Southern Democrats.

Link, William A.

As Nicol C. Rae explains in this new study, during the past quarter century one of the anomalies of modern American politics has been the Southern Democratic Party's strength in local elections combined with its weakness in national, mostly presidential, elections. Beginning with Barry Goldwater's and George Wallace's presidential campaigns of 1964 and 1968, and continuing with Richard M. Nixon's "Southern strategy" of 1968-72, the GOP established itself as a majority party in presidential elections. Republican strength and Democratic weakness are best exemplified by the fact that in no election since 1968 has a Democratic presidential candidate been able to carry a majority of the white vote. In recent years defections in presidential elections, among what Rae describes as "lower status" voters, have expanded further. Despite this fundamentally bad news for Democratic presidential candidates, Rae concludes that the post-1968 system fell short of realignment, as Democrats exploited an increasingly fractured system to their advantage. As a result, though a minority in presidential campaigns, Democrats fashioned strong majorities in congressional, gubernatorial, and state-house elections.

Mostly relying on a large secondary literature, Rae traces the nineteenth-century evolution and subsequent transformation of Southern Democrats. Before the New Deal, he argues, Democrats functioned with considerable power; one-party dominance (in large part established through the disfranchisement of African-Americans at the turn of the twentieth century) secured seniority in Congress and power-broking in the presidential nominating process. Nonetheless, in a federalized and decentralized system of politics and governance, deep and significant sectional divisions always existed within the pre-New Deal Democratic Party. Although the solid Democratic South occupied a powerful position in the Congressional party, most Democratic presidential candidates were from outside the region (Rae acknowledges the instance of Southern-born Woodrow Wilson, but asserts that he had been "de-southernized" [p. 11]). Even so, Southerners, through the two-thirds rule, exerted veto power over presidential nominations, and an intersectional equilibrium maintained peace in the Northern and Southern wings of the party. This was an era of loosely organized national parties in which the wings of parties often communicated different messages to the party faithful. Yet loyalty to national party remained strong, Rae asserts, for factionalization was sectional rather than ideological.

The New Deal fundamentally transformed this system. The advent of Franklin D. Roosevelt's welfare and interventionist policies injected a new politics of class and, although the New Deal coalition cemented voter loyalties until the late 1960s, national politics became decidedly more ideological. Sectional, North-South differences remained important, Rae concludes, but factionalism among Democrats moved "toward a more ideological type of conflict" (p. 14). These ideological differences, and especially opposition to an expanded federal government during and after the New Deal, affected Southern Democrats, even while they maintained a political system that excluded African-American participation and preserved de jure racial segregation. Ultimately, ideological differences and the advent of the civil rights revolution during the 1960s brought extensive change to the political landscape.

Yet the outlines of the changed landscape remained murky. Although Republicans chipped away at the Democratic one-party rule as early as the 1950s and established a presidential majority by 1968, they remained weak in other local and state elections throughout the 1970s and 1980s In 1988, for example, while the Democratic candidate for president, Michael Dukakis, could attract no better than 45 percent in Louisiana, in any Southern state, in the legislative elections in that year Democrats attracted no worse than 60 percent of the vote (in Florida). In 1988, Mississippians voted 40 percent for George Bush but 91 percent for Democratic candidates for the legislature! A similar bifurcation of the political system occurred in races for the House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate during the 1980s. Though Republicans dominated presidential elections, the inability of Republicans to organize their party and recruit candidates at the local and state-house levels meant that the safest route to a bright political future continued to be in the Democratic Party.

As Rae points out, significant ideological differences between Southern Democrats and members of their party elsewhere continued. Although Southern Democrats continued to figure importantly in national politics - in both houses of Congress they composed close to two-fifths of all elected Democrats - they disagreed with policy positions of Democrats outside of their region. The formation of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) in 1985 by Southern moderates reflected a fear that ideological differences within the party would damage Southern Democrats. In some ways, the election of Bill Clinton, who was a key figure in the activities of the DLC, marked a coming of age of Southern moderates within the national Democratic Party.

This book will be an indispensable starting point for those interested in the ambiguous qualities of contemporary regional politics. Those seeking new material on pre-1968 Southern politics will be disappointed; for the most part, Rae's book is derivative of the work of others, and Southern Democrats is chiefly a study of the recent era. His definition and use of the factors of ideology and sectionalism, moreover, are stark: the pre-New Deal Democratic Party was more ideological than Rae suggests. It is only necessary to read the words of nineteenth-century Southern Democrats, in newspaper and manuscripts, to realize that ideology was a central element in their local appeal and that the Southern variety of the message of' the party of Andrew Jackson differed significantly from its message elsewhere. Similarly, Southern Democrats have continued to experience sectional conflicts within the national party since the 1930s; indeed, much of what Rae describes as happening in the 1980s can be construed as sectional. Perhaps, instead of Rae's mutually exclusive categories, understanding the interesting but confusing relationship of Southern Democrats to the national party lies in the interplay between sectionalism and ideology. Southern Democrats have always been, to varying degrees, at odds with the national party because of a mix of sectionalism and ideology.

Although Rae pays appropriate attention to the impact of the civil rights revolution on Southern Democrats, there is curiously little time devoted to the long-term consequences of the Voting Rights Act, particularly during the 1980s and 1990s. This partly reflects Rae's attention to presidential and congressional politics and his neglect of municipal and state-house politics. It was in the latter areas that the impact of the establishment of "majority-minority" districts first appeared during the 1980s. But the election of a large number of African-Americans to Congress in 1992, coming out of reapportionments after 1990, brought important consequences, including not only greater power and representation for blacks but also the "bleaching" of districts elsewhere.

One wonders, as well, about Rae's assessment in light of the 1994 congressional elections. The results of these elections revealed how much the national party depends on Southerners for a congressional majority; the Republican sweep was largely a Southern sweep, rooted in the continued deterioration of the Democratic appeal to white males. Viewing the elections as realigning, given the low turnout of off-year contests, is no doubt premature. But the election may indicate a breakthrough on the part of Southern Republicans in establishing a viable party at the local level.

WILLIAM A. LINK University of North Carolina at Greensboro