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Southern Politics after the Election of President Clinton: Continued Transformation Toward the Republican Party?* Charles D. Hadley, University of New Orleans To whom does the South belong politically, now that an all-southern ticket has reclaimed the White House for the Democratic party? Review of 1992 voting returns for national, statewide, and legislative races in the South, contrasted with those from earlier presidential years, lead to only one conclusion: the South continues to move toward the Republican party. The Clinton-Gore ticket ran behind its percentage of the national vote in most southern states, as well as behind all Democratic candidates in statewide races, and would have won without any southern electoral votes; whereas Bush- Quayle ran ahead of their percentage of the national vote in every southern state except Clinton’s Arkansas, while Republicans gained seats in southern legislatures and congressional delegations. It is suggested that southern electoral college votes won by Democratic presidential candidates in 1976 and 1992 hinged upon Democratic vote-getters in races for statewide offices in each state carried except the presidential candidates’ home states. Where is the South after the election of President Bill Clinton? Pre- sumably the election of Clinton, a Democratic Leadership Council social and economic moderate, will draw the Democratic party back to the political center of American politics through his leadership on the issues and public policies that he propelled to the fore of the national political agenda. Will this, in turn, enhance the electoral prospects of similarly positioned Democratic candidates in his native South? A partial answer to this question lies in the changed context of contemporary southern politics. Most of the rest of the answer comes from an examination of the 1992 presidential election, including its impact on the region. Partisan and Political Context Race. The starting point for any analysis of southern politics is V.O. Key, Jr.’s classic Southern Politics (1949), in which he highlights and weaves throughout his analysis the centrality of race as the defining charac- teristic of southern politics. Key concludes that “The race issue broadly defined must be considered as the number one problem on the southern agenda. Lacking a solution for it, all else fails” (1949, 675). While the Civil Rights Movement etched the plight of southern blacks on the public ______________ CHARLES D. HADLEY is Research Professor of Political Science at the University of New Orleans, and currently President of the Southern Political Science Association. The American Review of Politics, Vol. 14, Summer, 1993: 197-212 ©1993 The American Review of Politics 198 | Charles D. Hadley consciousness, the racially conservative 1964 Republican presidential cam- paign of Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater forced the Republican and Demo- cratic parties and their national elected officials to take opposite sides on the race issue. Although it ultimately failed, the strategy of President Lyndon B. Johnson and his congressional partisans in forcing the adoption of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was to shore up their political base in the Deep South states by bringing massive numbers of disfranchised black Americans onto the voter rolls and into the Democratic party (Carmines and Stimson 1989, 49-50; Black and Black 1992, 149-158, 209-210; cf. Bartley and Graham 1975). The unintended consequence of this strategy was to drive conservative whites, especially those who were racially conservative, into the Republican party. As noted by James L. Sundquist (1983, 297): The process . appears to be one of spiraling interaction: as conservatives, particularly the younger ones, move into the Republican party, the liberal Democrats have an increasing chance to displace the remaining conservatives who control their party locally. At some point, liberals begin to win nominations. This drives out still more conservatives, which places party control even more firmly in the hands of the liberals. The increase in black voting has expedited the process . The impact of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 went beyond mere voter registra- tion for black southerners (Moreland, Steed, and Baker 1987)—it opened the door for their nomination and election to political offices at all levels of government. At the time of the Voting Rights Act, there were 72 black elected officials in the South excluding those in party positions; the number increased to 565 in 1970, 2,457 in 1980, and 4,369 in 1990 (Hadley 1983, 101; U.S. Bureau of the Census 1991, 266). Certainly, the election of blacks to political and party offices accelerated the movement of conservative whites into the Republican party. Voter registration, moreover, was not a one-way street. As Table 1 shows, in 1964, the year immediately before the Voting Rights Act, the pro- portion of age-eligible whites registered to vote (61.1 percent) was twice that of blacks (29.1 percent). While the voter registration gap between blacks and whites closed considerably immediately before and after the Voting Rights Act, it ranged from 3.2 percentage points in 1970 to 11.7 percent in favor of whites in 1980, stabilizing at 9.1 percent during the mid-1980s.1 It appears that the 1980 presidential contest between incumbent Democrat Jimmy Carter and conservative Republican challenger Ronald Reagan motivated a dispropor- tionate number of whites (79.4 percent VAP) to register at the same time that blacks appeared to lose interest (57.7 percent VAP). Southern Politics After the Election of Clinton | 199 Table 1. Voter Registration (Millions) by Race, 1960-1986 White-Black Blacks Whites Voter Registration a a b c N % VAPP N % VAPP Ratio % Black 1960 1.46 29.1 12.28 61.1 8.4 10.6 1964 2.16 nad 14.26 nad 6.6 13.2 1966 2.69 nad 14.31 nad 5.3 15.8 1970 3.36 66.0 16.99 69.2 5.1 16.5 1976 4.15 63.1 21.69 67.9 5.2 16.1 1980 4.25 57.7 24.98 79.4 5.9 14.5 1984 5.60 66.2 28.00 75.3 5.0 16.7 1986 5.45 60.8 27.03 69.9 5.0 16.8 aVAP = voting age population. bRatio = the number of whites registered to vote for each black who is registered to vote. c% Black = the percentage of the registered voters who are black. dna = not available. Sources: U.S. Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract of the United States: 1977, 1981, and 1990 (98th, 102d, and 110th editions), Washington, DC, 1977, 1981, and 1990, pp. 507, 495, and 264. It is important to remember that discriminatory voter registration regu- lations designed for blacks also had been applied to poor, illiterate whites (Key 1949, 542-550). Consequently, more than five whites for every black were registered to vote in the two decades after the Voting Rights Act (see ratios in Table 1), a ratio that depressed the black proportion of the elec- torate, which grew from 13.2 percent of the southern electorate just prior to the VRA to only 16.8 percent by the mid-1980s. Participation. As late as 1960, voter turnout in the South varied con- siderably from that for the nation as a whole, reflecting the preoccupation of the former with state over presidential politics. Turnout in the nation that year exceeded that in the South by 62.8 to 39.4 percent—a difference of 23.4 points. This turnout gap narrowed to 17.0 percentage points in 1964, and continued to shrink to 10.9 points in 1972, 5.9 in 1980, and 4.0 in 1992 (Hadley 1983, 100; Pear 1992). Increased voter turnout for presidential elections and increased voter registration among both blacks and whites combined to change the election context (e.g., see Black and Black 1987, 259-316; Stanley 1987). Straight ticket voting for Democratic presidential and congressional candidates decreased while that for Republican presidential and congres- sional candidates increased. Confining the analysis to whites, those who split 200 | Charles D. Hadley their ballots for presidential candidates of one political party and congres- sional candidates of the other voted disproportionately for Republican presidential candidates. Straight ticket Republican and split ticket presi- dential/congressional voters shared a number of characteristics. They were of high socioeconomic status and held conservative positions on political issues, making them prime candidates for eventual movement to Republican consistency, given the opportunity (Hadley and Howell 1980, 134-148).2 In his careful and comprehensive analysis of the partisan identification and voting behavior of southerners, Stanley (1988) sought to explain the drop in Democratic partisan identification (22 percentage points) and increase in both Republican (18 points) and independent (13 points) partisan identi- fication during the 1952-1984 interlude. Native white southerners, approximately two-thirds of the electorate, are the key to partisan change in the voting age population, as native black Democrats and in-migrant Repub- licans balance each other out. Native whites of both the pre- and post-VRA generations, in fact, were found responsible for most of the partisan change. He goes on to conclude “. that despite the 20-point Democratic lead in party identification in 1984 . , the Republican Party can be considered the major- ity party in the South in presidential voting” (Stanley 1988, 79). Reaching the same conclusion, Black and Black (1992) carefully document the transfer of southern white conservative influence from the national Democratic Party in the 1940s and 1950s to the national Republican Party in the 1970s and 1980s. If Democratic presidential candidates, including native southerners, are to have any chance in the region, they must target states in the Deep South where fewer white votes are necessary for victory, especially Arkansas and Georgia, which along with Tennessee are the three southern states where Carter received white majorities in 1976 (Black and Black 1992, 334-335, 360-362).

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