Dixiecrats" strategy would be a big
step in that transformation.

Atlant

and permitted the Fundamentalists to gain what power they have.
While I can empathize with your list--the majority of southerners do not hold these hell fire and brinstone attitudes. We ceded to the Republicans the Fundamentalist are the screechy wheel that gets the oil. We have consistently been losing control in house and senate as we more and more abandandoened the South. Look at the trun ojut in the states where Republicans wo yesterday. Dems do not even have enough hope to vote anymore. No one cares about them and are too timid to stand up and fight for them. The Republicans have used the same tactics in the West it worked so well in the south. Until we as a party stand up fight for every region of the country we will continue to become irrelevant.

It was amazing to listen to the call-ins re whether Dean should apologize for his comments on flag et. The overwhelming number of
calls esp from south defended Dean and said he should not apologize.
They believed he was reaching ojut to them. This shows the hunger and yearning for Democrats to go after the South instead of always
rolling over for the Republicans.C_Span Washington Journal)

and permitted the Fundamentalists to gain what power they have.
While I can empathize with your list--the majority of southerners do not hold these hell fire and brinstone attitudes. We ceded to the Republicans the Fundamentalist are the screechy wheel that gets the oil. We have consistently been losing control in house and senate as we more and more abandandoened the South. Look at the trun ojut in the states where Republicans wo yesterday. Dems do not even have enough hope to vote anymore. No one cares about them and are too timid to stand up and fight for them. The Republicans have used the same tactics in the West it worked so well in the south. Until we as a party stand up fight for every region of the country we will continue to become irrelevant.

It was amazing to listen to the call-ins re whether Dean should apologize for his comments on flag et. The overwhelming number of
calls esp from south defended Dean and said he should not apologize.
They believed he was reaching ojut to them. This shows the hunger and yearning for Democrats to go after the South instead of always
rolling over for the Republicans.C_Span Washington Journal)

and permitted the Fundamentalists to gain what power they have.
While I can empathize with your list--the majority of southerners do not hold these hell fire and brinstone attitudes. We ceded to the Republicans the Fundamentalist are the screechy wheel that gets the oil. We have consistently been losing control in house and senate as we more and more abandandoened the South. Look at the trun ojut in the states where Republicans wo yesterday. Dems do not even have enough hope to vote anymore. No one cares about them and are too timid to stand up and fight for them. The Republicans have used the same tactics in the West it worked so well in the south. Until we as a party stand up fight for every region of the country we will continue to become irrelevant.

It was amazing to listen to the call-ins re whether Dean should apologize for his comments on flag et. The overwhelming number of
calls esp from south defended Dean and said he should not apologize.
They believed he was reaching ojut to them. This shows the hunger and yearning for Democrats to go after the South instead of always
rolling over for the Republicans.C_Span Washington Journal)

Sounds damn good! The dems might be surprised to see a few southern states back in their column again by going this route. FA, NC, and LA come to mind.

couple of days, then Bush begins the race with app. 60% of the electoral votes needed to win and can spend all of his $200,000,000 in "our" states.

Not such a great strategy.

NT

You say we let the fundies take over. Okay. So, should we go down there and try to be more fundamental, more hatefilled, more lilly white, more anti-abortion, more pro-gun and all that crap (as Zell might suggest) than these wingers???? Zell says we are too liberal....for christ's sake, when is the last time you saw a damn Dem being liberal in the last decade or so?? If this is too liberal for him, then should we campaign promising we will start an immediate war on all Muslims and promise to spend the national treasury on the Denfense Dept?? That's what I'm getting at here in my post. If we keep prostituting ourselves to this crap, we are writing off Dems in every other state of the union. Where do you finally draw the line and say "I tried to bring you to the light; you don't want to come; live in your darkness---maby someday a brick will fall on your head and wake you up".

as diverse as any other region of the country. To lump every state in the South into one group and ignore them all ignores one of the principal rules of politics. "All politics is local."

If you look at voting trends on the ground in certain Southern states you will recognize that there are electoral votes from below the Mason-Dixon line to be had by the Dems. Mary Landrieu withstood a strong push by the Repubs to unseat her in 2002. The recent election in LA had Dems winning up and down the ticket and the Dem candidates for govenor got over 56% of the votes. In Arkansas, a Dem beat a Republican incumbent to take the U.S. Senate seat. Both of the states have been trending Democratic for the past few years. Both states went for Clinton in his two elections. Both states merit significant efforts to put them in the Dem column for 2004.

Also North Carolina is demographicallytrending Democrat and deserves a strong push. Even if we do not win there in 2004, solid efforts to do so will lay the groundwork for future victories. Similarly, South Carolina has been devastated by the loss of jobs overseas. It is a state that is ripe to accept a strong job protection platform.

Florida is obviously and important state to win and is imminently winnable. Just look at 2000.

I strongly disagree with anyone who thinks we should just write off the South. It is a recipe for disaster and ignores the reality of the diversity of the South in favor of sweeping generalizations.

business is all about gratifying some DUers' hatred for the South and has little or nothing to do with actual political strategizing.

(I got it right in the body of my reply but had to go back
and edit it into the Subject: of my reply.)

Atlant

Arkansas, Louisiana, and Tennessee went for Clinton both times. Georgia went for Clinton in 92 and for Carter both times. Florida went for Clinton in 96 and Gore in 2000. These are all legitimate battleground states, especially Florida.

On the other hand, I would agree that the Democrats shouldn't spend any presidential money in the political toxic waste dump I call home (Texas).