Blue Dogs in the South Are Purged -but Democrats are Rebuilding in Obama's Image

[Virginiá]

This seems to be the issue for Dems.  While the South is urbanizing, there are still plenty of rural/small town/exurban, no-college degree whites which find the current Democratic Party agenda and image to be anathema to them.  Many suburbanites are conservative as well in the South, and the GOP in those areas changing its image won't necessarily pick that many of them up.  It seems like in the end, for the Outer South, it's pretty much a wash no matter what the Dems do.

What exactly would they do to win back more rural/small town working class white voters, though? I've always wondered what kind of strategy would yield fruit in this regard. As we've seen, Southern Democrats taking up conservative positions did not help the last holdouts much.

[Virginiá]

I agree it's a bad situation, but the best-case scenario for the Dems is to run very culturally conservative campaigns (flags, guns, Jesus, Bible, pro-life, pro-family, etc.)

See, this is what I was thinking, but I think there is a major problem with it at this point in time. At the state level, it would most likely be plenty sufficient, but in terms of the US House/Senate, those candidates would have values that go directly against the national party (gay marriage, abortion, etc). Their constituents would expect them to fight for those values, which would involve fighting their own in Congress. With enough Congressional Democrats holding these positions, they could turn into the Democrats own freedom caucus. The risk of this occurring is probably high, considering the Traditional America vs New America is a primary focus nowadays.

Considering that the voters could just swap them out for a Republican if social values were the determining factors, it would put those socially conservative Democrats in a delicate situation.

Part of me thinks Democrats should just wait until they are able to get social values out of the conversation in these regions so they are not really bound by it when the check comes due. Though, that could be awhile, if ever.

[Virginiá]

There is this myth around here that the entire South is going to follow the Virginia model.  The Virginia model is unique.  Virginia's growth in the last decade has been the consequence of the growth of government in DC effecting the NOVA suburbs.  Of course those whose livelyhoods are dependent on big government aren't going to be voting for those advocating that we shrink government.  

I think that is oversimplifying it, though. A lot of the people moving to Virginia are from liberal areas. I'm not saying the federal government has nothing to do with it, of course people would be less receptive to 'big government' rhetoric if they had jobs/careers with said government, but conservative folks could also just as easily move to an area and take jobs with the federal govt and still vote Republican.

Also at play is the shrinkage of rural western/southern Virginia, fast growing minority populations (particularly Hispanics/Asians, AA growth in relatively stagnant), a fair amount of students and the continued decline of working class white voters (which happens to be a nationwide trend).

My point is, this can happen any place where more liberal voters are moving to. North Carolina and Georgia have similar situations, albeit not all the same factors and different paces of growth. I don't really see this set of trends in any appreciable manner in many other Southern places, though. Maybe SC?

Blue Dogs died out because people got tired of their dog and pony show.  As the Democrats drifted left culturally, the Blue Dogs held on to power by running one way in their districts and voting another way in DC.   People got tired of that.

I'm curious what happens to the Republicans these voters switched to when Trump is gone and the issues he has stirred up persists. After all, much of their anger lies in these Republicans promising things and never delivering. If people switched to Republicans for this reason only to face it again, what then? And if they just get involved more in primaries to push for candidates that will fight for them, why didn't they do that with Democrats?

[Virginiá]

The Democrats, during the Republican presidential realigning period of 1968 to 2004, won Congress the majority of that period while the Republicans won the presidency. From 2008 going forward, we may be looking at the opposite. (Between the U.S. House and U.S. Senate, choosing just one of them to be in the column of the party of the president, it's typically the Senate which will fall in the column of the party of the president…while it is the House which goes first for the opposition. Refer to the midterm elections of 2006 and 2010 as examples of that.)

This is a relatively good point, and I think there may be some truth to it. However, it seems more like that their Congressional dominance began in 1994. Republicans, at this point, already had enough voter support to take over Congress, they just hadn't found a way to get people to vote at the state/Congressional level the way they were voting at the presidential level, which was pretty strongly Republican, and obviously the Republican Revolution was their breakthrough.

Not every dominant stretch is going to be the same and is subject to unique circumstances of the time. Bush was, by most measures, a bad president and his 8 years of rule brought a lot of misfortune to the party. Scandals, the neverending wars, him simply being president when the economy tanked, which got his party blame, and so on. With that in consideration, its reasonable to see how Democrats could pick up so many seats and then lose them. They benefited from a backlash and not a genuine change in older people's voting habits.

The Democratic realignment I think we have having now is not a FDR-like realignment where people of all ages change allegiances, but rather a combination of overwhelmingly minority support, of whose population is growing very rapidly, and generational replacement - Millennials have been overwhelmingly Democratic for a long time now and they will continue to grow older and vote more and more often, squeezing out the Republican-leaning older voters.

All said, I think Republicans best performance will be in the House, and only for 15 or so more years at most. The Senate will probably be relatively flip-floppy as Democrats do have impressive numbers in presidential elections, but those voters fall out in midterms. So while theoretically they have the support in a lot of crucial states, they need to figure out how to get them to vote in midterms or simply wait until Millennials get old enough to vote more frequently.