Noodling around on the Internet yesterday, I spent some time gazing, mouth agape, at the results of the 1980 presidential election. This was the one in which the incumbent Jimmy Carter lost to Ronald Reagan. One controversy of that election season concerned Reagan's campaign stop, on August 3, 1980, in Neshoba County, Mississippi. Neshoba is a rural county, population about 29,000, in east central Mississippi, and is known, if it is known, to nonnatives only because it was the site of a famous crime--in the summer of 1964, three civil rights workers were murdered outside the county seat of Philadelphia. That the crime was not prosecuted or even actively investigated by the local authorities may be attributed to the fact that many of the perpetrators worked in local law enforcement for either the county sheriff or in Philadelphia's police department. The would-be "investigators," in other words, were themselves the conspiring murderers. In his speech that day, Reagan did not mention these events, which were then just sixteen years in the past. He did, however, offer his full-throated endorsement of "states' rights," the perennial rallying cry of segregationists who resented the federal government's civil rights program.
There has been for almost forty years now a simmering debate about the degree to which Reagan may have been deliberately exploiting ugly racial views for electoral advantage in the south. It was within the context of this debate that I was looking at that year's election results, because it seemed odd to me that Reagan should have been wasting his time anywhere in Mississippi. Did he think its modest store of electoral votes might not be his?
Well, stupid me for being stuck in the present! Turns out that the political world of the summer I turned 22 does not resemble the one in the year I'll turn 61. Reagan did carry Mississippi in 1980--by 49-48 percent. He won 43 other states, too. He won the national popular vote by ten points, 51-41. (Independent John Anderson got most of the remaining 8 percent.) Since Reagan won Mississippi by one point and the country by ten, you could say that Mississippi was in 1980 about nine points more Democratic than the country as a whole. Amazing!--to me, anyway.
Now that I know, I can think of one factor that might help explain away some of my amazement: Carter, Reagan's opponent, was a southerner himself, from Georgia, and had in 1976 carried all the states of the Confederacy except Virginia. Ford, the Republican, won California and Illinois in 1976; Carter won Alabama and Mississippi. Things change. West Virginia was one of the six states Carter carried in 1980. Trump carried West Virginia by 42 points, his second biggest margin behind only Wyoming.
It's being reported today that the Democrats will hold their 2020 nominating convention in Milwaukee, a decision that signals their intent to win back Wisconsin and its fellow Great Lakes states Michigan and Pennsylvania. I'm cool with that but I hope the party's strategists aren't overlearning the lessons of the recent past because . . . things change. The Great Lakes region has been moving toward the Republicans in a manner that resembles how some people fall into bankruptcy--at first, imperceptibly, and then at the end all of a sudden. Meanwhile, the Sun Belt is headed the other direction. The three aforementioned Great Lakes states were Trump's three narrowest victories. His next four narrowest wins, in order, were Florida, Arizona, North Carolina, and Georgia. It's symptomatic, I think, of the general trend that a fun and surprising factoid from the last election is that Trump's margin of victory, in terms of percent of the statewide vote, was wider in Iowa than it was in Texas. (And the difference between his margins in Ohio and Texas was less than one percent.)
Of course, a "Great Lakes strategy" and a "Sun Belt strategy" are not mutually exclusive. The Democratic candidate, whoever she or he is, can fight on all fronts. Ron Brownstein, however, points out that many of the announced or probable Democratic candidates are better fitted for one strategy or the other. Trump's support among whites in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania is slipping and someone like Joe Biden or Amy Klobuchar might be the best bet to close the deal. But in the Sun Belt states Trump's support among whites is holding pretty steady, so to break through a Democrat has to excite their growing populations of younger, browner Americans--a harder task for Biden and Klobuchar, probably, than for, say, Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, or Beto O'Rourke.
It's been said that as original sin is to Christian theology so also is slavery to American life--the source of our redemptive need, where things went wrong at the start. In defense of such a view it might be pointed out that, while the electoral competition keeps changing shape, the preeminent change agent, and therefore an abiding constant of any national political strategy going back not to Reagan or Nixon or Lincoln but, rather, to the debate over the Constitution, relates to the views and attitudes that different sets of Americans have in every era possessed on the topic of race.
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