Democrats’ Struggle in the South
CreditTravis Dove for The New York Times
For decades, Southern Democrats could count on winning local and statewide offices, even though the voters in their states would often withhold support for the Democrat in presidential races. No longer.
Despite efforts to distance themselves from President Obama, none of the Democratic Senate candidates in the South outdid his 2012 results on Tuesday. Democrats lost Senate races, sometimes by wide margins, in Kentucky, Georgia, Louisiana, Arkansas and North Carolina, most of which were thought to be competitive for much of the year. They nearly lost in Virginia, where they were thought to be heavy favorites and where The New York Times has not yet projected a winner.
The inability of Southern Democrats to run well ahead of a deeply unpopular Mr. Obama raises questions about how an increasingly urban and culturally liberal national Democratic Party can compete in the staunchly conservative South. It raises serious doubts about whether a future Democratic presidential candidate, like Hillary Clinton, can count on faring better among Southern white voters than President Obama, as many political analysts have assumed she might.
Southern Democrats Run Just Slightly Ahead of Obama
Southern Democrats used to run well ahead of the national party, but not on Tuesday. Each dot represents an election return in a county.
The Democrats running in the South this election season were not weak candidates. They had distinguished surnames, the benefits of incumbency, the occasional conservative position and in some cases flawed opponents. They were often running in the states where Southern Democrats had the best records of outperforming the national party. Black turnout was not low, either, nearly reaching the same proportion of the electorate in North Carolina, Louisiana and Georgia as in 2012.
Yet none of them — not Mary Landrieu, Alison Lundergan Grimes, Michelle Nunn, Kay Hagan, Mark Pryor or Mark Warner — was able to run Tuesday more than a few points ahead of President Obama’s historically poor performance among Southern white voters in 2012, based on county-level results and exit polls. There were some predominantly white counties in every state where the Senate candidates ran behind Mr. Obama, even in the former Democratic strongholds of Kentucky and Arkansas.
Perhaps most symbolic of the Democratic struggle was Ms. Nunn. She was the strongest Democratic Senate nominee of the cycle by some accounts: a prodigious fund-raiser and the daughter of a popular former senator. She had never run for office and thus had no record for which she could be easily attacked. And her opponent, David Perdue, was a corporate executive who once said that he was proud of his record of outsourcing.
Yet Ms. Nunn was defeated by nearly eight percentage points in Georgia — the same margin by which Mr. Obama lost to Mitt Romney in the state two years ago. She may have fared somewhat better than Mr. Obama among white voters, but not by much. She ran no better than Mr. Obama — or even behind him — in many of the state’s whitest counties.
The most surprising result was probably the close race in Virginia, where Mark Warner leads by just a half percentage point after having been favored by a wide margin. Some election watchers weren’t even paying attention to Virginia coming into Election Day.
Mr. Warner had a long record of performing well among the state’s culturally Southern voters. His success in appealing to so-called Nascar voters appeared in nearly every media profile over the last decade. The lore was well founded in the results: Mr. Warner swept the southern half of the state when he won the governor’s mansion in 2001, and then he won nearly every county in his 2008 Senate race.
But Mr. Warner’s standing in southern Virginia was reduced to that of just any other Democrat. He barely outperformed Mr. Obama in his traditional strongholds and underperformed Mr. Obama elsewhere.
Ms. Grimes of Kentucky was a third Senate candidate who seemed well positioned to outperform Mr. Obama. She, too, was a political novice, free to devise a platform distinct from the national party. She was critical of the Obama administration’s policies on coal, and refused to say whether she had voted for him. Her opponent, Mitch McConnell, may have been an incumbent, but he entered the campaign with approval ratings in the 30s.
Yet Ms. Grimes only ran three points ahead of Mr. Obama, winning just 41 percent of the vote.
Ms. Grimes’s inability to avoid Mr. Obama’s baggage was perhaps most evident in the heavily unionized stretches of eastern Kentucky coal country, which were among the most reliably Democratic areas of the country in the 20th century. But the so-called war on coal has dealt a devastating blow to Democratic fortunes in the region, and by extension, to Democrats seeking office in states like Kentucky and West Virginia.
Ms. Grimes did everything she could to distinguish herself from Mr. Obama on coal policy. But she was crushed even in the once reliably Democratic counties of eastern Kentucky. She lost Knott County by a 21-point margin. John Kerry, by contrast, won the county by 27 points in 2004.
In Arkansas, Mark Pryor, a two-term Senate incumbent whose father was also a senator, won just 39.5 percent of the vote — less than three points better than Mr. Obama. Arkansas was perhaps the Southern state that held on to its Democratic tradition the longest after the 1960s, but it is hard to detect any tradition left today. The state also voted overwhelmingly for a Republican governor.
There was no winner in Louisiana, where Senator Mary Landrieu and the Republican Bill Cassidy will go to a runoff. But Ms. Landrieu, who is widely expected to lose the runoff, ran less than two points ahead of Mr. Obama.
In North Carolina, Ms. Hagan’s inability to outperform Mr. Obama in North Carolina was less surprising. She was a first-term incumbent, she was a liberal, and her approval ratings were poor. But she led in nearly all of the pre-election polls over the final few months of the race, and yet she too was defeated by a two-point margin — the same as Mr. Obama in the state in 2012.
There were a few other bright spots for Democrats in the South. Gwen Graham defeated the Republican Steve Southerland in Florida’s Second Congressional district, an area that votes strongly for Republicans in presidential elections with a large number of registered Democrats. But the newly re-elected Republican governor Rick Scott made some of his largest gains over his prior performance in the same area.
It remains to be seen whether Democratic weakness in the South will outlive the Obama years. The national Democratic Party has fully embraced and even defined itself in terms of cultural liberalism — on gun control, gay rights, immigration, abortion, environmental policy and other issues. Generational and demographic change are likely to push the Democrats further in this direction, if anything, because younger and minority voters are strongly liberal on cultural issues.
Those voters have helped the Democrats win the popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections. But without a broader base of support that lets Democrats win more votes in the South, it will be very hard for them to win back the House, and it may even be hard for them to win back the Senate.