According to Adam Nossiter of the New York Times, the Southern Strategy is over because the Democrats won a presidential election without using a Southerner on the ticket. Nossiter acknowledges that Obama won Virginia and North Carolina (he doesn’t acknowledge that he won Florida), but then argues:
Along the Atlantic Coast, parts of the “suburban South,” notably Virginia and North Carolina, made history last week in breaking from their Confederate past and supporting Mr. Obama. Those states have experienced an influx of better educated and more prosperous voters in recent years, pointing them in a different political direction than states farther west, like Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana and Mississippi, and Appalachian sections of Kentucky and Tennessee.
Maybe Nossiter thinks you can’t be Southern and educated at the same time. Maybe he thinks that Virginia and North Carolina have educated themselves right out of the South. Hell, I don’t know what he means. I think Virginia, North Carolina, and Florida were pretty integral to Barack Obama’s plan of victory. Look at how much money he spent to win those three states. It turned out that they were superfluous, but that doesn’t mean that Obama won’t be keenly interested in winning them in 2012. In fact, the Republicans are going to need a strategy to take all three states back if they’re going to have any chance of winning a national election.
What Nossiter notes is that parts of the South, including almost all of Appalachia, gave McCain a higher percentage of their votes than they gave to George W. Bush. The only explanation for that is that the people of that region are racist and believed rumors that the ‘Hussein guy’ is a Muslim. I think they’ll get over that feeling by the second State of the Union address.
The South has not been marginalized as a region. They just become less united, that’s all.
