Anyone who says give up on the South, look at the county by county map

I have poor computer skills, or just bad skills when it comes to trying to put graphics up on DU, but take a look at the county by county map (Please someone post it).

We at least WIN counties in the South. Lousiana, Mississippi, Georgia, Virigina, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas at least had some counties that voted for Kerry. There is a whole strip of counties in Alabama that we won.

Take a look at the Great Plains (Big 12 schools) states. We don't win a single county in some of those states. It's a desert of red. That area is lost for quite some time.

The Great Lakes (Big Ten schools) states are our hope. Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Ohio, Michigan, Indiana and Illinois generally favor us now, but we musn't forget about them. We should actually focus on them to start making headway in the states that surround them.

Feel free to update me on Southern politics. I'm no expert. I've lived in different parts of Illinois my whole life. The county by county map just doesn't support giving up on the South and focusing on the Great Plains.

I think with the right candidate we could win Virginia, Tennessee, Kentucky, Arkansas, Missouri, Florida, and Louisiana. And we have to return Minnesota to it's strong Democratic tilt, and I believe we are doing well in Michigan. We also have to keep Wisconsin more Democractic. We have to try to regain states like Kentucky and West Virginia. An interesting state is Montana, they have a Dem senator Max Baucus, and just elected a Democratic governor. Yes Kerry lost their by a ton but I wonder if something could be done there.

Who in America thinks that corporations should have more power? This could be an angle to run with.

and that should be the lesson here:

in a small part i helped beat an incumbent repub and get a democrat into congress. i signed up a number of locals to register to vote, and drove several neighbors to the polls on tuesday. our precinct delivered a couple of hundred more to the dem than the repub.

local activism in GOTV works, even here in rural georgia, it works.

If you try to get out the vote in the Great Plains, you get the GOP.

"While Kerry's voters came about evenly from all parts of the country, more than one-third of Bush's voters were Southerners."

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=694&ncid=703&e=2&u=/ap/20041106/ap_on_el_pr/two_views

It is interesting to read about Bush scaring every last gay hating bigot out of its hole to vote against Kerry. Even the fucking Amish!

I think it somewhat puts the lie to the "red tide" claim being put out and swallowed whole. (I also can't seem to figure out how to post graphics.)

http://www.princeton.edu/~rvdb/JAVA/election2004/

ALL you have to do is stop looking at us as if we are nuts simply because we like and care about our guns and can wrap your mind around the paradoxical thought that we are proud of our Confederate legacy AND ashamed of slavery (I admit that's one tough paradox, but there you are. We are a complicated people.)

For years, liberals have been striving down here in the South but we have been cut loose from the rest of you folks because you persist in looking down your nose at us as if we were animals in a Zoo. You are aghast that anyone would find a use for a gun, or want to think nobly about a war in which 300,000 of us died in.

We know slavery began down here - but how do you not accept slavery was financed up there? (There's enough blame to go around on that one.) For every Birmingham you want to cite, I can give you a Bensonhurst, N.J. STOP justifying your contempt for us by pretending that racial injustice only lives down here.

You don't have to approve of all we do; just stop singling us out. The sooner you realize that the South is more like the rural parts of your home state - and not an aberration full of barbarians fit only to be pointed and laughed at -- the sooner we can start rebuilding the liberal coaltion that FDR built and Nixon destroyed.

Whenever you sneer at a Southerner, you are in essence doing what Karl Rove and the rest of them want you to do: you separate yourself from allies in the South who can HELP YOU WIN ELECTIONS.

It's not rocket science: it's acceptance that people want to live they way they want to live. In other words, liberalism.

I don't know where you get your information, but your picture of how "liberals" look at Southerners as if they were in a zoo, but it is not true of me or the people I know.

For your information, I live in the country (the entire NE is not urban, you know) and the country people I know mostly own guns. Not one of them has ever had to give up his shotgun due to any gun controll legislation.

As for slavery, the liberals I know are fairly knowlegable about the history of the US, including slavery, and tend to view the Civil War through an economic lens.

I could go on but I won't. If you have your picture of the "liberal" bias against Southerners, probably not much I'd say would convince you otherwise.

I do, however, find it odd that you posted that diatribe in response to a map which I thought showed a far more nuanced picture of D/R support than the electoral college map.

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

easy to do when reading a thread. I have friends who slop the hogs and milk the cows btw, and lots of people consider those of us in Upstate NY hicks. So welcome to DU, brother.

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

that you will still be a damn yankee (albeit geographically misplaced)

Jed Clampett was not from West Virginia. He was from Bugtussle, Tennessee.

This information from a friend of mine who lives 'way down South.

I have to admit that as being a denizen of one of bluest parts of the blue states, that I have at times looked down my nose at the South even to the point of expressing that after what George W. and Tom Delay of Texas, Trent Lott of Mississippi, Newt Gingrich of Georgia, Bill Clinton of Arkansas, Al Gore and Robert Frist of Tennessee have done to this country--Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee must be looking up from hell and laughing their starred-and-barred asses off! I would be quite glad to spend the rest of my life never hearing another Southron twang voicing the agenda of the national political scene.(admittedly, Californians of late have been no great shakes either, okay, bad pun) I particularly had a grudge against Texas, wishing that after the Civil War if only we had re-admitted all of the secesh states EXCEPT Texas or that if only Santa Ana had just besieged the Alamo for six months and let the crazy bastards self-immolate like the feds did at Waco a century and a half later that all would be right with the world. I hate the Dallas Cowboys and everything they stand for and just about everything about Texas, frothed and foamed, I simply DESPISED Texas and Texans for being Texans and then --BANG It hit me.
I LOVE Steve Earle. I LOVE Jim Hightower. I LOVE Molly Ivins.
How can I hate Texans and Texas when if I can name at least three of them, there must be alot of great Americans sweltering under the Red heat of evangical corporate yahooism? (Fuck Nepal, FREE TEXAS!)
Then along came John Edwards and spoke about things I've longed to hear from a politician, and what can I say, I heard the word and the scales fell from my eyes and I put away the childish things of petty regional prejudices and became, once more, a believer in democracy and the Democratic Party!
Thanks Reb
Oh yeah, and Slavery? Let's never forget that when a foreigner saw Old Glory in the first eighty-five years of our existence, he saw the flag of slavery. Slavery was an AMERICAN thing.

the next Texas Governor

I am a liberal living here in the South just as generations of my family has for as far back as anyone can remember.

The problem lies more with Southerners still thinking they belong to a different country and having a strange inferiority complex. How much does the Civil War affect you on a daily basis, anyway? My great-great-great-great-great-greatgrandfather Jonathan Edwards fought for the South in Georgia, but it's just a historical fact, now. Not something I carry around.

I own guns, big deal. I don't care that other liberals don't like guns.

Sure I get tired of the south bashing, but I look at it more as blue states-red states rather than a north south thing. North Dakota is red as hell, but can hardly be thought of as the south. Ditto Utah, etc.

have stereotyped us. He couldn't court us because he couldn't do what it would take to win us over. Howard Dean was the ONLY candidate to breach the topic and you saw what the northern liberals did to him. The only positive thing to say about Zell Miller is that he also got it right; Rove is the only person who gave him the attention that he wanted, so (predictibly) he finds Repug spittle tasty and yummy. The whole party could learn something from this - but they won't.

"I don't belong to an organized policital party. I'm a Democrat" - Will Rogers

That isn't writing off the South. And Dean wasn't undone by Northern Liberals. I was living in Georgia at the time (I now live in Tennessee), and Dean's comment became a problem, infuratingly enough, when Southern Wingnut talk show hosts feigned offense at his reference to Rebel flags in pick up trucks, something they would have been thrilled to hear coming from Bush's divine lips.

I'm a Southerner myself (albiet raised by a Damn Yankee Ma), and I'll tell you that the reason Liberals have so much trouble here is not because of Northern Liberal prejudice against southerners, it's Southern prejudice against everybody else. I've had the opportunity to travel all across this country, and nowhere do I find the regional prejudice that I've grown up with down here. There is an attitude among many that if a candidate doesn't have the appropriate Southern accent and doesn't do "Southern" things, he is not a "real man," and is therefore not electable by them.

I don't mean to paint us Southerners with a broad brush; we're all individuals, just like people in any part of the country. However, there is a sizable minority down here that think the way I've just described, and it can't be blamed on John Kerry or Northern Liberals.

have for Zell Miller...

Parts of Virginia are in fact leaving the desert that Governor Warner talked about at the convetnion/

has been voting Dem in local elections. I expect it to vote Dem more in the future.

Although that's part because of the local GOTV effort, was tremendous enough to nearly sweep the at-large on the county commission and win the county for our Senate candidate too.

Why do you think Delay went to so much trouble and expense to redistrict Texas?

It was because the Texas Legislature was controlled by Democrats!!!!

But I suspect there are plenty of DUers willing to write off Texas.

its not anymore. Texas has been trending more Republican with each election.

Dems won't win the south, they don't have to. What we can do is pick off a few southern states as Clinton did. That is enough.

and if there weren't any chance of that, then Delay would not have felt the need to redistrict.

because he wanted to protect the Republicans majority in congress. The Texas legislature won't be going Dem again anytime soon.

The Texas legislature won't be going Dem again anytime soon.

Right, because he redistricted. Otherwise, the legislature might MORE dem.

the federal delegation. He didn't restrict the state legislature.

for the first time since 1972!

Kerry carried Travis County with 56% (Gore lost with 41%). Kerry almost carried Dallas County. And this happened even though the national campaign completely wrote the state off.

It probably has a big impact on your map, and gives a false impression of strength. Unfortunately, white people overwhelmingly vote Republican, and blacks do not represent more than 35% of the population in any state. The black vote gives us a base to work from, but we simply have to get white people voting Democratic.

I know you didn't intend it but pretty soon we'll start seeing threads in DU asking if the Dems should sell out African Americans to curry favor in red states (oh wait, they already did...carry on);-)

for Dems to win in the south, we need to win 90 percent of the African American vote and about 40 percent of the white vote. We aren't doing that right now.

That's key.

turned out in large numbers this year. We still need to do a better job winning white votes in certain southern states.

at all.

I live in the South. I wasn't born here, but I've lived here (Georgia) for 20 years now. You've just accused all white Southerners of being racists, and that's not true. Remember -- as just ONE example -- that GA Gov. Roy Barnes lost in 2002 (on the infamous Diebold machines, along with Max Cleland), putting a Repug in the Gov's seat for the FIRST TIME IN 134 years.

Your assessment is unflattering and unfair and based on stereotypes that don't necessarily hold true.

You've just accused all white Southerners of being racists, and that's not true.

I have no idea what you're talking about. It is a simple fact that the majority of whites nationwide vote Republican, and most of that goes on in the South. It's "racism" to point that out? Absurd. It's no more racist than when I implied another simple fact: the vast majority of blacks vote Democratic. Is that somehow a racist statement as well?

It's kind of remarkable to me that in a span of two years, Georgia has gone from a solidly dem stronghold, to one of the most Republican states in the country. Granted, Zell Miller didn't exactly help the situation.

but because there is NO ORGANIZED Democratic party in Georgia, there was never a protest and never has there been any effort to challenge the machines. If the Demos here ever GREW ANY BALLS they would be all over this. I've been trying to get the ("liberal") Atlanta newspapers to look at this for two years and gotten nothing from them.

all those beeeuuutiful bright blue counties in Mississippi and Alabama must be 80-90% African-American.

To win 60/40 in the South means the Pukes must be pulling around 80% of the white vote.

Which is pretty disgusting.

Geographically it shouldn't be but it's been a GOP stronghold for quite some time.

Indiana is very Republican and Ohio has been Republican in the past as well. After I posted, I thought about changing the sentence, but now it's too late to edit.