Much of Ohio is like a Southern state, politically speaking.  

Most of the GOP's House seats and Senate seats come from outside the South.  Counting West Virginia and Kentucky account for 83 of 203 House seats and 19 of 49 Senate seats.  This may be a case, however, of southern control rather than a simple regional party.

Correction: "... and much more faux religious".

I know. I live in the deep south. The religious right here nearly elected David Duke governor and to the US congress.

TBoy

Ohio is where the NE, the Midwest & the South come together. Parts of Southern Ohio do elect Dems (like the new Governor, who was a Congressman from the Southern part). It's always been a swing state that has tilted more GOP than Dem.

Indiana is a much more Southern State than Ohio, yet moderates of both parties have done well state wide until recently.

All of the classic Midwestern swing states: Illinois, Michigan, & Ohio have southern populations (many Southern Whites moved North to wiork the auto plants), as well as classic old-line GOP types (farmers, small town businessmen). Pennsylvania is another swing state, with some similiarities to Ohio, IL, & MI.

I hope they stick with the theory they are not conservative enough.

At the same time as the Democrats are attempting to reinvigorate their party all across the country through the 50-state strategy, the Republicans are increasingly looking Southward to shore up support. For many Republicans, in fact, the lesson learned November 7 was not that American voters had rejected the extreme conservative agenda of the GOP but rather that the Republican Party was not conservative enough, bending on issues like spending and immigration.

In "The Rightwing Group Slander Of Liberals Refuted--Part 3", (further elaborated in later posts in the series), I showed the sharp differences in party/ideological shifts in alignment in the White South vs. the rest of the country.  The big picture money charts on this point are as follows:

Just look at the next-to-last row in each chart.  Self-identified conservative Republicans actually peaked during the Reagan-Bush era outside the White South, while their growth actually accellerated oh-so-slightly inside the White South.

What we saw in the last election is perfectly consistent with what these charts reveal.  As for the inflexibility involved, my later posts in this series add the dimension of church attendance to the mix.  Once you've started mixing religion and politics, it's very hard to put that genie back in the bottle.

Here's one more chart that underscores what's going on inside the GOP.  Contrast it with all their incessant attempts to paint the Dems with a liberal "San Francisco Agenda":

My post also breaks this down into White South and the rest of the country.  The percentage of conservatives within the GOP is almost identical in both groups for the third time-frame.  This is why the GOP message resonates so much better in the South than it does elsewhere.  And that, in turn, explains the GOP's White Southern flavor.

The GOP hard base of 23.6% in the South is not too much to overcome in elections when you have good Democratic candidates.

One thing that stands out about the South: voters there seem to have a low tolerance for mavericks, populists, and reformers.  This isn't necessarily a left vs right thing.  The South as a region has always given the lowest vote percentages in the nation to maverick candidates whether from the left, center, or right.  Ross Perot in 1992 and 96, John Anderson in 1980, Ralph Nader and Pat Buchanan in 2000, Buchanan in the 92 and 96 Republican primaries, Howard Dean in the 2004 primaries, Jerry Brown in the 1992 primaries, Eugene McCarthy in 1976.  The prevailing attitude in the South seems to be don't rock the boat.

The one exception of course were the pro-segregation "Dixiecrat" splinter campaigns of Thurmond, Byrd and Wallace.  But even this is the exception that proves the rule; these were perceived as the "don't rock the boat" candidates who wanted to keep things as they were.

Why is the South this way?  Possibly this: the South did at one time, namely in the 1860s, pay attention to people with grandiose ideas promising a glorious future if they would just embrace radical change, namely secession from the union.  It blew up directly in their faces.  The South has been a "burned over zone" ever since, wary of anyone with big ideas perceived as rocking the boat.  There have been localized exceptions: West Virginia embraced labor unions when the rest of the South shunned them; Louisiana sent Huey Long to the Senate.  But those two states are unique cases owing to Louisiana's lack of a common cultural heritage with the rest of the South, and West Virginia's status as a Rust Belt state and history vis-a-vis the Civil War.

Herein may lie the key to breaking the Republican logjam in the South.  But there are two different ways of looking at this.  One is to step back and give the Republicans just enough rope to hang themselves.  The Republicans are moving ever further rightward, already headed into radical-right territory that will no longer play in the South.  And as the Religious Right moves closer to embracing the theocracy of the Dominionist movement and the radical "contemporary" Christianity of corporate mega-churches, they will move beyond the pale of what even southern fundamentalists consider normative.  At the point that they move extreme right enough that they are perceived as radical right instead of conservative right, they lose the South.  The other way to look at this is maybe there's a need to break through the prevailing don't rock the boat attitudes in the South.  Ironically, by rocking the boat a little and being just enough of a maverick to show that it ain't so bad.  The South has to get over the Civil War sooner or later and realize that there's no reason to be afraid of positive change.  The Webb campaign has some lessons to pay attention to: running as a populist maverick who is nonetheless very much in touch with the cultural heritage of Virginia, while giving Allen just enough rope to hang himself.  It seems to have worked.  Can we pull off the same thing in Mississippi or South Carolina?  This may take some more work.  But it's possible.

I've thought for awhile that this suggests and obvious strategy. Drive the Republicans to being ever-more literally the regional party of the South.

That's not to say don't contest the South. Contest it! But focus primarily on non-Southern states. This has a two-fold effect: we get better Democrats from non-Southern areas more easily, for one. No Landrieus or Millers. It takes a great deal of resources and excellent campaigning for a Democrat to win in the South, and in exchange we get mediocrity. Still compete there, but focus mostly on their local and statewide races to build up a bench.

At the same time, we run a scorched-Earth campaign against Republicans in moderate and liberal areas. This depletes their national bench. All of the Republicans' weakest candidates this cycle are from the South (with the possible exception of Huckabee, and I think he might be overhyped), while all the strongest are from blue areas (New York) and trending blue areas (Arizona). If we eliminate them before they get national prominence, we never have to deal with them, and the Republican Party gets a regional mouthbreather for a Presidential candidate.

Key targets should be state legislatures and statewide offices while making sure to compete in every local election. They're the sprout whence governorships and senatorships grow. There's no good reason that the New York Senate or the California governor should be Republican.

I can't speak for the whole South, but as for South Carolina, having an (R) beside one's name is obviously a huge advantage, but it's certainly not insurmountable.  Any Democrat running statewide can bank on picking up about 40% of the vote outright, as was the case with every single one of the 8 constitutional offices that were contested in November.  That included an African-American female candidate for Secretary of State who raised only $50 outside of the money given to her by the state party.

Sure, Republicans have the advantage of being the majority party, but they also tend to run much smarter campaigns and kick Democrats all over the schoolyard in GOTV and base-mobilizing.  Democratic GOTV here is nonexistent.

as well as in Central pennsylvania

GOTV is non-existent in the South for good reason. Have you ever gone down those back roads my friend? Knock on those doors and get a shotgun in your face!

The reason no seats switched in Mississippi is that in the midterm years our only state and local elections are for judges.

I believe there were 3 special elections all retained by a candidate from the original party.

Next year we will see if we have success or if we lose seats.