Is the Republican Party about to become even more rural- and Southern based?
This week, the Wall Street Journal and NBC released a poll that changed everybody’s understanding of what’s happening in this year’s 2010 midterm.
The dominant narrative has been that deep anger and unhappiness with the economy and the direction of the nation will fall squarely on the shoulders of Democrats, possibly bouncing them from them the lofty perch of their supermajority.
But this poll found something peculiar: The GOP’s “surge” in the polls over the last two years has been driven in large measure by a mega-surge in the South.
Here’s how MSNBC described it:
The GOP has a HUGE generic-ballot edge in the South (52%-31%), but it doesn’t lead anywhere else.
In the Northeast, Dems have a 55%-30% edge; in the Midwest, they lead 49%-38%; and in the West, it’s 44%-43%.
MSNBC fails to note that the Democrats’ margin in the Northeast is EVEN HUGER than the Republican advantage in the South.
But it is startling to note that the Democrats still maintain an 11% point lead even in the Midwest.
Now here’s where this gets interesting and complicated.
Most pundits think the GOP has a really decent shot at picking up at least 30 House seats, pushing them close to a narrow majority.
But only twelve of those races are in the South. (I’m including Florida and Texas in my mental map of the South.)
The other eighteen are in states where Democrats still enjoy at least some “generic ballot” advantage, though to the GOP’s favor, only three likely or possible pick-ups are in the Northeast.
What does all this mean? There are a couple of possible interesting outcomes.
First, Republicans could find their march on Washington stymied by the fact that a lot of the country — especially in the Northeast and Midwest — still doesn’t trust their message.
Secondly, it’s possible that the GOP will win a very thin House majority by becoming an EVEN MORE Southern- and rural- based movement than ever before.
(MSNBC notes that even outside the South, Republicans are targeting districts that kind of look like the South.)
This increasingly stark and bitter regionalism is a challenge for both parties, and for the country as a whole.
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In the words of that great Southerner Gomer Pyle, “Soo-prise, soo-prise, soo-prise!”
Speaking of Gomer Pyle, has anyone seen the amazing “terror babies” rant by Rep. Louie Gohmert on the Anderson Cooper show? Is it an example of what has become of the GOP? There are politics and then there is completely crazy.
Crazy is in the eyes of the beholder.
And “different than me” doesn’t equate to crazy.
Hey PNE I just watched it on youtube, that was hilarious! thanks. “plug the hole!!!”
JDM, a conspiracy theory with zero evidence is pretty odd. If you go off on a rant about it on a major TV program when calm, reasonable questions are being asked about the so-called conspiracy, that is going into area of “crazy”. Especially when you are a member of the US Congress.
Geography does matter. On national level, the GOP is very Southern-oriented and on the state level, the Democrat are very NYC based. Who do you think the national GOP and NY Democrats are going to look out for? Upstate NYers? I think not.
Yeah P, rants about a “vast right wing conspiracy” attempting to fraudulently prove someones husband was playing with various and sundry women….that type of thing is just NUTS!
Rural based? I’m good with that. And if there is no huge lead for the GOP then maybe some folks around here can stop tar and feathering anyone even remotely to the right of Al Franken as a bomb making, violent, revolutionary Ku Klux Klan member.
The GOP won’t make any big gains, but some independents and conservatives might just do rather well.
You need to remember how things are very slow in the South. Even with air conditioning, things haven’t picked up much speed or changed much. The only thing that changed was when then the Dixicrats moved from the Democratic party to the Republican party after civil rights legislation was passed.
Same old same old.
PNElba:
Sorry. I didn’t realize there was connection between your crazy comment and the video.
Without watching it, I doubt that I would agree to extrapolate the behavior seen there to the entire GOP.
The Republicans have a message? Let me guess; it is a two-letter message. Am I correct?
“Yeah P, rants about a “vast right wing conspiracy” attempting to fraudulently prove someones husband was playing with various and sundry women….that type of thing is just NUTS!”
Bret, I assume you are not addressing me because I have no idea what you are talking about. Maybe you can be more specific.
Maybe we move to three parties, Southern-rural GOP very conservative, centrist Democrats and Republicans and Left wingers?
” PNElba says:
August 14, 2010 at 2:20 pm
JDM, a conspiracy theory with zero evidence is pretty odd. If you go off on a rant about it on a major TV program when calm, reasonable questions are being asked about the so-called conspiracy, that is going into area of “crazy”. Especially when you are a member of the US Congress.”
You want to talk about conspiracy theories, just remember your own party has made fools of themselves blathering on about conspiracy long before this- as in a certain former Senator, now Secretary of State.
More proof to my contention that the Civil War was one gigantic mistake. We should have let the South go. Most residents of the Dixie are a nice, interesting, usually decent, but different people. Trying to forcefully incorporate them into our system of politics and values has bought nothing but heartache and grief to the rest of America. Every major effort at reform in our history, Women’s Rights, Civil Rights, health care for all, etc., since then (partially excepting the New Deal) have been slowed or stopped by the Solid South. Modernization and migration to the South by educated Northerners has apparently done little to moderate this. I, and most of the people I know, are politically and culturally more like Canadians than Southerners.
A minority opinion, and much too late, but it’s a fact.
Well the South is no longer that much different as we may think. Look at an electoral map by county these divisions have as much to do with rural versus urban as anything else.
Frankly this idea that if you belong to the GOP or are conservative you are less educated or need more enlightenment from educated northerners is bigoted and elitist.
You are in the minority indeed if your are more like Canadians, in fact maybe the Northeast should have just been loyalist, maybe they are the ones that should be let go?
“…Modernization and migration to the South by educated Northerners…”.
Naw, nothing elitist in that statement. Good Lord, do you get your views of the south from re-runs of Hee-Haw?
Forgot one thing about Southern politics.
The reason why most Southerners were Democrats prior to the Civil Rights legislation had everything to do with Lincoln being a Republican. The same is true for the history of the Republican party in the North. In the case of the North, the people wanted to be identified with the party of Lincoln.
as a progressive, i’m frequently frustrated by the influence of the south on national politics too. but mervel and bret are quite right to call out newt’s pro-north, anti-south elitism.
Actually, I get my opinions about the South primarily from looking at the results of the last several elections, and the results of Congressional votes by state, including the recent attempt to remove from office a recent President for lying about sex.
My comments about Southerners were, I think, mostly positive.
I think Brian’s post pretty well demonstrates that the South still is, and perhaps always will be, politically, “another country.”
The other part of Brian’s post though was how different the Northeast was from the rest of the country, more different in fact than the South as far as politics goes. I mean it is not just the South that is conservative, check out the electoral results for the center of the country, from North Dakota to Texas, from Nebraska through most of the Mountain states.
The South IS weird though. Look at Mississippi, 40% African American the highest percentage in any state, they have the most African Americans as elected officials in the country (as they should), I think when we talk about the South we need to remember it is a VERY diverse place, much more diverse than the North East.
I just think we need to be careful about these generalizations that’s all.
The south may be “another country” but it’s no different than the difference between Northern NY and NYC. Different areas breed different concerns. Taking the elitist and arrogant view that the south is somehow wrong for thinking as they do (if you can put all the southern states in one group) is northeastern liberalism defined. Taking the broader view, it’s entirely possible “they” are right and “we” are wrong.
Where did I say the South was “wrong’? While I would not care to live there, I simply said that it was, politically quite different from the rest of the country, and we might have all been better served had they been allowed to go their own way in 1861. Nowhere in the Constitution did it then (pre-Reconstruction amendments, which indirectly made the Union legally indivisible ) say that a state could not secede, and Lincoln should have respected this. How is that for Northeastern Liberalism?
Yes, the South is diverse, and yes, a lot of blacks hold office (thanks to Federal intervention through the Civil and Voting Rights Acts , laws whose passage resulted in the ouster of the Democratic party from much of the region). And the western provinces of Canada are the same way compared to the rest of the country.
In fact, Canada is in almost every way a more decent country than this one. Much more economic equality than here, AND economic opportunity equal to ours. No families bankrupted paying for medical care for a sick child. Murder rate 1/2 ours. No goofy laws to make millionaires out of dope smugglers. And so on.
But I’m and American, and stuck with it. Wouldn’t change it, either.
The tone of your post indicates you feel superior to the southerners, and apparently most of America too. Canada a more decent country in almost every way? Wow.
Newt: Not only that, southern cities are growing larger and are becoming more blue. Dallas, Houston, Atlanta, Miami, Austin, etc. Even Jackson, Montgomery AL, etc. are becoming blue, blue, blue.
Maybe someday Texas can vote in a Democrat into the White house.