Yet another in the long line of mainstream articles coming out about White Flight from the Democratic Party. In Politico is “Can Southern Democrats make a comeback?”:
The party needs to spend less time on divisive social issues and more on middle-class economic concerns, and then hope that Barack Obama’s departure from the White House prompts skeptical white voters to give them a second look…
I cracked up at this riff:
“The No. 1 thing to be competitive in the South is to have Barack Obama not be president anymore,” said North Carolina pollster Tom Jensen, who runs the Democratic firm Public Policy Polling. “It’s just a simple reality that Southern whites really, really despise him in a way they have not despised any other president.”
Beebe says “it’ll help” for Obama to not be around, “but it’ll take more than that” to make up the lost ground.
Exit polls showed that Pryor received fewer than one-third of white votes last month. In Georgia, Democratic Senate candidate Michelle Nunn received a quarter of white votes, and Landrieu just 18 percent in the first round of voting last month…
The piece ends on a rather pessimistic note:
Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.), who is white but represents a majority-minority district around Memphis, thinks his party has a long road back in the South.
“Lyndon Johnson allegedly said we lost it for a generation when he signed the Civil Rights Act [in 1964],” Cohen recalled. “I think it’s gone for the rest of my lifetime and probably yours.”
