Politico: How Dems can catpure Dixie (again)

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My suggestion: give the Republicans enough rope and hope they hang thenselves. It's worked in Nevada, Delaware, Indiana,  and Missouri,  so maybe it can work in Kentucky,  Georgia,  Mississippi,  or Texas this year. You never know...

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 I learned my lesson from the 111th Congress, and never again will I back the likes of Gene Taylor, Travis Childers, Parker Griffith, etc.  I'm done with Blue Dogs.    

While I agree we should aspire to have 218 liberals in the House and not rely on Blue Dogs for a majority, but surely if it turns into a Childers vs. McDaniel race you won't be neutral?  Childers is still superior to almost any Republican, especially one who makes Steve Stockman look sane...

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Some people here seem to be under the impression that people only vote on social issues.

Let's put that myth to rest.  Again.

True, but then again 90% of white Mississippians voted for Romney in 2012. Did they do so because they liked his economic policies? How can Democrats possibly appeal to these kinds of voters?

Republicans have been running on social conservative issues like abortion and gay marriage for so long, that low-income white Christian voters in the Deep South (despite the lack of progress any Republicans have actually made on such issues) have begun to assume Republicans are correct on everything.  As we saw in the recent Tennessee Volkswagen plant, legions of poor white Southerners are super anti-union, oppose minimum wage increases, support tax cuts for the rich, etc., and a whole host of policies that are flagrantly against their own interest simply because they have been fooled into thinking the anti-abortion party must be right on everything.

Democrats can occasionally win rural whites if they can establish themselves as anti-abortion and anti-gay marriage and can spin the race away from politics altogether (see Travis Childers 2008 or several state legislators in Mississippi).  But overall Democrats would be better off targeting educated suburban whites.

 

The map on the left is the 2012 presidential election. The map on the right is the Personhood Amendment from 2011.  Personhood failed in a 58-42 landslide, largely because the large white college-educated suburban counties that usually vote Republican (DeSoto, Madison, Rankin, and the 3 coast counties) all rejected the amendment.  Those are the people that might consider voting Democratic with the right candidate (and/or if the Republican candidate or Republican initiative is crazy enough).

ETA: Even these areas are pretty ingrained as Republican, and it will be difficult to flip any of these counties.  I'm just saying what would be most likely to work, even though it's still a tough road.

And, having said all of that, if we see a Childers vs. McDaniel race, Childers' strategy must include getting votes from all those Northeastern counties that voted for the Personhood Amendment.  Long-term, though, targeting the suburbs should be better.  Demographic drift will make Mississippi more reachable for Democrats as the years go by too.  The majority of babies born in Mississippi have been black for years.

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The under 50k income vote is almost certainly heavily weighed by black voters, and blacks fall well below the poverty line in Mississippi, so it's hard to tell just how poor whites voted, but it's highly likely it wasn't for Obama.

That's a valid point, so that then would indicate the strong likelihood of a racial divide among voters.  That's a far superior explanation to the argument that social issues like gay marriage and abortion dominate in Southern elections.

I wish they had a chart for income and race.  Also, a $50,000 cutoff for the lowest group doesn't make much sense -- that's well above average in Mississippi, especially for blacks.

If Obama got 96% of the black vote and around half of the under $50,000s are black, Obama wouldn't need 20% of the under-$50,000 white vote to get 54% of the total under $50,000 vote.  And he probably got less than that.

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Democrats can occasionally win rural whites if they can establish themselves as anti-abortion and anti-gay marriage and can spin the race away from politics altogether (see Travis Childers 2008 or several state legislators in Mississippi).  But overall Democrats would be better off targeting educated suburban whites.

Why not do BOTH??

We can in state legislative elections, but we can't really in statewide elections.  Childers specifically can target northeastern rural whites and hope McDaniel's craziness scares off enough suburban whites to put him over the top.  But I don't think it's possible for a single Democratic candidate to appeal to both groups.

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While we're on the subject, I made this map a few months ago.  I took all of the county vote totals, exit poll data, and county racial stats and tried to back out a percentage of white voters who voted for Obama.



It's certainly not 100% valid -- I didn't have county by county racial turnout levels, so I had to assume they were uniform across the state.  I also had to assume Obama got 96% of the black vote in each county since there was no more precise information.  All of this probably balances out pretty well, so it's probably a good approximation of the real percentages, but it may not be exact.

Anyway, I think Democrats are maxing out what they're going to get in the northeast and dramatically underperforming in the suburbs.  The other half of the equation is get blacks to the polls even in mid-terms, and wait as demographic drift causes the black percentage to rise over the years.