Just Ain’t That Different Anymore

This is mixed news for both campaigns. As a Republican, McCain should, in a normal year, be able to count on the electoral votes that have generally gone to the GOP since Reagan, a hefty sum that would force Obama to win 70 percent of the electoral votes in the rest of the country. But this is not a normal year: a friend of mine was buying a plate lunch from the Church of God on Natural Bridge Road in Franklin County, Tenn., in July—you have to get there early, because the fried chicken goes fast—and overheard a couple of white truckers denouncing President Bush and the GOP in virulent terms. If you are a Republican in a nation at war and you have lost the truck drivers at the Church of God on Natural Bridge Road, you cannot be sure of anything.

Obama faces the same obstacle that confounded Al Gore and John Kerry: he is a Democrat, which has been a supra-racial fatal flaw in the South over the last 40 years. The two men who have defeated Republicans for the White House since 1968—Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton—were both Southerners who understood that America is essentially a center-right country. They won nationally because they spoke the language of that center, one that includes, but is far from limited to, states in the South. With the exception of Virginia, Carter swept the region in 1976. Clinton twice carried Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Tennessee and West Virginia, and picked off Georgia in 1992 and Florida in 1996.

Kerry lost every Southern state in 2004, so Obama has nowhere to go but up, and is, as of midsummer, not unreasonably confident of finding some success in traditionally Republican territory. The campaign has ground operations in Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas. His advisers offer the following scenario: register hundreds of thousands of new black voters, thus dramatically reducing the percentage of the white vote Obama needs to win or be competitive in the South. Meanwhile, he works hard to tap the large number of unregistered Latino voters in the South—630,000 unregistered in Florida, 84,000 in North Carolina and 70,000 in Virginia. And the campaign continues its effort to bring in new younger voters, targeting, for example, the 236,000 unregistered 18- to 24-year-olds in Florida. Georgia, with its 600,000 unregistered black voters, 227,000 unregistered 18- to 24-year-olds and Bob Barr's Libertarian candidacy, is the fantasy prize.

On a more realistic note, Democrats privately concede that Virginia is probably their best hope, and some in the party establishment in Washington believe Obama has a better chance of winning Virginia than he does Ohio. Wisely, McCain is taking nothing for granted and has treated the South with respect. He has campaigned there and knows that Virginia is perhaps his greatest vulnerability. On a swing through what the campaign called "the forgotten places" of the Deep South, McCain promised to be "a president for all the people." In this he was making the case that he is not an unreflective party man—and that he is not (truck drivers, take note) George W. Bush.

Dr. Percy was right: talking about the New South is boring. It is an artificial exercise, an attempt to bring order to something that is intrinsically complex and fluid. "In fact, my definition of a New South," Percy said, "would be a South in which it never occurred to anybody to mention the New South." Fair enough. But watch the map in the coming 90 days. If history is any guide, the South of 2008, or at least a part of it, will determine the election—not in defiance of the rest of the country, but in concert with it.

Correction (published Aug. 5, 2008): The original version of this article incorrectly stated that "majorities" of the populations in many Southern states were not born until the year Reagan first took office. It should have said "large portions" of those populations.

With Holly Bailey and Jonathan Darman

© 2008