I needed some balance.

well said.

There no reason to write off any part of the country - 50 state strategies have to be exactly that: 50 states.

I'm actually kind of surprised to find Jerome moving toward a moral argument here, given what a good strategist he is.  These are two different lines of thought.  I think the argument for not targeting the South at the present time is that, despite the efforts of progressives in the South, we're not likely to win there soon.  Why not target the states where we do?

That said, the moral argument is compelling, except for one flaw.  If contesting the South means that we have to trim our sails on our values in order to win votes, it's really not worth it.  When we move inexorably toward a more conservative Democratic Caucus because we feel we have to accomodate more Bubbas (and no, I'm not arguing that we did that this past Tuesday, unlike the MSM), we run the risk of not having enough votes in Congress for the values that make us a worthwhile party.  

Case in point--there was a lot of excitement in the blogosphere about Brad Carson's Senate campaign in 2004.  But Carson was vehemently opposed to strong environmental protection and bashed EPA on his congressional website.  If we need a Senate seat so desperately that we're willing to lose on issues as vital as the environment, what is it we really stand for?

As it stands now, I'd be in favor of putting forth a strong set of populist, progressive values and asking the South to join the rest of the country in supporting us.  But if it means we become the wishy-washy party on civil rights, the environment, freedom of speech and civil liberties just to win the support of 45% of white males, it's not worth it.  There are other ways to a majority.

Look at the campaign that Ford had to run in order to be even competitive down in TN? Is the point of the book (as you say) to argue that we shouldn't run down South, or, is it more accurate to say that the point of the book is to have a post Southern strategy for the Democrats?

Unlike your brief visit to the South, I grew up there. I've had these conversations with Southerners, and non Southerners a like. The rest of the country does not need to be stuck in the mindset of Southern conservatism, and that's where I see the real issues of strategy breaking with the past.

In a post Southern strategy, one is not giving up on the 50 state strategy or the South, but one is not having to depend on races such as the one that Harold Ford had to run for whatever reason Harold Ford had to run it either. There is a big difference between saying that the South is one among equal versus what has presently been the situation for 150 years now: the South playing the role of kingmaker of which party is dominant in national politics.

The result of this dominance has been a cultural conservatism that has continued to include racism (in the form that I imagine Ford had to address), but also in newer variants such as homophobia which he did not. It allows the South to define what conservatism is, and is not, versus other  forms of conservatism such as those out West which may actually help move the pendulum further to the left (by talking cultural conservatism off the table).

I think you intend to argue one thing- that the South shouldn't be ignored- but you actually are giving aid and comfort to another idea- that the South should be dominant. The extent to which the South can be moved to a progressive bent is the extent to which it is part of the 50 state idea. In other words, building for the future (running candidates, supplying state coordinators etc) is the best one can expect of the South, but depending on it for present electoral success or cowtowing to its regional conservatism shouldn't be because it hurts us elsewhere over the long term of not being dependent on the South.

It's the dependence that we need to break, not our connections to the South.

A liberal/conservative margin is meaningless if it isn't pro-rated with independents. If I wanted to inflate Ford, I would start by talking about how few self-identifying liberals are in TN. That is what is reflected in this poll. Even worse, there will probably be fewer in the future thanks to Ford.

Some losses are good losses because the ball is moved down the field. Not so here, it was just a loss.

And the DC crowd buying into the DLC approach of focusing on TN was wrong-headed, in retrospect the early attention would have been better invested in AZ (where it would have helped in the long term also).

Conservative self identifiers outnumber liberals 40-25%, though the country is split 50-50 on democrats and republicans. A LARGE percentage of democratic voters simply don't regard themselves as "liberal" because the word has an image problem. Case in point, Kerry's 48-51 loss would be a +23 on your scale, where he gets 48% of the vote in a nation where only 25% consider themselves liberal. get it? This is a relatively useless measure.

I agree 100% that it's both morally wrong and strategically mistaken to mirror the GOP's regional warfare mindset & strategy by striking back at the South.  In fact, the main problem with American politics is that we've never done something comparable to South Africa's reconciliation process.  That's what's enabled the GOP elite to play upon and cultivate white resentment as a basis for political power lo these many years.

However, at the same time, it's quite obvious that the GOP's extremism is hurting it most in the Northeast, followed by the Midwest, then the West.  Making specific efforts in these regions is a strategy that's much more likely to have immediate payoffs than focusing primarily on the South.  Furthermore our recent success in Missouri and Virginia points to better pickings in the Border States vs. the Deep South.

All this suggests to me a strategy that hinges on isolating the GOP regionally, and doing so in a way that splits their Southern base, between those who are happy wallowing in their provincialism, vs. those who are proud of their heritage, but prouder still of being Americans, and having a future as well as a past.  It should be recognized that Gingrich presented himself as an embodiment of the "New South"--precisely the second part of this split--which is precisely what we should aim to take away from the GOP.  We do it by stressing opportunity-developing initiatives, such as stem cell research, as well as the simple political reality that as we become more dominant in the rest of the country, voting Republican simply cuts them off from opportunity and advancement.

We don't need to threaten them.  In fact, we shouldn't.  We should be leading the way to restore New Orleans, for example.  But we should also make it clear that we see the way forward in terms of broad, up-from-the-bottom Democratic initiatives, not narrow, crony capitalist "trickle-down-if-your-lucky" GOP initiatives.  Broadband for all has a role in this, for example, just as rural electrification and the TVA did during the heyday of the New Deal.

My father's side of the family is your typical "ambitious redneck" track...immigration to North Carolina in the 1750s, a big chunk of us in western North Carolina by the American Revolution, then some of us moving to the Smokies in Tennessee, then a jump over to southern Illinois just as the Old Northwestern Territory became the various state territories of the Lower Midwest, then another jump to the steel mills of Gary in the late 1920's and early 1930s, and finally the speading out of that portion of the family across the country as the steel mills began to die out.

I still have relatives in the South, and I tend to buy into bruh21's argument.  Don't ignore the South, don't denigrate them, but build and be patient, because it's going to be a long slog before the fruits of such labors come to pass.

You have to realize that, while Northern Virginia became bluer, reinforced by folks working one way or another via the DC job cluster, a lot of Midwestern whites, starting in the mid-1970s, moved to the south and southwest, partially in response to job losses, but also due to crumbling cities in the Lower Midwest and Northeast and blaming the situation they were running away from on inefficient local government, race, or some combination of both.  Georgia's turning red is in effect a result of a second wave of this nature, because there are a lot of jobs there nowadays, and it just so happens that whites are the dominant groups coming in (though Hispanics are definitely on the path towards becoming a force there in due course). This is an area that is getting its values reinforced by disaffected whites in California nowadays as much as by African-Americans from the Midwest and Hispanics both from Florida and via immigration.

I only buy into blogswarm's argument that Arizona's Senate race needed resources that went to Tennessee and Ford only if you can convince me that Pederson's race was complimented by an effective grassroots campaign, and to the best of my knowledge, it wasn't.  However, had it been, given the exodus of Californians over the last decade to Arizona, then I would have bought into it.

Left-wing populism will sell in the South and Southwest, but it will take time and patience.  And that means not looking to the South as our all-in-one savior towards winning national elections, which DLC'ers and such (and not, usually, anyone on this site) tend to emphasize.  (And I consider Florida it's own little world, for what it's worth, and not exactly part of the South.)

That's the dependence I worry about.  And that won't help us.  But allocating resources to winning at the local and county level will eventually give us what we need to make gains in the South at larger levels over time.

I don't think the entire south can be treated the same way. But I see the party with more potential in the southwest and mountain states if we start incorporating some of the better libertarian ideas and communicating the environmental message in a way that resonates more with people in that area.

I live in GA. Georgia is a lost cause in the next four years. The only way we can win Georgia is through personality politics where some charismatic Democrat can win over the independents here.  Even the northerners who move down here seem to vote republican in big numbers.

I do think FL can be easily salvaged if we increase turnout among Democratic friendly demographics.

Please note -- those other Dem Senate candidates won; Ford lost. Why? Because, as Schaller argues, white supremacy is deeply embedded in Southern identity. That isn't going to work in the brown America we will have in 2050, regardless of ANYTHING either party decides to do.

Dems should ride the demographic wave to victory for a generation by prioritizing whatever policies and postures will bring those arriving browner voters into the existing coalition. We can forget the South til it comes around to modernity. We certainly can't let it set the agenda for a time which is passing it by.

No, don't abandon Dems stranded in the South -- but we can't try to help them survive at the expense of our majority which is what letting the South set the agenda amounts to.

I didn't argue that we should abandon the South.  I'm not just picking on Ford.  And using ideology as a benchmark is ridiculous; by your measure John Kerry was a fantastic candidate for Tennessee, which we know he wasn't.

The problem with writing things off is that nothing good comes from it.  But I would say running people like Ford is writing the south off.

Ford was obviously a cynical politician who would do anything for a vote and he lost.  Webb wasn't and he won.

Speaking as someone who has never voted for a democrat that won(I live in SC) I have to say that the problem is a lack of opitmism.

Interesting choice of words, that. Denigrate means to paint someone or something as black (meaning negative), and thus comes from the same root as nigger, which of course associates black (skin in this case) with a negative value.

Two points I'd like to make:

First, the racism which we associate with the South, and which lost the South for the Democrats as Johnson predicted when the Democrats made themselves the party of equality, is clearly not confined to the South. To one extent or another we are all racists. For just one example, people belonging to oppressed groups often have "internalized oppression" as a result of which they think they are not as good as their oppressors. Racism is only one aspect of the Conservative world-view that people should stay in their place, since society works best that way. Although there is a core of truth to this, and it has wide acceptance in many strata of our society, as a way of running a society it is a failed ideology. In Bush and the Conservatives (neo- and otherwise) in the Administration, Congress, and the Judiciary, the Conservatives got far closer to getting everything they wanted than they ever have in our country. It was such an obvious, colossal failure that it was obvious to many "swing voters", i.e. people whose philosophy is some semi-formed mix of liberal and conservative, and also even to a smaller, but significant number of conservatives. To be sure, a significant part of the vote was against the incumbants rather than for the candidates, and many of the democratic candidates had some conservative views, but it was clearly a movement towards the left. If, as so many pundits are saying, it was a movement towards the center, we would see many of the candidates on the left being defeated by more centrist candidates, and we didn't see much of this.

Now, the liberal point of view, which is probably the dominant one in this country, is also the main alternative to the conservative one. (For simplicity I am painting these as twe views, while of course each is a complex constellation of different views which have many elements in common). The word liberal has been so effectively painted black by the conservative movement, that many of those voters would be horrified to be told they voted for a more liberal candidate, but that's what they did. It is precisely the conservatives who have the most to gain by moving over to more liberal views. Conservatism is not good for anyone. Those very few at the top of the social ladder may get some short-term gains, but that's about it. If in fact there are more conservatives in the south, then they are the ones who would have the most to gain.

And this brings me to my second point. In looking at the full-page chart in the New York Times showing the extent of swings in each district, I was struck by the fact that the largest swings were in the most Republican districts, many of which were in the South. The South is where the Dems picked up their biggest victories in popular opinion, in terms of increase in Democratic votes, even though few of the Democrats won in those districts. Ford is in no way an isolated case. Although most of the Democratic candidates, like Ford, ended up losing, they picked up more votes over the 2006 election than the blue places in red district after red district.

Now, I don't know how we turn this into a true electoral advantage. But a start would be to encourage some of the reforms which those living on the coasts have long had and which the South has largely lacked. Again, I don't know what they all are. Rights for gays, pregnant girls, and immigrants might be what Northeasterners think is needed, but things like better schools and health care and media reform would be less controversial and have a greater long-term effect. It is not an accident that colleges are a prime target for conservatives. As Stephen Colbert says, truth has a well-known liberal bias, and colleges encourage people to think for themselves, a liberal value. Heck, I bet even raising the minimum wage could have a long-term effect on people's viewpoints. Unfortunately all this will take time, but we need to get started with whatever we can do in the next two years.

Since Ford's supporters think Ford's conduct was essential(I agree to some extent but not to the degree Ford went), I propose why not compromise on another ideal and promote WHITE candidates in TN so they wont fall prety to the dirty ad put out by the repubs.

Oh no? Not acceptable? Why not? I thought some of the pragmatists feel winning is the only thing.

Now, you can understand how we feel about excessive compromise versus reasonable compromise.

I read Schaller's book and in it he says something that I think relates to what many of the conversations above.  He claims that if anyone can explain why 2 sets of people, who shop at the same stores, kids go to the same schools, work in the same area, go to the same evangelical churches(even though their denomination is different), but vote so completely different where one group votes 90% democrat and the other votes 80% republican, without using race as an explanation, he would through out his entire premise of a non-southern strategy.

I think a 50 state strategy is about infrastructure such as calling lists, volunteers, organizers.
I think the non-southern strategy is about message.  Why we're progressives, why we're liberals.  A post southern strategy means that we do not compromise our message.  It doesn't mean that we can't invest in the South for some occasional surprise pickups or to concentrate on state legislators.

As for morality, well, we can't do anything for poor people (black or white) if we don't have a majority in congress.  Why would we wait 30 years for the South to come around, instead of consolidating in the North, Midwest, and expanding in the Mountain and South West where our message will not be interfered with by race.  

For the first time since the New Deal, the majority party in Congress is not the majority party in the South.  That is VERY significant.

We should fight for every seat in every election at every level anywhere in the US and we obviously shouldn't abandon the South.  But, when it comes to Presidential elections, I hope the idea that we need someone that will "run well in the South" is completely dead.  Based on shifts away from Republicans and towards Democrats in other areas of the country, a Democratic candidate can loose most states in the South and still win the Presidential election.  If Kerry had won Ohio, he would have won the Presidency with Maryland as his only Southern victory.  The same would have been true for Gore, if he had won New Hampshire.  

The last President to win election without winning one Southern state was Republican Benjamin Harrison in 1888. Although Democrat Grover Cleveland won the popular vote, he lost the electoral college.  

Hermanos, the South is way Red, and still racist, as evidenced by the "turn" when the RNC ran that sleazy ad with the white puta winking at Harold Ford.  Spend some small money there, building, sure -- especially among non-Cubano Latinos, who should be part of the Dems natural constituency.  Target competitive CDs.  As for the rest -- let the economy lag, let Katrinaitis sink in even more so than it has, let the GOP get its weak candidate from the crackers.  Let the South catch up to us, man, when it gets wise.

Listen, don't forget that the war of ideas borders the world of ethics and ideals and this post here is entirely right.

The south doesn't deserve to be mis-led. No american does. Whether or not ford was a social conservative he'd have done a darn better job than the republican.

Please lets not forget that there is a huge congressional scandal brewing for the GOP

http://www.cnn.com/2006/POLITICS/11/15/l obbyist.probe.ap/index.html

This article above outlines a bit of what Abramoff was up to. The Dept. of Justice things Abramoff is the key to a huge scandal.

If the Democrats clean house and finish the job, we can be guaranteed

someone once told me the art of politics is to know what people want, and to know what they will settle for

Americans threw the bastards out! They will only settle for a clean house!!

Ford did ok.