GOP maintains grip on South, but at what cost?

[November 08, 2008]  WASHINGTON (AP) -- Tuesday's elections leave little doubt that the Republicans' Nixon-era strategy to win over white Southerners has been a resounding success. But have they lost the rest of the country along the way?

For all the talk of President-elect Obama's inroads in "New South" states like Virginia and North Carolina, the numbers in the Deep South are stark. Some 90 percent of white voters supported Republican John McCain in Alabama and Mississippi, according to Associated Press exit polls. In South Carolina, Louisiana, Georgia and Texas, it was about 75 percent or more.

Three of the Republicans' four congressional pickups came in the region, which remains dark red from Charleston, S.C., to Dallas.

"The South ought to tell the Republican Party to hold its primaries down here because we're the only region of the country that Republicans can count on," said Bernie Pinsonat, a Louisiana pollster. "It's the only base left."

To many Republicans, the lopsided Southern victories have come at the expense of other regions.

Forty years ago, Republicans under Richard Nixon decided that national success required breaking up the Democratic dominance in the South. They did so by employing a "Southern strategy" of appealing to white resentment over desegregation and later by highlighting liberal Democratic positions on social and welfare issues.

Today, conservative positions on gun rights, abortion and gay marriage are staples of the Republican platform, as well as a disdain for any tax increases and unyielding support for the war in Iraq.

But if these hard-line conservative positions sell in the Deep South, they appear to have alienated voters elsewhere, if the past two elections are any indication.

According to exit polls, the South was the only region in the country where the share of voters identifying as Republicans was still about the same as the Democratic share. Elsewhere, Republicans were far outnumbered.

After Tuesday, New England will no longer have a single Republican House member. The GOP lost three more Senate seats in the West, and Obama won landslides across the Pacific Northwest and the Northeast.

"I think you can count every Republican from Pennsylvania north on one or two hands," said Charlie Bass, a former Republican congressman from New Hampshire who lost his seat in the last Democratic wave of 2006.

Bass, who now heads the moderate Republican Main Street Partnership, said Southerners and other conservatives who control the party have continued pushing it to the right because it suits their constituents. But the party risks losing national relevance if it doesn't broaden its message, he said.

Cultural issues should be a part of the agenda, he said, but "just don't make it the only reason why you're going to Washington. We don't have to vote on abortion some 80 times a year as we did under (former Republican Majority Leader) Dick Armey."

Bass also said the party must show more of an interest in policy issues like health care, budget deficits and the environment. He said he cringed when he heard the now-familiar GOP chant of "Drill, baby, drill."

"I don't necessarily think offshore drilling is a bad idea, but it isn't just drill, drill, drill," he said. And "low taxes are great, but what about deficits?"

"The Republicans need to understand that even if they win every seat in the South, they won't be in the majority," Bass said.

Congressional Republicans already have begun shaking up their leadership team, and party elders began holding meetings shortly after the election to discuss their next steps.

Calls for change could be heightened this year after Obama shook up the electoral map by winning even the Southern border states of Virginia and North Carolina, and congressional Democrats picked up a handful of seats in several Southern states, including one in Alabama.

Rep. Jack Kingston, a conservative Republican from Georgia, said the party might need to be more careful about putting divisive social issues at the top of its platform. But signaling the internal struggles the party will face in the coming months, he cautioned against pulling back from GOP ideology just because of two bad elections.

"The reality is no party in power during an unpopular war or a bad economy has done well, so I don't know that flailing yourself to death is going to make any difference," Kingston said. "In 2006, the war was very unpopular, and how could you screw up the economy worse than Bush and (Treasury Secretary Henry) Paulson have done in the last six months? So to me, we don't need to ... say, 'Oh, because of this we have to abandon social issues.'"

[Associated Press; By BEN EVANS]

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