A fellow southerner sent me this Washington Post article about how southerners view the Presidency of Barack Obama.
While he was jokingly incredulous about the actual existence of the article’s main protagonist, it roughly encapsulates the feelings of the white south. A range of emotions, from blaming general (but not specific) racism, to a general belief that Obama doesn’t “understand” the south.
So a good friend sent me a post from The Economist about an interesting (non)controversy in the upcoming Obama presidency. Apparently, there has been some murmuring that Obama is neglecting Southerners in his cabinet appointments. This (supposedly) is surprising, giving a several-decades-long trend for Southerners to be disproportionately represented in Presidential and Congressional politics.
Capitol Building
Now, in terms of staking a claim on this debate, I completely agree with the short piece from The Economist. People are neglecting a lot of Obama appointments that are clearly southerners. So really, from the perspective of the substantive debate raised (i.e. “Is Obama neglecting southerners?”), I think the answer is simple: he isn’t neglecting southerners. However, what this “debate” does raise are a couple of other interesting questions:
1) Why are some people so quick to discuss the decline of the South in politics?
The guys over at the blog Strange Maps have come up with a great display demonstrating a modern effect of slavery on the contemporary US. Check out these two maps, one detailing 2008 voting patterns, and the other detailing 1860 cotton production (bluer areas represent voting Democrat, redder areas Republican):
Cotton and Voting
And now a juxtaposition of the two:
Strange Map Overlay
The maps kind of speak for themselves, but what is most interesting is the extent of the geographic correlation. Furthermore, turning to the Panhandle, one can see suggestive evidence for why the Tallahassee area tends to vote more Democratic.
When I was in high school, I was already trying to apply my sociological imagination for my own benefit. By my senior year, I was very aware of the role football played in status and, thus, the role football played in one’s dating outlook. As an effort to gain the good graces of the cheerleaders at Suwannee High School and to gain attention more broadly, I spoke to the Suwannee County School Board in 2001 in protest of the decision to not allow the already-purchased cheerleading uniforms to be worn at school.
In one my earliest (and most failed) attempts at eloquence, I spoke to a crowded room of maybe 70 people about my own initial doubts concerning the importance or function of cheerleaders, and then discussed my stark conversion once the cheerleader uniform ban was revealed. The image of a school lacking such prominent reminders of this core tradition of southern education and tradition, football culture, was a devolution of our community feelings, I argued, and the long tradition of cheerleading uniforms allowing bare shoulders and slightly shorter skirts (which is required by the full range of motion in their routines) was an important mechanism for bringing school spirit to mind throughout the school day and not just at games that only a (sizable) minority attended. I also argued that I routinely broke dress code through my involvement in school theatre and playing varsity soccer (that’s right, varsity), as well as for Halloween and other costume events, all without recrimination. The Suwannee Democrat quotes me in their coverage of this debacle as saying, in reference to cheerleading uniforms during the school day, “It’s a symbol of our school, a tradition.”
While the uniform ban was not reversed, there was an up side: we had at least made the attempt, we had stood up and had been heard. Cheerleaders, parents, and I learned about the organizing for issues we believe in, and these skills are important for being good citizens.
And I did succeed in going on a series of dates with a cheerleader.
I was sent an article in today’s New York Times (I know, NOT a Southern paper) describing potential ramifications of the Southern voting patterns we’ve been talking about here at The Panhandler’s Guide. Assuming a normal amount of political backlash, the article reads:
“What may have ended on Election Day, though, is the centrality of the South to national politics. By voting so emphatically for Senator John McCainover Mr. Obama — supporting him in some areas in even greater numbers than they did President Bush — voters from Texas to South Carolina and Kentucky may have marginalized their region for some time to come, political experts say . . .
. . .Less than a third of Southern whites voted for Mr. Obama, compared with 43 percent of whites nationally. By leaving the mainstream so decisively, the Deep South and Appalachia will no longer be able to dictate that winning Democrats have Southern accents or adhere to conservative policies on issues like welfare and tax policy, experts say. . .
“Merle Black, an expert on the region’s politics at Emory University in Atlanta, said theRepublican Party went too far in appealing to the South, alienating voters elsewhere.”
As we’ve pointed out on this blog before, the question of race always goes hand-in-hand with analyses of voting in the South. One thing I think is interesting, bases on my research regarding race, is how the authors note the 5% increase in white voter support for McCain compared to Bush, yet what if it had been a 2% increase, or 10%? How much of an increase is needed to constitute the implied proof of growing racism? More importantly, how much did religious intolerance play into this increase in white pro-McCain voters? The article give a revealing quote: “I think any time you have someone elected president of the United States with a Muslim name, whether they are white or black, there are some very unsettling things,” George W. Newman, a director at a local bank and the former owner of a trucking business, said over lunch at Yellow Creek Fish and Steak.” I think this is a research project in need of pursuit: religious versus racial fears in the South.
To read the whole article, click here.
Jeff and Brian have both given great analysis of the presidential politics of the panhandle, and I can do little more than agree. Instead, I think it might be story time…
I remember election night 2000 like it was only yesterday.
It was my first semester at New College, and many of the students (almost all of whom were on the political left) were watching the returns in the conference center on campus. I had just left the Panhandle for college, and had even gone home two weeks earlier for fall break.
In a fit of what I guess was/is political independence, I registered no-party-affiliation in Florida. Florida has closed primaries, so I am not allowed to vote in any of them. Mostly, an NPA affiliation from the Panhandle means “somewhere left of Mao Tse-Tung,” which I can assure is not the case, personally…more or less
Click to read more…
Almost a year ago, I broke one of those simple yet insightful maxims of daily life I learned growing up in the South: don’t discuss religion or politics over dinner. I was eating with my parents back in Live Oak, and the issue of the upcoming election came up. We discussed the nominees for both the Republicans and the Democrats, and my father ventured a guess that I was to hear over and over the following year, all across the country: “People around here just aren’t going to vote for a black man.” He pointed towards the forested land we lived on, and said “People in Live Oak aren’t going to feel comfortable, and I’m not saying it’s right, but if Obama gets the nomination there’s no way he can win.”
While the immediate conversation devolved into a series of half-cocked assertions on both sides, more cool-headed reflections surface in the following months. Would people really not vote for a black man in this day and age? If so, by how much? And would this be especially strong in the South? How much does race predict voting patterns in a bi-racial election?
It turns out this is a well-known question, coined alternately the “Bradley Effect” or the “Wilder Effect.” These terms refer to the situation where voters do not voice racial bias to pollsters and so election-day results are significantly lower for black, or other minority, candidates. A recent paper out of Harvard University analyzes 133 races for state governor, and finds that there was a “Wilder Effect” but that it disappeared. The author argues that racially-charged issues in a specific period created the effect, and once this context changed, the effect went away: “the prominence of racialized issues such as crime and welfare declined markedly at the national level in the late 1990s and early 2000s” (7). The author uses data from the Clinton-Obama primary match-up, and finds that Obama actually did better than polls indicated, not worse.
Senator Barack Obama is taking this country by storm. Every reliable predictive tool shows him well ahead nationally, and polls are showing him making substantial gains even in “red states” like Virginia, North Carolina, and Indiana. In some cases, states like Virginia are now polling with an Obama lead of 7%, when in 2004 that gave Bush an 8% lead (considerably more than his national vote-share advantage of ~2%). But these facts are all over the news. Here’s a real question for you: Will my reliably conservative Okaloosa County (“the OC”) turn blue?
My best guess is: absolutely not. Now, I’m not one who likes to profess opinions without relevant data. Without access to polls or other relevant information, I know how prone the human mind is to simplification. Demographic shifts since my time in “the OC” may change the composition of the electorate (although it would be hard to see the kind of demographic shift occurring in Okaloosa that would work in favor of Democrats). Still, only based on my experience with the region, I would guess that not only will Obama not take Okaloosa County; he will not even change the vote share there by more than 5% from Bush’s 3-to-1 margin of victory in 2000. *(With the assumption that Bob Barr’s votes get to count toward McCain –a lame concession in a sense, but still nonetheless indicative of the OC’s “redness”)
Now, this may seem like a crazy prediction right? You could easily say that, even if Okaloosa doesn’t like Obama, its staunchly-conservative views aren’t likely to align with McCain. Also, we’ve seen places like Montana become a toss-up; and Montana voted 75% for Bush in 2000. Okaloosa County is strongly influenced by the military; maybe Colin Powell’s powerful endorsement will change some minds? Also, we’ve heard stories about how the terrible economy is making even blatantly racist individuals consider Obama. So why am I so sure that the OC will go so red? Let’s talk about some recent history.
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