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The Deep south used to be a solidly democratic region, a few states even voted for Bill Clinton, according to long lost myths I’ve heard of the mists of time before 2000. (2000 election was my first time being aware of an election map around when it happened, 2004 was the first time fully paying attention to an election. The Louisiana-West Virginia-Missouri triangle voting Clinton is as weird to me as Ohio and Missouri the bellwethers will be to people jut paying attention around now.) But as we all know it’s shifted quite a bit, and now the south as a whole is the most Republican part of the country.
But as we also know some of these states have a high fraction of black population, and black people tend to vote strongly dem (Southern black population very, very strongly dem.), one podcast on here even proposed Mississippi as a possible flip. I’d say this isn’t likely, but if you don’t play you can’t win, and some of these states are worth writing about.
Deep South vs…….uh, anyone? anyone? Little help here?
I’m writing about Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi for this post: currently Republican states with a high fraction black. I’ll write about South Carolina separately since it is a fast growing state and has a somewhat different pattern. Arkansas, Kentucky, and Tennessee do not have particularly high fraction of black population (there’s a better expression for this, but I’m not thinking of one at the moment), so isn’t any particular reason to think they’ll flip.
When I wrote about Georgia, I described it as Deep South vs. big city: LA, MS, and AL are equivalents without the big city. Official New Orleans metro is about 1.25 million people, quite a bit smaller than the several million Atlanta and only about 1/3 of the state rather than the half to 3/5 that Atlanta metro is. Alabama has a few medium sized cities, officially Birmingham metro is about a million, but this similarly is not as large a fraction of the state. Mississippi is even less citified, Jackson and its metro don’t come close to a million, around 1/5 of the state.
These states all follow a similar vote pattern: the black population votes blue at some of the highest percentages you will ever see a demographic division vote for a party. But black voters are still a minority in these states, and the white population votes strongly red in similarly high percentages, and this adds up to solidly red states. Mississippi through the 2020’s has kept a similar, strongly Republican partisan lean, while Louisiana and Alabama have gotten redder.
Solid South Resurrected?
The Doug Jones 2017 election was helped a ton by high black turnout, but this is almost certainly not enough outside special elections, especially in the Trump period where turnout is continually increasing for both parties. It’s clear that for these states to swing, a lot of white voters have to go dem (Or pay a ton of white people to move to, say, Wyoming, but this is unlikely and interferes with theoretically moving dems there for two easy senators.)
How to do this….I can write about demographics and numbers and such, and can look up which organizations are doing works, can analyze and set goals and think out how to do things, but this kind of challenging face to face stuff is better left to people who’ve been doing it awhile. Posts on deep canvassing, or winning in rural areas more generally, may apply here. Suburbs of New Orleans, Birmingham, and other such medium sized cities voted for the occasional dem winners (Bel Edwards, Jones), and some people there may be interested in voting dem if the situation/selling goes well: suburbs of Memphis in Mississippi maybe possibly might maybe fill a similar role (Though one of the nearby counties is already pretty blue).
Deep South: Simple to understand, difficult to do. Next post: Kansas or South Carolina.