The GOP--Party of the South

by Paul Rosenberg [courtesy of Open Left - Front Page]

This Monday, over at Swing State Project, Crisitunity wrote:

An interesting new article from NCEC (the National Committee for an Effective Congress) shows just how far the GOP has fallen from its late-90s glory days. They're by no means the first to observe that the Republicans have increasingly painted themselves into a corner in the deep south with their divisive rhetoric and embrace of the religious right, but they put it into pretty stark relief with some excellent charts and maps.

I won't reproduce their charts (please check out the link), but the takeaway is that fully 41% of the Republicans' seats are now in the South. If the different states were stocks, the Dems would be seen as having relatively balanced portfolio, while the GOP has put most of its eggs in the southern basket, holding very little of the northeast or west anymore.

This all might seem boringly obvious, but, of course, given our punditalkcrazy, trust me, it's not.  In fact, there are two major facts of recent American political history that are hidden here:  First, that the GOP's 1994 Congressional victory was georgraphically diverse, and based primarily on picking up the disaffected Perot vote, following the Clinton/Gore betrayal on NAFTA.  (See Three's a Crowd: The Dynamic of Third Parties, Ross Perot, and Republican Resurgence).  Second, that once in power, the Republicans quickly swung away from the Perot agenda and toward an embrace of the more regionally-focused social conservatives and the religious right.  This two-step is what the House figures serve to undescore.

(A hilarious example of how far out of touch our punditalkcrazy is can be found, courtesy of Bruce Bartlett, at the Wall Street Journal editorial pages, "The GOP Is the Party of Civil Rights".  Pay no attention to the past 44 years....)

Following Crisitunity, I use a simpler geographical breakdown into four regions. Crisitunity also uses three different scenarios to project possible outcomes this November, which I've combined with the historical record since 1992 to produce the following chart:

Raw numbers can be a bit deceptive here, as the optomistic projection has the Democrats holding an edge over the GOP in the South.  That would seem to undercut the point Crisitunity is making.  Well, that's why God invented percentages....
First, let's look at the percentages within regions:

This view makes it quite clear that the 1994 GOP victory was geographically quite well balanced between the Midwest, South and West, with the South actually slightly less Republican than the other two regions outside the Northeast. This balance shifted immediately in the next election, and by 2000 the South was almost 60% GOP, while the West had reverted to being majority Democratic.  A GOP resurgence in the Midwest in the 2002 "fear factor" elections temporarily stabilized things, but by 2006, the Democrats were back, and the South was the only region where the GOP held a solid majority of seats.

Using a pure percentage breakdown of the House, the trend is even more striking.  Although the GOP's 1994 win was georgraphically balanced, as shown above, the South held more seats overall--almost 18% of all House seats were in the hands of Southern Republicans after that election.  And that percentage increased in every election through 2004.

The above trends can be summarized by looking at Southern seats as a percentage of the whole:

Here we can see the dramatic progression as the South shifts from being about 1/3 of both party's caucus strength in 1994 to just 1/4 of the Democrat's caucus strength today, and 42.2% of the GOP's caucus strength.   The concentration is so intense that it becomes even stronger, the more that the GOP stands to lose in the upcoming elections: up 2.4% in the GOP's most hopeful projections, up 4.6% in the GOP's average projections, and up 5.4% in the GOP's most pessimistic projections.

Of course, none of this is any sort of guarantee about what the Congressional Democrats will be like.  It merely shows what the potential could be--a truly national party vs. a narrow regional one.