GOP Lock in the South

The LA Times has published a study of the Republican gains in southern states in the 2004 election, and concludes the party has a stranglehold on that region of the country. Summing up the Republican position in the South, The Times says

After Bush helped the GOP win six open Southern Senate seats last month, Republicans now hold 22 of the 26 Senate seats in the 13 states.

That is the most either party has controlled in the region since Democrats also won 22 in 1964 —ironically, the election in which the white backlash against the Civil Rights Act allowed the GOP to make its first inroads into the South.

Forty years later, under a Southern Republican president, the South has become an electoral fortress for the GOP. Outside the South, Democrats hold more House and Senate seats and won many more electoral college votes than the GOP last month. But the GOP's advantage in the region has been large enough to overcome those deficits and create Republican majorities in both chambers of Congress and the electoral college.

And the magnitude of November's Republican sweep last month suggests the GOP advantage across the region is expanding.

Comparing Kerry's performance in white-majority counties in those states with that of Clinton in 1996,

In Southern counties without a substantial number of African American or Latino voters, Bush virtually obliterated Kerry. Across the 11 states of the old Confederacy, plus Kentucky and Oklahoma, whites constitute a majority of the population in 1,154 counties. Kerry won 90 of them.

By contrast, Bill Clinton won 510 white-majority counties in the South eight years ago.

And for Kerry's overall performance,

Bush's overwhelming performance left Sen. John F. Kerry clinging to a few scattered islands of support in a region that until the 1960s provided the foundation of the Democratic coalition in presidential politics. Kerry won fewer Southern counties than any Democratic nominee since the Depression except Walter F. Mondale in 1984 and George S. McGovern in 1972, according to data assembled by The Times and Polidata, a firm that specializes in political statistics.

These results confirm what I have commented on previously, namely that Bush strengthened his position across the board, both where he won in 2000 and where he lost in 2000, and the Republican party in now in a position of unassailable power that it has not enjoyed since the 1920's.